If you're in a hurry to get somewhere, don't ride along with Bob Tyson. It's not that he travels slowly; he just can't help stopping along the way. "I'm driving down the road, and something catches my eye -- I'm not sure what -- and my foot moves to the brake," he explains. "I have to go back and look, even if the thing is likely to be gone."
Tyson is a born photographer -- a compulsive looker who wants to show the rest of us what he sees. Whenever possible, he's up and out of his Hayward, Calif., home by dawn with 40 pounds of camera gear and a tripod slung over his shoulder . . . just looking.
"There's something expeditionary about photography," says the 55-year-old artist who captures landscapes and cityscapes all over the world. His former instructor, Joel Leivick, a senior lecturer in photography at Stanford, says Tyson uses his camera to make sense of what he sees: "He's on a personal quest, trying to understand the world by a very careful scrutiny of its surfaces."
Tyson has been in love with photography since kindergarten, when his father showed him how to develop film and make prints. For his undergraduate major, he chose geology -- which was less of a departure than it might seem. "Taking Geology 1 with Ben Page, I realized that it gives you the power to see things other people can't. It changed my life," Tyson says. For 11 years he worked as a field geologist with international engineering firm Bechtel. Then he came back to get a fine arts degree at Stanford ("the ultimate bazaar for mind and heart") and devoted himself to photography full-time. "Only much later did I realize I loved geology and photography for the same reason: both work from outward appearances to get at deeper meaning."
His black-and-white images, exhibited throughout the United States and in Italy, have a moody, luminous quality. A misty riverbed in Nepal evokes a Joseph Conrad novel; the underside of a monstrous ship looms in dry-dock in Mobile, Ala. Tyson uses an 8-by-10-inch view camera -- a very big, old-fashioned apparatus -- and a handwrought printing process that embeds bits of platinum and palladium in the paper fibers.
His companion, Krakow-born painter Krzysztofa Zwierz-Ciok, describes him as a workaholic who incessantly clicks a digital camera when he isn't hauling his heavy gear. "Sometimes he even photographs the food he eats," she says. Once, she recalls, he pulled off the road to shoot a corroded sign dangling from a stick.
Nothing could be more natural for Tyson, who says, "I'm for reviving the lost art of looking." To him, the roadside is more interesting than the road.
