Will Tenney

Biography

“I guess I look at nature images the same way I look at paintings.  I have always been interested in nature, having grown up in an environment where a love of the outdoors was encouraged.  For the past several years I have been studying photographically many natural subjects, but I have been really fascinated by rocks which exhibit movement in their form or line or pattern, harmony in their color, and which create a visual contrast to their hard and seemingly immutable structure.  Recently I have become interested in reflection and how an image can be altered by its reflection off water or even wet sand.  What I see in a reflection is different from what I see when I look straight on, and how the constantly changing reflective surface modulation affects the reflected image is of particular interest to me.  I am fascinated by the art nouveau swirls, bends, and distortions of the image created by ripples, swells, or even wind on the surface of water.  Wet beach sand, its reflective surface disappearing as waves recede, allows for interesting and fleeting reflections.”

Will Tenney lives and works in Medford, Massachusetts as a photographer when he isn't being a graphic designer or a bassoonist.  He keeps quite busy as a member of a woodwind quintet, as an active volunteer with the Medford Historical Society, the Medford Arts Center, the Medford Arts Council, the Friends of the Mystic River, the Society of Printers, and does a fair amount of his own historical research.  Recently he has rekindled his interest in sound recording.

Growing up in Berkeley, California, as a child of 7 he was given a Kodak Brownie camera by his father, San Francisco Bay Area photographer Thos Tenney.  In high school he acquired an old Leica camera and even though it scratched every frame on every roll, having a 35mm camera was a real breakthrough for him.  It's been downhill ever since, having gone through Pentax cameras, Minoltas, Nikons, Canons, even a classic Mickey-Matic – but he has now gone completely digital, no longer keeping a darkroom.

Graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in Graphic Design, Tenney entered the publishing industry as a book designer, a trade he maintained for over 35 years, primarily concentrating on the design and production of educational materials.  He has worked as designer, design director, art director for many publishers and has won many awards for his book design work.

Over the years, Will Tenney has traveled many times to Europe and lived for a while in Trinidad.  In 2000 he visited Cuba on a cultural exchange, and in 2002 spent two wonderful weeks in Tuscany and Cinque Terra in Italy.  In the summer of 2006, he and his wife spent two weeks in southern Spain, resulting in some wonderful images and sounds.  In the autumn of 2008, he joined with some friends hiking in Zion, Bryce and the Grand Canyon.  With family on the West Coast (California and Oregon), he tries to get there at least once a year. He has been to France many times, most recently in September 2009 on a bicycle trip through the Dordogne region of the south east.

Tenney’s work has been shown in West Medford Open Studios for many years, the Doc Kountze Arts Festivals, the Medford Arts Festivals, at The Gallery @ The Chelsea City in Chelsea, Somerville Art Beat, Somerville Open Studios, Arlington Open Studios, the Springstep Gallery, Century Bank, Hyatt Place Hotel, Out of the Blue Gallery in Cambridge, 13FOREST Gallery in East Arlington, and is represented in the Boston Design Center by Diana Levine Fine Arts.  His work has appeared in many educational textbooks, and some of his images of France were featured in the Boston Globe Sunday Travel section a few years ago.  In December 2006 a piece of his work was prominently featured in the Sidekick section of the Boston Globe, and most recently a piece of his work was featured in the G section of the Globe in January, 2009.  The Bank of America recently purchased 48 of his prints for display in their various offices around the Boston area.

His website, www.willtenneyphotos.com, shows not only many of his photographs (and the stories behind them), but also features some of his “soundscape” audio recordings.