ST. LOUIS, March 11, 2016 - St. Louis-based photographer Michael Eastman debuts Derivation, a series of impressionistic photographs celebrating the beauty of St. Louis’ Forest Park, at William Shearburn Gallery in St. Louis on May 13.

A self-taught photographer, Eastman is celebrated for his large-scale photographs that document interior and exterior architecture in cities ranging from Havana to Rome, over a four decade-long career. The works in Derivation revisit one of Eastman’s earliest subjects: Forest Park.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, Eastman had documented the park regularly: its people, the water, the flora, and ultimately its decline into crumbling walls and overgrowth. Eastman’s 1992 book The Forgotten Forest, supported by the then-new conservancy Forest Park Forever, walked its viewer through the park in melancholy black and white, shot in the compositionally precise, austere style Eastman has come to be known for.

The photographs in Derivation capture in full color a dramatically different, restored Forest Park of present. These are a formal departure from Eastman’s meticulous past work, being shot sans tripod with a 35mm digital camera while walking on foot. To achieve the images’ stippled surfaces, Eastman devised a “metaphorical lens” for his camera, made from pieces of antique glass found at yard sales and souvenir shops. He says of this method, “I wanted to develop a kind of print that was new, my own, and a completely different take on the park.”

Eastman works intuitively within this process, placing the lenses either in front of or behind the camera. The resulting visual effect traverses a hybrid territory between photography and painting. Eastman refers to this method as an “impressionistic camera,” as the images evoke those plein-air landscapes while being produced via photographic means. Eastman describes them as “about sculpture and texture and color and surface,” celebrating their spontaneity and accessibility.

Gallery owner William Shearburn, who originally exhibited the photographs from The Forgotten Forest, is excited to be working with Eastman again. “Michael, in his past work, has such a keen ability to infuse spaces with narrative and mystery,” Shearburn says. “I’m thrilled now to be introducing this new body of work. It’s a daring venture from the images he’s known for; here he’s really heightening the pastiche, the abstraction.”

Eastman's photographs have appeared in Time, Life, and American Photographer, and they are included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and other prestigious institutions. His books include Havana (2011, Prestel), Vanishing America (2008, Rizzoli) and Horses (2003, Knopf), which is now in its fifth edition. Eastman lives in St. Louis.