Bill Peters

Known for:  Archival digital prints on rag paper

“I express the abstract beauty of the South San Francisco Bay wetlands, a landscape as visually striking as that of any national park.”

The digital approach suited Bill Peters’ aerial views of San Francisco Bay salt ponds, sloughs, and wetlands in the period 2009-2019. Rapid, intuitive selections of colour and composition, while in the air, are the basis for detailed choices and manipulations in studio. The resulting photographs contain bold colour and abstracted form with unanticipated details.

It was in herring cans used as developing trays, on the floor of his childhood bedroom in Calgary, that Bill Peters first saw an image emerging under the glow of a dim red light and was forever captured by the magic of photography. While doing a degree in Astronomy, he studied photography and film making at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. A career in museums, planetariums and science centres followed, and lead Peters to live in a number of cities and experience many around the world. He grew to appreciate cities as great, human collaborative creations and explore their visual dimensions.

Frustrated in portraying his vision of cities on film, in 2006 Peters borrowed one of the first high resolution digital SLR cameras and a day later was watching images of revolutionary scale and visual dynamics scrolling out of one of the first professional, archival, inkjet printers.