Christopher Burkett’s photographs of Nature have bridged a most precarious artistic chasm, which is the critical and aesthetic distance between tradition and new vision. Those artists working within a tradition, or those who are seen to be doing so, are generally sent to the back of the bus in terms of critical interest, especially in America... We treat traditions, artistic or otherwise, as the paths upon which we now trod in impatient quest of the new...

The motive for change, especially in the arts, is born of discontent with the status quo, which concentrates all of one’s energies on events and ideas in one’s own time... The arts, like material goods, are too often viewed with worried boredom in anticipation of annual or shorter periods of change... In the arts, the term “avant-garde” has long represented artists who aspired to being unorthodox and experimental and who were committed to changing or at least challenging the prevailing mainstream ideas of the art world...

Mastery of technology, or “craftsmanship,” has always been important to the liberation of all forms of aesthetic statements. In this regard, Burkett excels in a manner equal to all artists before him who were admired for their control of the medium and their unique visions, including Carleton Watkins, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and others before them. Burkett has achieved in Cibachrome what Eliot Porter achieved for dye-transfer or Weston and Adams for black-and-white prints...

Burkett’s full-spectral realism in landscape and details of Nature have come to the public fore at a time when the enormously successful twentieth-century artistic visions of modernism and postmodernism have been relegated to the present historical dustbin. The newest of the new vision in photography, the current avant-garde, is all about recycling physical characteristics of scale, color, surface, technology, and content issues that include social and environmental concepts, fictional and narrative theatrics, and visual pleasure. By these criteria alone, if one had not seen a Burkett photograph, his work could easily fit into some aspects of such a description and place him among the avant-garde. But his subject matter places him in another realm that is singular in its devotion to the relationship between physical reality and the spiritual qualities of beauty in landscape...

(The essay continues for seven more pages, for a total of 4,500 words.)