Mark Brown’s Published Books

Street Life in a Ghost Town

By Mark Brown

90 pages, published 5/29/2020

These photos were taken during the 2020 Covid -19 pandemic. After my gym closed I started to take long walks every day, shooting pictures of the deserted ghost town downtowns near my home in Mountain View, CA. I also took long walks by the San Francisco Bay. I had never done street photography on a sustained basis before, having done it only short term in locales such as London, Paris or New York. As shelter in place orders were declared, the…
Seeing Through a Glass Darkly - Early Artworks by Mark McAfee Brown

By Mark Brown

68 pages, published 3/20/2020

The artworks in this volume cover a span of many years when I was finding my way and getting established as an artist and include piles of bricks, stacks of rocks, snow creatures, small model sailboats, skateboards, sculptures, drawings, ceramics, photographs, paintings, etchings, photo etchings, stained glass and my first forays into the digital realm. It is illustrated with many photos and includes an introduction.
Fire and Iceland

By Mark Brown

60 pages, published 2/19/2020

This book was created after a 2 week trip driving around Iceland. It is a strange and magnificent other worldly landscape. There are 150 volcanoes and glaciers calving icebergs into lagoons. There are ice caves and lava caves. Waterfalls are everywhere. The aurora borealis sometimes appears at night.The weather is variable and ever changing. Everything in Iceland is on a scale that dwarfs all other landscapes. All is vast, beautiful, enormous…
Earthbound in Flyover Country

By Mark Brown

146 pages, published 1/18/2020

This book is a record of a 3 month, 12,000 mile trip that my wife and I made crossing America twice; first driving on northern roads and returning through the south and southwest. We wanted to see and savor all of what America was, is, and is currently becoming; naturally, geographically, geologically, ecologically, zoologically, economically, historically, ethnically, culturally, gastronomically and politically. That vast stretch of America…
A Dark Door to the Radiance beyond

By Mark Brown

114 pages, published 12/14/2019

We spend our lives in conversation, talking to each other all day every day. Considering how much we have to say it is remarkable how little we remember from day to day of what anybody said to us. This book is a compendium of very memorable things that people have said to me over my lifetime, and the stories behind those conversations. It is sequenced in the order that these unforgettable quotes were first spoken to me and is an autobiographical…
Pure Places- Wild and Wonderful American Landscapes From the Kalalau Valley to Cape Cod

By Mark Brown

116 pages, published 6/6/2018

This book consists of my American landscape images coupled with short personal stories/essays about the areas depicted in the images. It is comprised of spreads, with the images on the left side and the corresponding stories on the right facing pages. The landscape images are sequenced geographically, from West to East, starting at the Kalalau Valley on Kauai, Hawaii and ending in Cape Cod, at the Eastern tip of Massachusetts, spanning all of…
Amiable Animals - Curious Creatures and Interspecies Friendships

By Mark Brown

88 pages, published 6/7/2019

Amiable Animals - Curious Creatures and Interspecies Friendship is an art and photo book. The first photograph I ever took was of an ostrich at the Bronx Zoo when I was seven years old. That same day I rode an elephant. We had a smorgasbord of pets in my early years: a pair of raccoons, a donkey named Puzzle, an ultra white furry Nordic Samoyed Dog and a Rastafarian haired Briard Sheep Dog, Neon Tetra Fish, Siamese Fighting Fish, Parakeets,…
As Above So Below • Aerial Images by Mark McAfee Brown

By Mark Brown

70 pages, published 4/2/2018

This book consists of aerial photos, taken over the last 30 plus years. I love the vast vistas that open up as one ascends, the mountains peeking through the clouds, the fractured geometry of farmlands, impossibly angular canals, dykes, reservoirs and water projects, gridded cityscapes, forests, fires, rugged expanses of wilderness, lakes, seas, endless oceans and the spectacular panorama of clouds on the move, capped with turbulence, rumbling…
Oh Say Can You See? Old Glory in America

By Mark Brown

76 pages, published 3/11/2019

This is a book featuring photos of the American Flag in America.In the United States, American flags are ubiquitous. Also known as Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes and the Star Spangled Banner, they fly atop tall buildings, in front of houses, schools, post offices, city halls, government buildings of all kinds, country clubs, businesses, municipal swimming pools and are prominently featured in sporting events and parades. Many of the photos…
Show Me A Sign - Photographs with Words

By Mark Brown

90 pages, published 5/8/2019

This book is a compendium of photographs that combine images and words - some intentional and some entirely happy linguistic and visual accidents. I have been a visual artist and a writer for most of my life, so I have a deep and abiding fondness and love for both words and images, as this book demonstrates. At its most basic level, photography is a form of non-verbal communication. When words are added to images, a new layered form of dialogue…
Say Cheese - Shiny Happy People - Candid Portraits by Mark McAfee Brown

By Mark Brown

88 pages, published 4/23/2019

Happiness is contagious. Happiness can be an elusive, evanescent, elastic, fleeting, ever changing moving target. From an early age we are taught to “Kiss the joy as it flies by” as William Blake put it centuries ago. By kissing that joy he concluded that we could then “Live in eternity’s sunrise.”As the Dali Lama wrote: “Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions. If you want others to be happy, practice…
Notes of Note - Music and Musicians

By Mark Brown

90 pages, published 10/26/2018

It has been said that in Heaven there are only two sounds, Songs and Silence. While I have often embraced silence, I love songs and music even more. To my ear there is nothing more simple, purely and profoundly beautiful than two or more people singing or playing music together in harmony. “Music Self Played is Happiness Self Made” is what one of my early piano study books boldly declared on the cover. This book consists of photos and stories…
Light Interrupted • Shadows • Chiaroscuro • Reflections

By Mark Brown

90 pages, published 11/26/2018

Where ever you go, whatever you do, something dark is always following you. Shadows are everywhere when ever there is a source of light, be it a lamp on your desk or the sun, 93 million miles away from the ground you are walking on. Reflections are almost everywhere also, though not quite as ubiquitous as shadows. Mirrors are often one of the first things we see on any given morning after taking a shower, showing us our naked selves staring back…
Landscapes • Prints by Mark McAfee Brown

By Mark Brown

66 pages, published 8/17/2018

Landscapes are a series of digital art works that express my love of the natural world and provide a graphic visual diary of my adventure travel. These images began as analog or digital landscape photographs. They have been turned into a cross between woodcuts and photographs, They are presented in two page spreads, the images complementing each other geographically, geologically, emotionally or compositionally. They are calm, meditative and…
Moving Water

By Mark Brown

64 pages, published 9/12/2018

This book features images of rivers, clouds, volcanoes, geyesers, multi million dollar fountains, koi and trout and adrenaline junkie kayakers, among many other photogenic subjects. Geographically it is a world wide image tour, featuring photos from Hawaii, Switzerland, Sedona, the Grand Canyon, Idaho and Montana, among many others.
NightBlooms • Prints by Mark McAfee Brown

By Mark Brown

30 pages, published 8/16/2018

NightBlooms are a series of digital art works that explore the space in which Nature and Technology merge and multiply. From my garden I harvest flowers and scan them with a desktop scanner. I use the scanner as a camera, shooting each image from below. Flowers are placed on top of the scanner with the scanner lid left open. I do a large number of scans until I have all of the picture elements I need for an image. I then compose the images using…
LeafLines • Prints by Mark McAfee Brown

By Mark Brown

24 pages, published 8/16/2018

LeafLines are a series of natural/digital art works that use leaves to create dynamic negative space made by the visual interplay of the color, texture and shape of individual leaves against a solid background color. The images are calligraphic and have a visual vibrancy and intensity created by the figure/ground relationship of the leaves with the background space. They are created by scanning individual leaves and compositing the artwork in…
Slices of Life • Collages by Mark McAfee Brown

By Mark Brown

34 pages, published 8/16/2018

Slices of Life are a series of collages that I made in the 1980’s after finishing graduate school. Suddenly without a printmaking studio, I returned to single image analog art making. I began to make collages from old books and cards. I recently decided to collect all of the wild and colorful images from this series into a book. I was initially imspired by Max Ersnt’s collage novels. This series really got going when a friend gave me many bags…
Fingers, Figures and Feet (Angles of Repose) • Prints by Mark McAfee Brown

By Mark Brown

30 pages, published 8/16/2018

This book is an updated remake of a series of images I made in graduate school in the early 1980’s of fingers, figures and feet. I recently scanned the negatives I had originally made photo etchings and photo silkscreens from, and was able to remake the images far better with digital technology than my analog methods from long ago..

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