is an accomplished Seattle photographer with a deep reservoir of past explorations and expressions. His images of buildings and cityscapes, both sacred and secular, are portrayed each with a compassionate eye. Over the last several years, he has taught photography to design students in the early fall Design in Rome Program in Rome for the University of Washington, and in that time has poured over the hallways and alleyways of Rome soaking up the mixed tributaries of influences.

Part of Curtis’ recent photographic images capture words inscribed on buildings; some of the words are carefully crafted from ancient sacred texts and other words are crafted with a fluid spontaneity, and have more earthy sources. In expressing either the profound or the profane, the script conveys an underlying and insuppressible will to communicate which is a spring of creativity shared by all artists as well as a collaboration of artists. There is a sedimentary layering of expression in the photographs; there is the art of the building, then the art of the scribe, then the art of Curtis; it is a palimpsest of meaning and art reflective of the organic nature of culture and individual expression.

Curtis, is a worthy namesake to the first great photographer from the Puget Sound region, Edward Curtis, and Mel also shares some of the same sensitivities about culture, meanings and surfaces as E. Curtis’ protégée, Imogene Cunningham.