In Timothy Thimmes' Summer landscape, Park City's iconic white barn is draped in a wall-sized American flag. It is late afternoon, the height of summer. Golden cattails fill the foreground of the frame. Around the barn the fields are a midsummer lush green, the cottonwoods and aspens in full leaf. Behind the barn, the Wasatch back is shadowed, while above, a back-lit puffy cumulus is rolling through on its way to evening. There is a satisfying compositional similarity of the perceptual size of the cloud and the size of the barn, and likewise the tall grasses in the foreground of the piece have a similar rolling feeling as the mountains looming behind them. There is a steadfastness in the barn; it feels timeless and solid, while around it the natural world plays out an ever-unfolding beautiful perfection.
Timothy Thimmes is a purist when it comes to light. A stickler for craft, Thimmes works to get the composition, shape, detail, and light right from the beginning of the process, rather than rely-ing simply on electronic post-processing and image enhancement. “It must be perfect from the start,” he says. Thimmes trained at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, earning a BFA in photography, after pivoting from an early educational direction that involved receiving aBS in business management from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He merged the two paths and went on to open his own studio in Los Angeles, with clients including Columbia Tri-Star, MGM, Orion Pictures, The Samuel Goldwyn Company, and others. He and his wife, Janet, moved to Summit County, where they opened a marketing and advertising agency, T SquaredStudios. Thimmes loves his life in Utah, where, in addition to taking photographs, he skis and raises llamas.
