Columbia Gorge News

Gorge Arts & Artists

Mark Hudon’s Photography: Landscape From the Corner of Your Eye

By Tomi Owens, 5-02-06

Sweeping panoramas, limitless horizons, and vast, immeasurable vistas don’t really do it for Hood River photographer Mark Hudon, although they certainly play a part in his compositions. He describes his work as “the Northwest landscape you see out of the corner of your eye.”

The play of shadow and light across a meadow, the natural striations on weathered stone, frost clinging to single leaf. All the elements of great photography exist in each picture, and then, there is little bit more: An exceptional scrutiny of what isn’t obvious, an analysis of the constituent parts of the whole.

Hudon, you see, is a details man. His eye for the minute was perhaps developed in the years he spent as one of the world’s foremost rock climbers (or perhaps it was that eye for detail that enabled him to reach such heights). He got into the Yosemite Valley climbing scene in the 1970s — the twilight of the golden age, when climbing legends were still to be found swappnig yarsns around the campfires. Hudon was known for climbing hard, long routes in free style (or, given the necessity of pitons and other aid-climbing techniques on the big walls, “free as can be”). He also wrote a noted climbing article, “Long, Hard and Free” in Mountain magazine, and later climbed exceedingly difficult routes at Smith Rock, near Bend.

Here is a quote from the 1981 article, which echoes Hudon’s breathtaking photography: "On my first visit to Yosemite I was obsessed with climbing the Salathe and as I later became convinced it would go free, I became obsessed with it again. I heard myself tell Max that I was climbing and suddenly the rock did not exist a few inches below my feet, a few feet above my hands, every hold stood out in great detail, its angle and slope noted, foot placed just right, slip into a pin or nut. I was a climbing machine lost on El Cap nothing mattered — I was where I wanted to be and going where no one had been before."

Many of us, when we see a shear rock wall, see something daunting, formidable, even terrifying. Those possessed by the climbing obsession see a puzzle and, ultimately, a path.

Hudon's path ultimately took him and his wife Peggy out of California to settle in Hood River.

You can view Hudon’s work in the café of the Mid Columbia Medical Center at 1700 E. 19th Street in The Dalles where he is the featured artist for May and June. He is also the May featured artist at Brian's Pour House on Oak Street in Hood River. But if you really want to see him in his element go to his “hole in the wall” outside Andrew’s Pizza in Hood River. He is there every First Friday, impossible to dislodge.

Mark Hudon doesn’t brag about the glory days and he laughed it off when I teasingly referred to him as a god of rock climbing. Besides being a well-known artist, Hudon and his wife Peggy and their little girl Ellen own and operate the Hood River Coffee Co. Hudon is part of a warm, friendly family unit and if he misses the thrill of Yosemite’s most death-defying climbs, it doesn’t show.

But the magic lingers in the details of his images. It's easy to catch a fleeting glimpse of the divine in his photography, and not only from the corner of your eye.

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