SOME ORIGINAL AESTHETIC THEORY MEETS SURPRISING IMAGERY IN STUNNING COMPOSITIONS

by Edward M. Gómez

It’s both accurate and something of a cliché to note that, no matter how high-tech and sophisticated a photographer’s camera equipment might be, it’s how he or she regards a subject, frames it through the camera’s viewfinder, and, generally speaking, considers it that, more than anything else, really informs the character and helps shape the appearance of a resulting photographic image.

The New Jersey-based photographer Joel Simpson (Instagram: @joelssimpsonphoto) understands this notion instinctively, as all good shutterbugs do. For several years now, he has brought a distinctive aesthetic vision and a sensitive touch to his work documenting unusual, millennia-old rock formations and stunningly strange textures in the surface of the earth, which he seeks out and captures with his digital camera during the photo expeditions he organizes to desert regions and other way-off-the-beaten-path locales.