John Howland
born 1950, Broken Arrow, OK
I was born in Broken Arrow in 1950, moved to Tulsa the next year and have lived here ever since with the exception of my years in school at Washington University in St. Louis (1969 - 1971) and the University of Oklahoma (1971 - 1978). I graduated from Hale High School in 1969 and, although now retired, I am an attorney who spent his entire career as an associate and then shareholder at Rosenstein, Fist & Ringold. I have studied and worked in photography since 1969.
I enjoy sharing photography that allows others to see some of the natural beauty that I have been fortunate enough to enjoy and, when possible, to present the natural world in a way that causes viewers to question what it is that they are seeing. I have been influenced by a myriad of sources both ones that apparent to me and ones that are not. Certainly they include my instructors, most notably Victor Youritzin at the University of Oklahoma, the artists and photographers that I have had as friends or colleagues, the numerous museums, galleries and exhibits that I have been able to visit in North America and Europe, and well know photographers and artists including Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Joel Meyerowitz.
My education began with a photography class in the Art School at Washington University in St. Louis my freshman year. Although a chemical engineering major, I also enrolled in art history courses. Later, I was one of the half-dozen students selected to run the university's on-campus photography studio, providing a wide range of photographic services to faculty and students. At OU, I took additional photography and art history classes and worked out of a darkroom in my house until selling the darkroom to raise funds for law school. My education also included selling cameras for Looboyles, serving as an assistant to art history professor Victor Youritzin and working in the Art School's library. After moving back to Tulsa in 1978, I continued to take photography and other art classes, including a photography class under Shan Goshorn at Philbrook, and I worked in the darkroom and digital lab at AHHA until it closed. More important has been what I've learned from fellow photographers, the many hours that I have spent at major museums, exhibits and galleries in North America and Europe, self study of technical and other books on photography and from producing approximately 1 million images to date.
