© 2024 All Rights reserved WUSF
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

'Clyde Butcher: Visions Of Dalí’s Spain' Gives Insight Into Surrealist Paintings

Daylina Miller/WUSF News
Landscape photographer Clyde Butcher, left, and Dali Museum Curator Peter Tush, right, show off a photo of Dali's home.

Salvador Dali's surrealist, often bizarre, painted landscapes were not a product of his imagination - but based on the beaches, rock formations and dream-like skies of the Catalonian coast in Spain.

The Dali Museum recently commissioned Clyde Butcher to travel there to take a series of black and white photographs to document Dali's homeland.

More than 40 of those photos are now on display at the St. Petersburg museum. The show will be Butcher’s first photo exhibition of Spain, as well as the first time he has been commissioned to photograph an area that influenced another artist.

Butcher, a landscape photographer best known for his photos of the Florida Everglades and Big Cypress, does not believe color photos would have had the same impact. 

Credit Courtesy the Dali Museum.
/
Courtesy the Dali Museum.
To create this special exhibition, The Dali invited Clyde Butcher, the renowned nature photographer often called “Florida’s Ansel Adams,” to explore and visually document Salvador Dali’s homeland.

"How would you use the same colors he used?” Butcher asked. “Black and white shows you the textures, the feeling. You can't compete with his color work. So black and white was the really obvious choice in doing this. I think it would have been a disaster in color."

Peter Tush, Curator of Education at the Dali, said Butcher's images take you on a journey to the village of Cadaqués, where Dalí spent summers while growing up, Dalí’s house in Port Lligat and the rugged region of Cap de Creus – all areas prominently featured in Dalí’s works.

“As you explore Dali's paintings, you see these regions but you don't quite register that they're real,” Tush said. “And what Clyde's been able to do has been capture very clearly how absolutely amazing and overwhelming the world is that Dali grew up in."

The exhibit runs through Nov. 25. Butcher himself will sign books at The Dalí on June 30, Sept. 29, and Nov. 3.

I took my first photography class when I was 11. My stepmom begged a local group to let me into the adults-only class, and armed with a 35 mm disposable camera, I started my journey toward multimedia journalism.
You Count on Us, We Count on You: Donate to WUSF to support free, accessible journalism for yourself and the community.