INTIMATE LANDSCAPES, opens on First Friday, May 3rd, 2024, at The Mendocino Coast Photographers Gallery, 357 N Franklin St., Fort Bragg.

More About Photographer Tony Eppstein

A New Zealander by birth, Eppstein acquired a simple box camera when he was about ten years old, and relatively soon graduated to developing film rolls in his parents’ bathroom. He wanted to make a career in photography, but was persuaded that further education in math and physics would be more practical. Fine art photography remained his avocation and secret love while he worked as a development engineer in the disk drive industry, from which he retired in 1998. He had some photographic successes: an award from Popular Photography; one-man shows in Palo Alto, Stanford University and Mendocino; images on the cover of the Stanford University Annual Financial Report and other book covers, in newspapers and journals, and on websites. However, the self-effacing New Zealand culture in which he grew up made him reluctant to put himself forward. On his death in 2023, his family found more than a dozen boxes of matted prints, many of which have never been shown.

Eppstein found a visual poetry in the shapes and patterns of the natural world, which he preferred to photograph in close-up. He named these images “Intimate Landscapes.”

Mendocino Coast Photographers Gallery is the only landscape photography-centric gallery on the coast, featuring the work of John Birchard, Jonathan Pazer, Scott Chieffo, Ken Van Der Wende and Lisa Walker-Roseman.