Artist’s Biography

For more than 35 years, Phillip T. Turk has been perfecting his signature style, creating a unique blend of emotion and technique. He has worked for years on his creative process to make it a consistent and integral extension of his life.

Born in Miami, Florida in 1947, Turk was raised in the traditional Southern middle-class manner of the 50s and 60s by his physician father, who still made house calls. Turk describes his father as “a special person who provided an environment of freedom and choices to do mostly as I wanted, so long as I pursued a college education.” Turk attributes much of his success to the attitude of individualism and self-expression his father believed in so strongly.

A graduate of Florida State University in 1970, Turk studied photography in the university’s Bachelor of Fine Arts program. Since FSU focused more on artistic expression rather than commercial technique, Turk was able to explore a myriad of photographic concepts and ideas, creating a variety of techniques that provide him with his own eclectic photographic style. The darkroom became his experimental laboratory where he began manipulating and altering basic photographic images to synthesize imageries that expressed his personal visions. The visions he was developing represented a curious perspective of the photographed image, residing in interpretation somewhere between fantasy and reality.

Upon graduation from college, the realities of life set in. Turk returned to Miami and joined the ranks of the working class. Driving a cab by day and playing in a rock band by night sustained him, and more importantly, his idealism about life. It allowed him to continue his artistic endeavors with photography. In 1972 he set out to visit a friend in Monterey, California, and during his vacation he was so struck by the spectacular conditions…the geography, and ever-present fog naturally created for photography…that he did not return to Miami for 10 years. Instead, he remained in Monterey creating photography that he would sell to art galleries and craft dealers throughout California. In his travels throughout California he bumped into the late Ansel Adams at a gas station south of Big Sur and came away from their brief discussion deeply inspired by Adams’ advice to “follow your own vision.”

In 1982 Turk returned to Florida and completed the evolution of his style and technique to a level where now, the photographic process is a subconscious effort for him. He is able to isolate photographic images and transform them into final prints without mechanical thought, allowing him to maximize the time he spends with the creative process. He chooses to express emotion more than technical perfection, and says he feels the pursuit of an elusive technical perfection, in and of itself, can be a trap that inhibits one’s creative development. “I invite my audience to have questions about my art,” he says, “and if I’ve done my job well, those questions always challenge.”

All images © 2006 P. T. Turk