February 28th, 2011
Religion in the Arts and Contemporary Culture is pleased to present View from a Small Boat with award-winning photographer and adventurer John Guider. Guider built a small motor-less boat, launched it into the Cumberland River close to his home, traveled to the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico, across the Gulf to Key West, then up the entire East Coast of Florida. He will soon begin an arduous trip up the Atlantic coast to New York City. “My intention is to go out for at least two months every year until I have completed the circumnavigation known as the ‘Great Loop’. Once I get to New York City, I will enter the Hudson and Erie Canal, make my way across the Great Lakes, down to Chicago, and back to the Mississippi, ending up in Cairo, Illinois where I first entered from the Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland Rivers. The total journey is over 6000 miles, I am a little more than halfway with at least three years to go.” Guider will tell us about his several year journey, which is also a journey of the soul and spirit. He will feature his exquisite photographs showing the water and land from a point of view seldom seen. Like the abstractions of modernist photographers, Guider’s emphasis on texture and ambiguous subject matter evokes his encounter with nature. His work shows us a world visible only at a slow river pace. “My images are meant to be an expression for what I was feeling rather than a response to what I was seeing. The realities that appear in my photographs are intended to act as vessels for the poetry that lies within me.”
John Guider is a nationally recognized award winning photographer and author, and one of eleven finalists in The Most Beautiful Minds in America 2011. His work has appeared in major publications such as Print, Communication Arts and Graphis. He is the recipient of many awards including a national Addy Award, the American Cancer Society’s Excalibur Award, and the Nashville Advertising Federation’s highest award, the Silver Medalist, in the year 2000. His images and his adventures have been featured in numerous magazine, television, and newspaper articles and broadcasts.