Biographical Sketch

Born in Syracuse, NY, in 1949, Huntington Witherill moved with his family to California, in 1953, where he began taking piano lessons at the age of four. With intentions of eventually becoming a concert pianist, Witherill entered college as a music major in 1968, but soon thereafter became interested in the study of two-dimensional design. That shift in artistic pursuit eventually led to a career in fine art photography beginning in 1970.

Having studied photography in the early 1970’s with such notables as Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Steve Crouch and Al Weber, Witherill has remained faithful to his classical roots while progressively transitioning toward a more contemporary approach to the medium. Over the past fifty years, his work has been featured in more than one hundred individual and group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the world.

Indicative of a diverse approach to the medium, Witherill works in both black & white, and color, and his subjects include classic landscapes, studies of pop-art, botanical still-life, urban architecture, classic and exotic automobiles, cultural icons, and other assorted visual anomalies and curiosities. More recently, Witherill has developed a form of digital collage involving a combination of sketching, drawing, and photography, resulting in an imaginative series of abstract images titled: Enigmata.

Witherill’s photographs have been the subject of three award winning hardcover monographs titled: Orchestrating Icons (2000), Botanical Dances (2001), and Photo Synthesis (2010) and in 1999, he was the recipient of the “Artist of the Year” award presented by the Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, California.

Witherill’s work is also maintained in numerous distinguished public art collections including; the United States Department of State: Art in the Embassies, Fundacióe Van Gogh d’Arles, Arles, France, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, and the Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, CA, among others.

Since 1975, Witherill has also continued to teach photography for a variety of institutions and workshop programs throughout the United States, including the University of California, the Friends of Photography, the Center for Photographic Art, the Oklahoma Arts Institute, and the Ansel Adams Gallery, among others.

Huntington Witherill lives on the Monterey Peninsula in Central California.

More comprehensive biographical information can be found on the Downloads page via a downloadable PDF file titled: Complete Biography.