Eric Horan
A commercial and environmental photographer based in Beaufort County, South Carolina, Eric Horan makes a living out of what he loves to do — compose the world around him, if just for an instant, with the lighting and the colors at his disposal.
These natural compositions are gratifying for someone who grew up hunting, in Colorado, and moved to South Carolina, in 1981, to do construction. He was never really very good at the shooting part of hunting, Horan confesses, but loves studying the habits of his subjects, like a wood duck — where it moves, feeds, nests — and sitting patiently in a blind for hours to hopefully capture and image at last, which may open viewers’ minds to new possibilities.
He gave up construction, like hunting, and went to New York, in 1990, to learn commercial photography under some of the best known commercial photographers. In nine months, he served as assistant on every kind of shoot, including trucks for UPS, tabletop food for Coca-Cola, and fashion for New York magazine, learning the technical systems of each master.
What is his own technique for constructing photos? Horan is a self-professed minimalist, he says, aiming for clean and graphic effects. He prefers to the spectacular technical equipment and effects of the studio the simple shot — carefully composed but realized with one or two lights, or “natural light alone if I can get away with it.”
Horan is also a traditionalist, not avant garde, abstract, or esoteric. He aims to be clear and understood. He aims not so much to please as to move. “My images hopefully have a voice and speak for themselves,” he professes, whether he’s focusing on a bird, tidal pool, or doing someones portrait. His pictures have a lyrical quality and speak to the viewer in different and sometimes private ways. "If not, he says, then the image does not make the cut . I most often, can tell, if a picture works on me then it will also with others."
Horan hopes his work affects people subtly, he says — nudge us out of our busy and habitual way of regarding nature. He would like us to see, with him, those privileged instants in which suddenly the world opens up, in a flood of light and color, and embraces us somehow as part of a plan.
Clients and collectors speak of Horan’s access to magic, mystery, and spirit. One client speaks of his ability to come back with “spectacular images time after time.” Another talks about his “natural gift of spotting beauty.” till others recount how Horan is a “joy to know and worth with” — not least because “you would swear that some of his captured images are otherworldly.”
A creative director speaks for Horan’s timely and independent work habits: “he's the kind of photographer,” she says, “who doesn't need an art director on the scene. You just give him an assignment and he brings back the goods….”
Over the years, Horan has won assignments from major magazines and won photographers’ prizes too. He’s been published in Business Week, Fortune, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times Sunday Travel, Travel Holiday, and Smithsonian, among others. When he comes back from assignment, editors will tell him he brings back a superb portrait of a place.
So, when he returned from Zanzibar in 1988, he brought with him a prize-winning trophy (Studio magazine’s annual international design competition): a cityscape shaped by his magic intervention — billowing thunderheads in the sky, he says, “but lots of sun, lots of character also, and after sunset the clouds lit up and the lights came on in the city and all this daylight and royal blue sky and incredible clouds.”
Or when he helped deliver a trawler to Florida, he had a stunning, serendipitous image of a dolphin hitchhiking in the bow wake of the boat, underwater, on its side, and looking up at him on the second deck, seeming to say, how do you like me now?
This shot won a Carnegie Museum competition in 1987 — and was picked up by Smithsonian, in 2002, and used as the cover shot for a story on dolphins.
With his 2004 book Carolina Nature, 135 of Horan’s natural images of South Carolina’s Lowcountry are working their magic on coffee tables — and on viewers’ minds. Once again, every time they’re accessed, in fact, these images offer us privileged glimpses into the natural mysteries that surround us. And that, mysteriously, may vanish if we fail to see them and appreciate them for what they are.
Eric also leads photo workshops and wildlife photo tours in the South Carolina Lowcouny. His Lowcountry photo safaris and lowcountry wildlife photo tours are semi-private or private and Eric teaches photography and wildlife approach technique in route. Eric gets photographers close to dolphin, ospry, bald eagles, egrets herons, pelicans plus many seabirds, wading and shorebirds not to mention deer, mink,otter, racoons etc...
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