Martin Dorn is Seattle-based visual artist working with both film and digital photography. Drawing inspiration from the often-problematic relationship between people and the environment in the American West, he interrogates and seeks ways to subvert classic photographic traditions that view landscape from a colonial perspective, or as the merely scenic. He explores Asian and Native American attitudes of respectfulness and spiritual regard towards the environment.

Biography

Martin Dorn is a first generation native of the Pacific Northwest, son of a Boeing engineer. His childhood memories are of family backpacking trips into the North Cascades and the Olympics, fly fishing for trout in lakes and rivers. He is a backpacker, skier, and climber, and has climbed many of the high peaks of the North Cascades and the Olympic Mountains. After a career as a quantitative ecologist with NOAA, he returned to an early love for photography.  He is enrolled in the Certificate Program at the Photographic Center Northwest, and is scheduled to graduate in June 2025.

When not editing and printing photographic images, he can be found wading through Northwest rivers, hiking the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington, or rephotographing Carlton Walkins’ 1867 photographic journey up the Columbia River.