10/9 -12/11
“I began to love what occurs when you coat good paper by hand with these remarkable metals”
— Irving Penn
The Wilderness Within is a celebration of transformation — both sudden and steady, wild and wondrous. A platinum palladium print exhibition by Jon Dragonette, photographed in the Adirondack Mountains with a 4×5 film camera. What started in solitude, with a camera in hand, became a conversation between inner and outer wilderness. The mountain tests the body, but solitude tests the mind. This work explores the intersection of nature and self, not as a project, but as a need, to step outside the noise and into a landscape vast enough to hold questions I couldn’t yet name.
The Platinum Palladium Process: Developed in the 1870s, platinum palladium printing is one of the oldest photographic processes still in use today. A light-sensitive solution of platinum and palladium salts is brushed by hand onto 100% cotton rag paper and allowed to dry. A photographic negative is then placed in direct contact with the coated paper and exposed to ultraviolet light. The exposure creates a chemical reaction that forms the image from precious metal particles within the fibers of the paper.
Artist's Statement
The Wilderness Within is a Platinum Palladium print exhibition shot on 4×5 film in the Adirondack Mountains. Born in the stillness of winter and the quiet ache of personal transformation, it began not as a project, but as a need, to step outside the noise, into a landscape vast enough to hold questions I couldn’t yet name.
What started in solitude, with a camera in hand, became a conversation between inner and outer wilderness. The mountain tests the body, but solitude tests the mind. The rush of cold air on my face as I opened the door was the first reminder—I was no longer in the city, but back in the mountains of my youth. As I climbed through the dark, my warm breath haunted the frozen air, drifting upward like a ghost. The silence of the forest was only broken by my heartbeat, thudding steadily as my legs burned and my lungs caught fire. Thoughts rise and fall like the trail head, about life, love, loss, fear, resilience. And somewhere in that noise, I’d begin to discover something new, something about my own strength and the quiet perseverance it takes to move through difficulty. In the act of making a photograph, everything would go quiet. The camera gave me a way to listen, to reflect, and to begin making sense of what I was carrying.
This work explores the intersection of nature and self, the ways in which the land can challenge and heal us, and how, when we let it, it teaches us what it means to be both fragile and strong. It’s about what happens when we let discomfort strip us bare, when we surrender to the slowness of the trail, when we choose to see rather than to escape. In that surrender, clarity emerges, not an answer, but a deeper way of being with the questions.
Artist Talk on November 14, 7-8 pm
About the Artist
Jon Dragonette is a photographer born and raised in Saratoga Springs, New York. After leaving the area, he spent more than twenty years working between San Francisco and Los Angeles. He has recently returned to the Adirondack region, where the landscape of his youth has become an important part of his photographic practice.
Working primarily in film and traditional darkroom processes, Jon’s fine-art work explores the relationship between the natural world and the human experience. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including at the Vermont Center or Photography, Fish Tank Gallery in San Francisco, Troy Arts Center, Nashville
Community Darkroom, and King Plow Gallery in Atlanta. In 2022, his photograph Chinatown was awarded Best in Show at the 44th Annual Photo Regional in Troy, New York. In 2025, he was awarded Best Portrait / People Photograph by the Photography Foundation Awards in London, England.
Jon is also the author of Still-Life: Los Angeles Amid Quarantine, a self-published photographic book documenting Los Angeles during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book has been archived in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and the Los Angeles Public Library’s Special Collections.
