What is the Surreal in the Real?
Photography offers artists an opportunity that hand-based plastic art (viz.painting and drawing) does not: photographers can create images that combine the natural world with the mental ones without sacrificing realistic capture. A painter can put a face on a rock, but a photographer must find a face in the rock.
My mission is to capture an extensive inventory of mental images, images from the unconscious, imaginative images in rock and ice formations. These images tend to exceed conventional versions of figurative subjects. They are more outlandish, more frightening, more seductive, more detailed than the vast majority of painted or drawn images, merely by virtue of their being conveyed through a medium whose essence is texture, and whose shapes are the products of physical forces, unconstrained by a human imagination.
I have staked out four main stages in my journey towards this mission: Landscape - Abstraction - Figuration - and Fiction. With Landscapes, I strive to go beyond conventional landscapes, which are all about exceptional places. The other categories move farther off from concern for place and deeper into imaginative, purely aesthetic realms.
None of these is a new discovery, but the deserts, badlands, caves, and ice formations that I visit to capture such images provide a much richer source of naturally occurring Surreal-tending images than has been collected by my predecessors. Also, there are images that straddle adjacent stages: landscapes that also function as abstract compositions (especially drone captures), abstractions with suggested or "liminal" figuration, figuration that suggests an imaginary world, and finally, closing the circle, landscapes that suggest fictional scenes.
This landing page offers a few examples of just how bizarre and evocative geology can be. Then the main galleries exhibit arrays of images from each category, including "Dronescapes and Aerials," a hybrid group. By viewing them in order, you can see how the photographic subjects progressively distance themselves from their actual source objects, going deeper into projected mental imagery, that is, deeper into a surrealistic ethos, while never straying from singular photographic capture of the real geological or glacial world. There is no digital process image combining. The Real truly encompasses the Surreal.
My Work
Spectacular color landscapes still charm me, although the fine-art photography world has largely moved beyond them, and they have drained into the inventories of stock image companies. In my quest for them over the years, I periodically happened upon sites with particularly bizarre formations—rock, mud, ice—which, rather than evoking an exhilarating location, pointed beyond themselves, perhaps touching something in my unconscious. As visionary photographer Minor White (1908–1976) said, “One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are.”
This is especially true of these very special places of bizarre geology: Bisti and other badlands (New Mexico, South Dakota), lava fields (Hawai’i), slot canyons (Arizona, Utah), Crack-in-the-Ground (Oregon), Little Finland (Nevada), Valley of Fire State Park (Nevada), Goblin Valley State Park (Utah), Fantasy Canyon (Utah), and also in waterfronts abroad in Ireland, Wales, France’s Ile de Ouessant, and “lunar valleys” in Sardinia and Corsica. In such places competing geological forces of uplift and erosion have left us with acres and acres of mind-boggling shapes, an open invitation for one’s imagination to transcend itself.
My mission
My mission is to capture an extensive inventory of mental images, images from the unconscious, imaginative images in rock and ice formations. These images tend to exceed conventional versions of figurative subjects. They are more outlandish, more frightening, more seductive, more detailed than the vast majority of painted or drawn images, merely by virtue of their being conveyed through a medium whose essence is texture, and whose shapes are the products of physical forces, unconstrained by a human imagination.
I have staked out four stages in my journey towards this mission,: Landscape - Abstraction - Figuration - and Fiction. None of these is a new discovery, but the deserts and badlands that I visit to capture such images provide a much richer source of naturally occurring Surreal-tending images than has been collected by my predecessors. Also, there are images that straddle adjacent stages: landscapes that also function as abstract compositions (especially drone captures), abstractions with suggested or "liminal" figuration, figuration that suggests an imaginary world, and finally, closing the circle, landscapes that suggest fictional scenes.
Galleries
Endorsements of JoelSimpson’s Works
For Faces in the Rocks (2025)
“Joel Simpson demonstrates that we shape and areshaped by land outside and inside. Ranging from abstraction tosurrealism, through associative explorations that render theunconscious conscious, he invites us on fantastic journeys, offeringus stimulating perspectives and tools designed to enrich ourrelationships with land/ourselves.”
—JOHN PAUL CAPONIGRO, International Fine ArtPhotographer
“Simpson’s breathtaking images—manifesting‘psycho-geological photography’—stand as a testament to theprofound imprint the earth leaves on the human mind and the power ofphotography to reveal such truths. It is the rocks that man has founduniversal forms and faces. In fact, the human psyche itselfmirrors the layers and crust—from the conscious surface to itsenigmatic core. To witness these photographic revelations is nothingshort of groundbreaking.”
—ROGER BALLEN, InternationalFine Art Photographer
For PLAYGROUNDS FOR THE MIND (2022)
“[Simpson’s images]...are nothing if not irresistible visual at some unconscious or conscious depth—familiar déjà-vus, love letters to our weary planet’s enduring mysteries and from the history of art or the nightmares of your tribe.”
its charms.”
—EDWARD M. GOMEZ, editor, brutjournal.com
“Playgrounds for the Mind revealsJoel Simpson as part genius, part crazy man with his intense passionfor what he calls geological art photography in near and far worldlocations. The images are gorgeous, strangely compelling
beauties rooted in Surrealism. They beckon me totheir sites which I know I could never find; Simpson has saved me thetrouble and makes them even more beautiful than they probably are.”
—HARVEY STEIN, educator, author, photographer
“Nature, at its most non-human magnificence, isnot malevolent, it is indifferent. In Joel Simpson’s view it isalso a place where the human can interact with the great inhumanforces by offering imagination a playground....Simpson travels allover the earth to find the most extraordinary and bizarre geologicalsites, then to photograph their most complex rocks. With help fromCarl Jung, André Breton, or your own dreams, you can find—at someunconscious or conscious depth—familiar déjà-vus from the historyof art or the nightmares of your tribe.”
—ANDREI CODRESCU, novelist, poet, essayist
“Simpson claims a Surrealist pedigree to hiscurrent work that may reveal mysterious figures in rock formations,but whether they’re there or not, the work is striking.”
—LYLE REXER, critic, and author
“Playgrounds for the Mind is aterrific mind-opening (and eye-opening) work. Congratulations.[Simpson has] invented a whole new way of seeing.”
— RUSSELL BANKS (1940–2023), novelist
“Always a courageous visionary.”
— CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN,(1939–2019), avant-garde,multi-media, feminist artist (from an email before the book came out)
FACES IN THE ROCKS:
Beyond Landscape to
Psycho-Geological Photography
In my new book, FACES IN THE ROCKS, I go beyond landscapes into what I call “psycho-geological photography.” By this I mean letting rock and ice formations speak directly to my visual intuitions—aka my unconscious mind—prompting me to capture them as compositions, rather than as enhanced descriptions of places. To make the finished art work, I edit them in Photoshop to bring out what I originally saw, usually resulting in utterly original abstract and figurative visions that exceed the capacities of my own imagination.
The book includes 212 images and 28,000 words of text, offering a thorough theoretical and historical framework, as well as fully illustrated how-to and where-to-go sections. Former NY Times photography critic and photo historian A. D. Coleman writes an introduction.
For more information, go to the Bookstore page.
Look Inside (hit the back button to return to site)
A Visit to Fantasy Canyon, Utah.
One of the most provocative locations of rock formations.