About the Artist
Blake DeBock
Through his images Blake works to tell unique stories of Earth's wildest & most awe-inspiring places. His father introduced him to the mountains at an early age & together they found solace exploring the sparkling granite summits & pristine mountain streams of the High Sierra. Among Blake’s earliest memories are riding horseback to iconic places like Minaret & Thousand Island Lakes, fishing the streams & watching the mighty thunderstorms that would roll in overhead. Around the same time a love for the Ocean and surfing was also developing from many strong influences within the family. Throughout the years for Blake, the camera became a way to document these experiences he was having in the natural world. Blake attended college for a total of two days & felt as though for him the path of formal education was destined for failure. What he did know was that he wanted to live creatively & do so without compromise. In 2014, Blake began assisting master surf photographer Aaron Chang. For over half a decade he worked with Chang learning from & shadowing one of the most well-known names in the industry & was immersed in the surf photography world.
During this time Blake had met some new friends from South America who would drastically change the course of the next few years of his life. Together they went on a road trip to Yosemite & Big Sur in an 86’ Ford Econoline van his friends had bought for a couple hundred dollars. It was a trip that blossomed into lifelong friendships. Blake began learning Spanish & hearing all about their home countries & one place in particular really sparked his imagination, Patagonia. Blake had never left the United States but in 2016, inspired by these friends he embarked on an impulsive solo trip to the Southern reaches of the South American Continent. His first day abroad was spent in the sleepy fishing village of Puerto Natales in Chilean Patagonia. Over the next ten days he trekked the Torres del Paine Circuit which he began & ended with the hike up to the base of the iconic Towers. He found himself in awe of the endless glaciers, towering spires & abundant nature, from the herds of guanacos to the soaring condors & illusive puma. On the fourth day he broke his toe at Lago Dickson on the remote backside of the mountain range, but he decided to continue as it was only a slightly longer distance to push on & continue forward rather than to return the way he came. A few nights later he ran into his first puma while hiking back to camp in the dark of the night. He stayed in Patagonia for six months that trip hitchhiking along the side of rough dirt roads, hiking in the mountains & capturing those moments with his camera in hand.
Many of those experiences on that first trip South were crucial in shaping the art you see today & it’s where he realized the potential for his photography as the best way to share his stories. He returned home with the feeling that he’d left a piece of himself down there so for the next several years he’d spend half the year surfing & working in California & the other half he’d return to Patagonia. It was there in the dramatic mountainous wilderness of Southern Chile & Argentina that he found his eye as an artist & refined his own creative style. He never did get over the night that he saw his first puma & it ended up sparking a deep interest in these cats, their ecosystem & the idea of storytelling-based conservation. He taught himself to track pumas in Chilean Patagonia & would spend months on end in Torres del Paine working on telling the story of these ghost cats in the wild.
Over the years Blake has traveled Patagonia extensively, visiting places like Valle Cochamó (The Yosemite of South America), Isla Chiloe, the Northern & Southern Patagonian Icefields, Lago O’Higgins, Islas Malvinas, Tierra del Fuego, El Chalten & Sierra Baguales. He’s also hitchhiked both up & down large sections of the Carretera Austral; a brutal dirt through the Chilean Fjords connecting Patagonia to the rest of the country. Some other notable travels include frequent trips to the Big Island of Hawai’i where Blake has spent countless hours doing aerial photography in Cessna airplanes, treks high into the Peruvian Andes shooting portraits of indigenous peoples & surf trips to Chile, Costa Rica, Panama & Peru.
In 2019, Blake finished off his season in South America with a 2-week solo trip to the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) & in typical style he arrived in the islands with no itinerary & just a few hundred dollars in his pocket, lent to him by a friend in Patagonia. He spent a week photographing king penguins which was completely self-sustained having to pack in all food, water, gas, camping gear & even solar panels to charge his camera. By the second day he found himself bedridden in his tent with the flu, presumably from laying in penguin poo with his wide-angle lens the entire first day. Despite his sickness he still ventured out of his tent twice a day onto the stormy beaches to shoot once in a lifetime images of the thousands of king penguins that surrounded him. By the 6th day his sickness was only getting worse & with trouble breathing in the cold South Atlantic Ocean air he self-evacuated a day early to the hospital in Stanley. Once better he organized a flight to Saunders Island in the far West of the archipelago for another week of photography self-sustained & completely alone. Access to the outside world was through a radio lent to him & only worked if he climbed the mountain above camp. The beaches & cliffs were filled with colonies of gentoo, king, rockhopper & magallenic penguins as well as albatross, sea lions, elephant seals, & a playful pod of commerson’s dolphins. If he hadn’t already, here he had found true solitude.
Blake spent the next summer traveling the American West with a new companion, his dog Luna. When he was ready to return to Patagonia for his fourth big trip, he found it impossible to get South in those first few days of the pandemic. Unable to leave the country he bought a camper for his truck which he lived in throughout the pandemic. During this time, he really became fascinated with making images that invoked the spirit of the American West & his images during this time often featured animals like bears, wolves, & mustangs. He frequently traveled to Montana & Wyoming as well as often returning to California & The Sierra to visit family. He began spending entire seasons in & around Yellowstone as well as often camping out with herds of mustangs all over The West.
By the end of 2021 he had big plans for the next step in his carrier, the dream of opening his own gallery as a place to showcase his fine art works. His time working in Aaron Chang Galleries would prove vital in every step of the process & he took everything he had learned with Aaron & applied it to this new venture. In March of 2022 at 27 years old he opened the Blake DeBock Gallery at The Village in Mammoth Lakes, CA; a ski town nestled in the heart of the Sierra. It’s a place that brings Blake’s story full circle back to his over two decades of exploring in these very mountains since he was a young boy. From the windswept glaciers & towering spires of Patagonia to the high glacial meadows & sweeping granite vistas of the Sierra Nevada, there’s certainly many lifetimes of adventures to be had. For Blake this is just the beginning of a life of creativity & passion inspired by the natural world.
The DeBock Collection
Blake's fine art works, photographed from around the world, represent his most unique and defining moments behind the lens. These prints are part of a limited edition with each print signed, numbered and coming with a certificate of authenticity.
