About The Artist

URBAN LANDSCAPES,  Photographs of Queens County Parks by Paul Melhado.       
      There are few places in New York where the connection between people and nature is more intertwined than here in this great county of Queens. Having spent more than two decades in this borough, I can rarely think of a major life experience that is totally detached form one of the 32 “great parks” scattered throughout this county. Over the last five years I have complied what I believe to be the most extensive visual record of Queens County Parks to have ever been produced. My entire life since 1996 has been organized around this project, minimizing all other professional commitments. Like Atget’s record of Paris at the turn of the century, these works are self-commissioned historical documents of our contemporary urban environment. They are the visual records from my seven-year journey through this magnificent county, a byproduct of my encounters and experiences within these urban landscapes.
         The photographs in this portfolio are part of a larger series of one hundred photographs from 32 Queens County Parks, a portfolio I hope to bring to the world in book form by the end of this year. These images are the embodiment of my belief in the power of seeing, the physical representation of pre-visualized thoughts. They bring closure to seven years of hard, exhilarating, work. Ansel Adams wrote “To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surface and record the qualities of nature and humanity which are latent in all things”. These images are my attempt to do just that, to heighten our visual relationship with the commonplace by teaching others how to see more effectively.

All images on this site copyright 2012. Rights reserved.
email address: paulmelhado2@yahoo.com

---