About the Artist

Deb Bentlage currently works as the Phippen Art Museum Curator in Prescott, Arizona. After over 20 years spent working in public relations, advertising and marketing services for major Fortune 500 companies in St. Louis and New York, she decided to pursue a quieter lifestyle where she could concentrate on her first love of photography as an art form. Working for over ten years at a major consumer products company in Manhattan where she had the opportunity to travel all over the world, she decided to move to Northern Arizona to dedicate more time to blending art and photography.

Deb always enjoyed photography from a young age and delved into photojournalism while working on the Daily Texan at the University of Texas at Austin, where she started taking her own photographs to accompany her articles in the amusements section of the student newspaper. Earning a BFA in photography from Southwest Missouri State University, she studied with a student of Jerry Uelsmann and developed her own artistic vision of the "surreal among the real". Her photography also has appeared in publications in Connecticut, Arizona, Missouri and Texas. She acted as a staff photographer for Circuit Playhouse theatrical productions in Memphis, Tennessee, with her photographs regularly published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper. After earning an honorable mention from the Nikon Response & Recognition national competition while in college, she continued to be featured in group photography shows at the Sedona Arts Center, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Springfield Art Museum, the University of Missouri-Columbia, Missouri Southern College and several private venues. She was selected for the Missouri Photographers 1976 group exhibition, where one of her photos was selected to become part of the University of Missouri permanent collection. Her most recent photography exhibition was "East Meets Southwest" in November 2007 at the Sedona Arts Center Community Exhibition Gallery.

About the Photoart

"Capturing the Surreal among the Real" by deb bentlage

Light, composition and a unique perspective of a "surreal among the real" image inspires this group of photographs. In this body of work, my intent was to try to capture moments that appear surreal or as if in a dream, but are actually things that were happening right in front of my camera lens. Seeing something out of the ordinary in a very ordinary environment or an everyday occurrence with unusual composition or lighting attracts my attention.

My attempts are to capture the mysterious-looking and magical things that can happen right in front of us every single day: a balloonmeister who appears to swallowed up in an inflating hot air balloon, a young girl scratching her head at a bus stop, a boy carting his broken bicycle or a commode placed in unusual surroundings. The anonymous nature of the subject or environment allows the viewer to impose their own realities upon the visual image. My inspiration is the magical and beautiful ways that life can unfold in front of our eyes with humor and beauty by visually celebrating the unusual placed among the usual. It is my hope that these photographs bring a smile, a chuckle, a memory or something else to keep the viewer in touch with life and the great world around us. Thank you for taking a moment to look around and enjoy the photoart!