My adventures in photography started in the early 1990’s, when I discovered the annual New York Orchid Show. Not a total novice with my Nikon FM2, I became absorbed in macrophotography and discovering inner and intimate dimensions of the flowers I had never dreamed of before, hidden from the naked eye, to be found only through the lens of camera. This journey blossomed over twenty years into ongoing series of flower portraits in oil and initiated a lasting passion for nature photography with the intention of discovering through the lens of a camera that which is hidden from direct physical vision. In 2001 I started working with a digital camera.

The next big step happened in the spring of 2008, when I was inspired to expand my artistic vision by combining my love for photography and painting nature into one artistic expression, with the mission of capturing the unseen energies behind physical reality. This was made possible through the advance of digital technology.

“Joanna Gabler sees and photographs nature through her painter’s eye. Sensitive to the color and form, she goes out into nature, seeking her own personal vision. In a second part of the creative process she uses common digital editing tools to refine this vision further beyond what she has observed through her viewfinder. She breaks down the organized arrangement and forms we are accustomed to see in daily life. Out of the forms she has recorded she creates new symmetries and color patterns which reveal the hidden life behind the plants, rocks, buildings, and objects she sees.

As she works with the forms she has captured, new forms emerge, which may be totally unfamiliar in reference to the original thing as observed in the world. The viewer may may well recognize the shapes of branches by their twists and turns and their gnarled contours, but the trees are transformed into ideal symmetries or asymmetries. Some of this finished images may remind one of gemstone or a mandala, or even patterns on an oriental carpet.

However they appear, they have traveled a long distance from three-dimensional physical reality, through Joanna’s eye, through the camera lens, through the computer to the print. They have become created objects in their own right and add a new dimension to the objects they originally came from”.

Michael Miller, The Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts