Marc Muench

As a third-generation photographer, it would be easy for Marc to fall under the shadow of his talented parents and grandfather. Instead, Marc has emerged as one of the nation's premier photographers in his own right through a combination of innate ability and a unique style that blends landscapes, action, and other photographic genres, depending on the scene and the assignment.

Like his father before him, Marc was immersed in America's landscapes. Both his grandfather, Josef, and his father, David, specialized in landscape photography. His mother, Bonnie, is also a photographer and painter. A keen eye for color, light, and composition is second nature to the Muench family.

Marc estimates that his family has archived 250,000 individual 4x5 transparencies over the years, which is the primary statistic that drove the family studio to a digital workflow. Marc explains that their first foray into digital photography was to hire an employee to run the drum scanner they had purchased and digitize their work. Since that time, Muench Photography has fully embraced the digital workflow, from capture to print.

The Great Outdoors and More

Working alongside his parents at the studio, Muench Photography Inc., Marc has collaborated on and published several landscape photography books with his father, and has had a number of solo landscape photography books published, in addition to extensive publication of his work inside and on the covers of magazines like National Geographic, Skiing, Outside, Time, and Reader's Digest.

Marc is widely sought out for his work, not only for his technical and artistic excellence, but also for the subtle additions he brings into his photos that help set them apart and draw primary interest to what appears to be a secondary element.

In Marc's ski photography, for instance, he does not typically capture the Juicy Fruit moment where the skier is bursting out of the powder and taking up the majority of the frame. Instead, Muench's skiers are usually dominated by the landscape around them. But in an almost counterintuitive sense, the skier, the mountaineer, and the kayaker, as the case may be, become the point of dominating interest. "It's their position in the landscape that makes them significant," says Marc.

"You have to closely study what's being done in photography now to find out how to differentiate yourself. That doesn't mean to become an amphibian and turn into something you don't want to be, but rather to define what you want to photograph while keeping in mind what's being done so that you're not assimilating someone else," says Marc. "I also look at other fields like fashion and industry to derive different ideas and techniques to apply to my landscape photography."

Marc also brings this sensibility to his commercial work, which accounts for about a third of his business (landscape and outdoor adventure represent the other two-thirds). Marc says that though he enjoys commercial photography and engages it creatively, its primary purpose is to help provide a financial foundation for pursuing his coffee table book photography.

Workshops

I am thrilled to now be offering photography workshops. We have plans for traveling to some very cool locations around the world over the next few years. I am discovering that from teaching I learn what I need to know inside and out, the important virtues of photography. What for me has become second nature must be carefully mapped into a guide of truths, concepts and tips laid out in different ways depending upon the location of the workshop.