
"Iceberg and Sky, Southern Ocean", 32" x 21"
You are cordially invited to meet
Hudson Valley Artists
Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott
Opening Reception
Sunday May 5, 2013
2:00 - 4:00 PM
Gallery At Lifebridge Sanctuary
333 Mountain Road, Rosendale, NY 12472
Water Dreamings
A photographic map of water holding places
Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott, a wife and husband team, are internationally published photographers of nature. Nomadic for years before the birth of their daughter Tara, whose arrival induced them to hang their hats in the Catskills with a sweeping view of old river valleys, they spend most of the year following animals, ever-changing landscapes, and moving with the light and the seasons while exploring the color, rhythm and wild essence of remote places.
A brief sampling of publications includes National Geographic, Audubon, Smithsonian, Nature Conservancy, Life, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Natural History, Geo Germany, Travel and Leisure. Among other honors, Yva and John received four awards at the National Press Photographers Association Pictures of the Year and five awards at the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year international competition, as well as awards in Nature's Best and National Wildlife magazine competitions.
In ancient Aboriginal cultures, the location of sacred water-bearing places crucial to survival were passed down through communal oral histories. Called "dreamings," the stories were attributed to ancestral beings who not only brought forth all the land forms and countless entities living in these landscapes, but also established the laws of social order and a framework encompassing human, animal and plant experience in the universe.
In WATER DREAMINGS, Yva and John offer a visual map of water-holding places. They also celebrate water's beauty, its changing moods and constant movement, and the deep spiritual wonder it evokes in us.
The exhibit will hang through July 2013, available for viewing by appointment.
Tel: 845-658-3439
Email: info@lifebridge.org
Water Dreamings Stories: http://www.momatiukeastcott.com/content.html?page=7
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For additional information, artist interviews, or images, please contact CPW at info@cpw.org | (845) 679-9957
CLOUDS
Yva Momatiuk & John Eastcott
On view: September 8 - October 14, 2012
Opening reception & artist talk: September 8, from 5-7pm
Gallery hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 12-5pm and by appointment
The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is delighted to announce the fall solo exhibition entitled Clouds, featuring recent work by the remarkable wife and husband team of Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott.
On view from September 8 – October 14, 2012, the exhibition showcases Momatiuk & Eastcott’s sublime, large-scale images of cloudscapes taken from vantage points that are both dizzying and vast. Momatiuk and Eastcott (based in Hurley, NY) have travelled the world in pursuit of their love of photography and nature. Their latest work is an elegy dedicated to the ever-changing wilderness of the sky.
By turns moody, vibrant, majestic, and serene, the still images are captured from surprising and unexpected vantage points, evoking a sense of movement and wonder within the viewer. Some of the cloud formations are representative of lofty mountaintops, others evoke a tempestuous sea, while one is reminiscent of schools of multicolored jellyfish.
The photographers are inveterate travellers whose sense of wanderlust takes them on adventurous explorations across the world, allowing them to create images from previously unseen perspectives. The exhibition Clouds presents photographs that expand the limits of perception, and that challenge the viewer to look up, pause, and bask in the visual wealth that nature provides.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott are internationally acclaimed photographers of nature. Nomadic for years, they settled in the Catskills in 1979 but continue to explore the rhythm, the light, and the essence of remote and mysterious wild places.
Born in Poland, Momatiuk fell in love with nature photography as a small girl, while watching grainy B/W documentary films of animals inhabiting dark swamps of Eastern Poland. Later she hunted with her father Mikolaj, a forester’s son, who imitated sounds of wild animals and taught her to quietly hunker down and wait, often for hours, for their arrival. She studied architecture, received her MA degree in Warsaw, and worked for a prestigious New York firm before she left the Manhattan landscape for a Wyoming cattle ranch where she got hired as a cowhand, walked with wild animals living along the Great Divide, photographed and wrote.
A New Zealander, Eastcott published his first book of photographs at 17, earned a degree in photography in London, and met Yva while hitchhiking near the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. Together, they took off for the North, fell in with Dogrib and Slavey fishermen catching whitefish on Great Slave Lake, and published their first images under shared photographic credits.
Later Momatiuk and Eastcott proposed a story idea to National Geographic and spent five months in the Canadian Arctic with a group of Inuit hunters. Soon they were authoring magazine stories and pictorials for National Geographic, Smithsonian, National Wildlife, Ranger Rick, Audubon, Nature Conservancy, Geo, BBC Wildlife, Stern, The Observer, Wildlife Conservation, Equinox, and Nature Canada. Yva and John, married by then, became a couple of roaming “professional bums”, to use their words, following their curiosity and desire to see, feel and learn.
They have traveled and photographed in New Zealand, Poland, Slovakia, Canada, Afghanistan, Chile, and Argentina. They followed the mustangs of the American West and created a book of images and a Smithsonian cover story. They spent many seasons in Alaska, the American Southwest, and river swamps of the South. They returned to the Canadian Arctic, explored pampas of Patagonia, the outback of Australia, the savannah of Africa, and the Pribilof Archipelago in the Bering Sea.
Momatiuk and Eastcott have published four books, High Country (1980), Mustang (1996), This Marvellous Terrible Place: Images of Newfoundland and Labrador (1998) which also became a theatrical publication, and In a Sea of Wind: Images of the Prairies (1991), as well as two children’s books, Face to Face with Wild Horses and Face to Face with Penguins, both published in 2009 by the National Geographic Society.
They are recipients of awards from the National Press Photographers Association Pictures of the Year, BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year, Nature’s Best and National Wildlife magazine competitions, and the annual award from the Alaska Conservation Foundation for excellence in still photography dedicated to environmental issues. Their images were represented in several National Geographic shows in Washington, DC, and in BBC exhibits in the Natural History Museum in London, England.
They currently reside (semi-permanently) in the town of Hurley, nestled in the Catskills of upstate New York.
To learn more about John & Yva’s work, please visit www.momatiukeastcott.com
CPW invites groups and individuals to schedule tours and gallery talks of the exhibition and facility.
This exhibition and its related programs have been made possible in part with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, with support from Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
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Show at KMOCA January 2012
Ashokan Ice

Kingston Museum of Contemporary Arts
103 Abeel Street
Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott, a wife and husband team, are internationally published photographers of nature. They spend most of the year following animals, ever-changing landscapes (including Antarctica), and moving with the light and the seasons while exploring the wild essence of remote places.
For this show, Momatiuk and Eastcott have captured the patterns, swirls and textures of winter ice on the Ashokan Reservoir. Broken and crumbled, the photographs portray a sense of cold and hibernation interrupted by currents, temperature changes, and wind.
Momatiuk and Eastcott's photographic essays have appeared in National Geographic, Audubon, and dozens of other international publications. Honors include four awards from the National Press Photographers Association.
Originally from Poland and New Zealand respectively, Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott make their home on Eagles Nest Mountain on the outskirts of Hurley.
KMOCA is open on Saturdays 12 - 4, or by appointment.
Kingston Museum of Contemporary Arts
103 Abeel Street
http://www.kmoca.org
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Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, Extreme Exposure lecture series, March 24, 2011
- SOUTH: LIFE ON THE EDGE -

Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott lectured at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles on March 24, 2011 during the exhibit titled Extreme Exposure. An on line video of the lecture can be found at
http://www.annenbergspaceforphotography.org/events/iris-nights/extreme-exposure/76
SOUTH: LIFE ON THE EDGE
In 1976, Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott abandoned the usual expectations of Western culture to live with a group of Umingmaktormiut Inuit people in the Canadian Arctic. It was with the Inuit that they learned to live a life where time seldom mattered and did away with things not essential to survival.
This adventure in the Canadian Arctic led to the first of eight articles Momatiuk and Eastcott contributed to National Geographic magazine. The two have explored the world's cultures and wild sanctuaries for 35 years -- traveling from the Pribilof Archipelago to the Australian Outback, from the Louisiana swamps to the grasslands of Wyoming and from Patagonia to Northern Labrador.
Their talk will focus on the several months spent exploring the Antarctic Peninsula and South Georgia Island on a small sailboat. Their photos will showcase their passion for the extreme landscape and abundant wildlife of the Polar South. "You cannot believe places like this exist," said Chris Johns, editor of National Geographic magazine.
Momatiuk and Eastcott believe in documenting environmental concerns in an effort to protect what they love. This has led them to work with the Audubon Society, Wildlife Conservation Society, Smithsonian Institution, Defenders of Wildlife and The Nature Conservancy. Their images have earned awards in many competitions, including Pictures of the Year, National Wildlife Federation and BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
They fund photography workshops at a school for autistic children near their home in the Catskills, NY.
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