Tyler W. Green | About

Tyler W. Green

Biography

Tyler W. Green is an American photographer who was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1985. He was introduced to photography at a young age through the newspaper his father worked at in his hometown of Artesia where he spent evenings thumbing through boxes of discarded prints. His youth was characterized by outdoor recreation, exploring caverns, mountains and deserts where he developed a deep appreciation for nature while capturing the scenery with a disposable camera. He earned an associate degree from the Art Institute of Seattle in Washington in 2005 but did not pursue photography until his mid-twenties. He ended a career in music production and returned to Artesia in 2007 to work at the newspaper where he grew up. Self-educated in photography, he pursued photojournalism while working as a software developer, enhancing the newspaper's digital presence.

Green relocated to Albuquerque in 2012 to work for the states largest newspaper where he continued to work in software and received occasional photography assignments. His passion for nature was reignited through multi-day backpacking trips in wilderness areas. This led Green to pursue photography as an art form, with his initial work, Landscapes (2014-19), consisting of traditional black and white scenes of the American Southwest. Confronting the disconnect between these undisturbed landscapes and the built environment, his work took a new direction, exploring themes of environmental impact and the altered landscape. Arroyos (2015) reveals an early approach to illustrating his concern for humanity's dominance over nature, featuring images of flood control structures entrenched in the natural landscape.

Guadalupe Peak in West Texas

In 2019, Green relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he continued to pursue the theme of the altered landscape with The Missing Forest (2019-23), a long-term project addressing the social and ecological ramifications of timber harvesting within the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The initial series, Remnants, features enormous old stumps bathed in artificial light. These haunting photographs depict a sense of grief associated with the destruction of natural habitats. This series signifies a departure from a documentary approach, as Green began to work directly within the environment, modifying the scene to produce photographs that reflect emotional and spiritual attentiveness to the subject matter.

Work on The Missing Forest was interrupted in 2020 by the Coronavirus pandemic. Presented with the rare opportunity to explore the urban landscape devoid of human activity, Green created the series Stay Home (2020), which contemplates the impermanence of societal structures and human endeavors through photographs of empty highways and city streets. During this turbulent period in the Pacific Northwest, Portland experienced social and political protests, while record-breaking temperatures and wildfires ravaged the region, leading to dangerous air quality, as depicted in Air Hazard 388 (2020). Bearing witness to this tumultuous time, Green developed a sense of urgency to be mindful of environmental and social concerns. His future works would challenge the perspective that humans are separate from nature, presenting the tension between human activity and its impact on the environment as a central theme. In Fire & Ice (2021), Green paired climate data with images of melting perennial cave ice to illustrate the fragility of the environment in a warming world.

Photographer Tyler W. Green wedding photo

Wedding photo in the New Mexico badlands

Returning to work on The Missing Forest, Green employed multiple approaches to image-making that complimented his earlier work. With Incisions and Ghosts, he intervened directly with the landscape, incorporating light and digital illustrations to produce conceptual images that draw attention to the emotional weight associated with the destruction of natural habitats. Satellite images and illustrated maps were introduced to convey scale, in terms of time and space. Utilizing a post-documentary approach, he captured logging operations and neighboring communities, enriching the portrayal of the intricate relationships between humans and forests that unfolded throughout the project.

In 2022, Green returned to New Mexico, where he produced photography for multiple projects that delve into the ramifications of human-caused global warming, as it relates to desertification and increased wildfire intensity. The ongoing project, Carbon/Element (2023), steered Green towards printmaking, utilizing the photogravure process. His intention is to create ink for the process using charcoal collected from areas affected by wildfires. In 2023, Green relocated to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he currently works and resides.

Green has had solo exhibitions at the Ocotillo Performing Arts Center (2016), the University of New Mexico (2018), and the Artesia Historical Museum & Art Center (2019). His work has been featured in group shows such as Image New Mexico at Matrix Fine Art (2015), Albuquerque: A City Seen at the University of New Mexico (2019), Zine/:ZEEN at the Lake Oswego Arts Council (2020), Pacific Northwest Drawers at Blue Sky Gallery (2021 & 22), Out of the Drawers: Everything I Love, I Have Taken at Blue Sky Gallery (2021), What Will Nature Do? at The Art Center in Corvallis, Oregon (2021), and the 14th and 15th Anniversary Issues of Fraction Magazine (2022 & 23). In 2023, Green was honored with a Fulcrum Fund award from 516 Arts, a partner in the Regional Regranting Program of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. His works are held by the Portland Regional Arts & Culture Council and other private collections. His news photography has received awards from the Associated Press, the New Mexico Newspaper Association, and the National Press Photographers Association. He received an Associate of Applied Science in Audio Production from the Art Institute of Seattle in 2005.