Bio
Loftis’s thinking about photography was shaped by two important early experiences. As a child, he looked at family photographs with his mother. It was clear to him at the time that these were objects with a special value: they were fragments of history itself, the heritage and visual memory of his family. The quiet truths of these pictures made a powerful impression on him; indeed, they provided a kind of model for the directness and clarity of his work to come. The second formative experience occurred in 1951, when Loftis – at the age of fifteen – received his first camera. At the time, he was learning to fly, and he used the camera to document both airplanes on the ground and the earth from above. It is tempting to speculate that flying and photography became intimately linked in Loftis’s mind – that the exhilaration and radical sense of discovery of the first activity shaped his appreciation for the second. Both flight and photography provide new perspectives – at once heightened and intensified – of things we thought we knew.
Solo Exhibitions
2007 Ins and Outs, Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City, MO
2004 Hoods Doors and Fenders, Image Point Gallery, Kansas City, MO
2002 Fifty Years of Photography, Albrecht-Kemper Museum, St. Joseph, MO
2000 Richard E. Loftis, An Exhibition of Photographs
2000 Edward A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS
2000 Chrome on the Range, Wichita Center for the Arts, Wichita, KS
Selected Group Exhibitions
2000 The Ride, Society for Contemporary Photography, Kansas City, MO