Winston Swift Boyer

Boyer's photo of La Sal Mountains, Moab, Utah

Boyer was born on June 25, 1954, in Great Falls, Montana. He is the son of Winston Philip Boyer (1915–2000) an inventor,[3] geologist, and prospector, and Josephine "Josie" Swift (1921–2012) granddaughter of Arthur G. Leonard, president of the Chicago Stockyards.[4] Josephine graduated from Bennington College with a degree in literature and fine art. At a very early age Winston moved to Moab, Utah, with his family where his father prospected for uranium. Winston’s early memories were the spectacular red rock landscapes of Arches National Park and the characters surrounding his mother and father including writer Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire, who at the time was the park ranger for Arches. At age 10 his parents divorced, and Josephine took the family to Pebble Beach, California, and moved the family in with her mother, Lila Leonard Swift. Josephine became a school teacher and then moved the family to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.[5]

Winston attended Robert Louis Stevenson School in Pebble Beach.[6] His brother, Jonathan, is a former professional cyclist who, in 1981, became the first American to participate in the Tour de France.[7][8]

As a teenager, Winston attended a workshop at Point Lobos led by landscape photographer Ansel Adams. He attended Monterey Peninsula College, then traveled in Mexico and Guatemala and the United States before enrolling in the film department at San Francisco State University and later at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studied art history and cinematography. At UC Santa Cruz, Winston studied art history under Mary Holmes[9] and film history under Tim Hunter in the early 1970s.[10][11][12]

In 1974, Boyer visited his brother, Jonathan, in France and got a job as a sports photographer covering bicycle racing.[11] From 1976 to 1979, Boyer traveled to Italy, Germany, and France as a sports photographer for European and American publications. In 1984, he worked as a photographer for CBS Sports for the 1984 Tour de France.[13] During these times in Europe he compiled fine art photographs of European landscapes, peoples, architecture, and exhibited in both American and European galleries.[10] His Night Angel, a twilight photograph of an apartment building from Nice, France, and California Coastal Vista from Morro Bay, California, appeared in the publication of Time Life Books' 1981, in the chapter "The Artistry of Master Printmakers".[7][14]

Ansel Adams attended Boyer's 1981 exhibition at the Sunset Center in Carmel.[7] When Adams died on April 22, 1984, Boyer attended a reception five days later, with friends and fellow professionals, to open the Friends of Photography memorial exhibition for Adams at the Sunset Center. Boyer exhibited with the Friends of Photography organization in 1980 and 1985.[15]

In the mid-1980s, while living in New York, Boyer received an advance from the Bulfinch Press imprint of Little, Brown and Company to travel the United States and assemble 64 photographs for the book American Roads. Travel writer and historian William Least Heat-Moon wrote the introduction to American Roads and said:

Boyer has captured the beauty of an America that cannot be enjoyed from a commercial jetliner or along major highways linking population centers. Boyer's work emerges as a metaphor for America: a land of pioneers and settlers, travelers and adventures.[16]

Boyer was a senior photography director for an early online editorial fashion e-magazine called Fashionlines, from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.[17]

His portfolio includes the Ocean Series, Mask Series, American Landscape, Vertigo Series, Cannery Row, American Facades, The Views, European Gallery, and Eritrea, Africa.[7] While living on Garrapata Ridge in Big Sur for fourteen years, his Ocean Series evolved into large-scale photographs of the sea, sky, and clouds, often at sunset, from vantages in and near Big Sur.[12][18]

Venture artist Winter Lazerus[19] interviewed Boyer in 2014 and asked him:

Question: What is the best advice you have for a young person who wants to be a photographer professionally?
Answer: I am not per se a professional photographer, meaning one that shoots commercial work. Commercial work is wonderful and very disciplined work. When I do commercial work, I am always happy with the experience because it pushes me in directions that I would not have gone on my own and I learn a lot by the experience. I consider myself a fine art photographer. In other words, I do my own work and try to get away with making a living at it in the art world. An accountant would say you are crazy to pick this as a career. I have been working as a fine art photographer for over 40 years and there are certain things, I have gleaned from it; it picks you, you do not pick it. Another is when and if it picks you, as hard as things get, you should remind yourself you are doing exactly what you want to be doing and very few people can say that. Lastly, if you do pick this road, as hard as things get, something always gets you by.[20]

In 2015, Boyer travelled to Eritrea, a country in the Horn of Africa region of Eastern Africa, where he photographed the people, landscapes, and architecture including the Hamasien Hotel, Fiat Tagliero Building,[21] large hand-painted signs, street wall murals, Modernist architecture,[22] and handmade terraces. The work was published as a piece called "Inside Eritrea: from tank cemeteries to futuristic architecture-in pictures" by The Guardian.[23]

Boyer is featured in the book California Elegance Portraits from the Final Frontier, by Christine Suppes and Frederic Aranda published by Mondadori, released in March 2021.[24]

Boyer now lives in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, with his wife Kathleen and works as a fine art and commercial photographer. He considers color photography his medium, in the past using the Cibachrome printing process and now Archival Art Fine-Art Pigmented prints for the production of his fine art prints.[10][25]

• Color photography

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Winston Swift Boyer.

• Official website
• Gallery Sur, Winston Boyer Biography
• Gallery Sur, Winston Boyer Collections
• Matthew Swift Gallery, Gloucester, Massachusetts