Meet the Artist: Michael Van Buskirk is a photographer who has spent his life exploring the visual world, first as an ophthalmologist helping to preserve vision for his patients, and then as a photographer capturing scenes that catch his eye.
Van Buskirk is a fourth-generation doctor who grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana, steeped in medical tradition. He received his education and medical training from Harvard and Boston Universities. Van Buskirk was a leader in the treatment and teaching of glaucoma. He authored hundreds of medical studies, was the founding editor of the Journal of Glaucoma, and wrote multiple medical texts, as well as non-medical books, including The Van Buskirks of Indiana and Daughter, Doctor, Resurrectionist: A True Story about Medical Body Snatching in 19th Century America. Van Buskirk lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife of 60 years, Bette.
He built his first darkroom as a young boy in the basement of his childhood home and has been fascinated by this craft ever since. Before retiring from medicine in 2004, Van Buskirk resolved to learn as much as he could about the new methods of digital photographic image acquisition, enhancement, and printing. Not without some irony, his study of digital image manipulation led him to explore some of the more elegant printing methods of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in particular, hand-printed images in Platinum/Palladium on heavyweight rag papers. Many of the resulting images are on display in this show.
Handmade Platinum Palladium Prints
By Michael Van Buskirk, June 2025
"The theme of the show is not a subject but the method of handmade Platinum Palladium printing, the unique, hallowed printing method of the 19/20th century."
One may wonder why someone would choose to work exclusively with the vintage methods of hand-done photochemical Platinum/Palladium printing amid rapid advances in making images with a digital printer. The answer, says Van Buskirk, lies with the thought that for an image to become a photograph, it must undergo distillation to its purest essence in the final print, a lasting, unique, and authentic object, not just to see, but also to hold in the hand and to hang on the wall.