Peter lik photography biography templates

Australian photographer

Peter Lik (born 1959) is an Australian photographer best known for his nature and panoramic landscape images. He hosted From the Edge with Peter Lik, which aired for one season on The Weather Channel.

Early life

Lik was born in Melbourne to Czech parents who emigrated to Australia after World War II. He took his first photo at the age of 8, after his parents gave him a Kodak Brownie box camera for his birthday. The shot was of a spider web in the garden of the family home. In his youth, Lik would bring his camera on family vacations and take photos of country scenes and the ocean. This practice continued when he took road trips out of the city and into the wilds of Australia, often accompanied by his friend and fellow photographer Michael Plumridge. As a photographer, Lik is self-taught, learning mostly by trial and error.

Career

Photography

In 1984, Lik made his first trip to the United States, traveling around the country for a year in an old van. While in Alaska, he was introduced to panoramic cameras and learned about large format photography. Upon his return to Australia, he continued to experiment with the panoramic format. In 1989, Lik returned to the United States, undertaking a project to photograph landscapes in all 50 states. Photos from the project were later collected in his 2003 coffee table book, Spirit of America.

Lik spent the early 1990s working for the tourism department of Queensland, Australia, traveling through the Outback and photographing little-seen areas. In 1994, he moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. Since the mid-1990s he has self-published coffee table books, postcards and calendars of his work. In 1997, he published his first book, Australia: Images of a Timeless Land. In 2010, he published a 25-year retrospective coffee table book, 25th Anniversary Big Book, containing over 50

Peter Lik has spent over 35 years pushing the boundaries of fine art. A self-taught pioneer in the field of landscape photography, he has become synonymous with pristine images of cascading waterfalls, ethereal mountain peaks and peaceful desert canyons.
Peter has been shooting expansive scenes of Mother Nature his whole life. Born in Melbourne, Australia to hardworking Czech immigrants, he never took the gift of life's beauty for granted. Peter's catalogue of work can be traced back to the essential moment when, at 8 years of age, the gift of a Brownie Kodak camera from his parents set him on a course for destiny. Since his first, fateful snapshot of a spider web in the family garden, Peter has followed his calling to capture and share the most beautiful places on earth.
It was after a trip to the United States in 1984, that Peter discovered the panoramic camera format, a defining moment in his career. Challenged with the dare to "Go big or go home," Peter did both. For the next two decades, Peter would travel back and forth between the United States and his native Australia, honing his craft and establishing his prominent position in the world of fine art photography.
In the late 90s, Peter took a giant leap forward, taking on a massive project now known as Spirit of America. After fifty thousand miles and 1,000 rolls of film, Peter had revealed landscapes from all 50 United States, completing the "biggest challenge of my life." From there, it was only onward and upward for this remarkable success story.
More landmarks for Lik came in 2011 and 2012, when his iconic images Ghost and the highly awarded Inner Peace, would both be featured on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. It was on the heels of these major accomplishments that Peter jumped straight into the heart of mainstream culture by starring in the NBC-produced TV series, From the Edge with Peter Lik. He had officially become a household name.
In 2014,

Peter Lik is a photographer’s photographer. I’ve been in his galleries in Lahaina, in Honolulu, and in Las Vegas and I love them. He has other galleries and a list of them is on his website. According to his bio he is an Australian who, like me, was given a brownie camera at a young age. But unlike me, he was immediately seized with a desire to take pictures which developed into an amazing and successful career.

He sells his photographs to the public through a chain of galleries in high end districts across the world and on his website. This is a hard thing to do as any of you who have tried it will know. Over a few dollars for a print you run into “yeah, but it’s only a photograph” mantra. Peter has been able to break through that attitude and command very respectable prices for his work. He has done this with good quality, good technique, and immense attention to detail.

If you read what he has to say about past projects and planned ones in the future, this is a man who travels to take pictures, lots of pictures, and plans ahead. I am beginning to realize as I read different photographers’ websites, that the planning ahead is a distinguishing feature of the professional.

I love to wander in his galleries and enjoy the images .These spaces are large and well laid out. The one is Las Vegas, for instance, is dark with very deep colors on the walls. His images are “in your face” big and they are illuminated so as to make them seemingly jump off the wall. And considering the size, the sharpness and detail is impressive. He must use large format cameras and panoramic techniques to stitch together immense expanses. Standing before his images one feels a compelling desire to fall into the picture and become a part of it.