WSU photography professor Dennis DeHart is an artist, a teacher and a traveler. Just this year, he traversed the U.S., visited China, and gave a lecture in France. Now, a selection of his photographs resides in a small gallery in Los Angeles.

DeHart’s work is currently being shown in the inaugural exhibition of SPOT Photo Works, a contemporary photography gallery in Hollywood. The exhibit, “Concentrate to the Quiet,” opened Aug. 2 and will continue through tomorrow in one of the historic buildings known as Crossroads of the World on Sunset Boulevard.

Kathleen Clark, director of SPOT Photo Works, said her vision for the studio is to expose visitors to great photography that many people haven’t seen anywhere else.

“It’s a leap of faith for (DeHart) to take a chance (on a new gallery),” Clark said. She added that the opening saw a couple hundred people over the course of the evening and the show has been well received since then, getting a “good amount” of street traffic.

One unique aspect of DeHart’s photos is the way he mixes still life and landscape, Clark said.

Much of DeHart’s work is engaged in a Western location, said fine arts department chair Thom Brown, noting his photographs of watersheds and rivers in this region.

“That particular work has a lot of relevance to this particular part of the country,” Brown said.

DeHart said he is interested in capturing how nature and culture connect and overlap with each other.

“Concentrate to the Quiet” was shot mostly in Scandinavia while DeHart did a residency there in 2013. This project was unique because, while DeHart said he had traveled previously, he had “never really lived in one place for five weeks, being that focused.” He said he would like to continue immersing himself in other countries in the future.

DeHart’s first foray into photography was in high school when he said he learned to use the dark room for the school paper. He said he enjoyed working with words and images, mixing the mediums.

“I love how you can change the context of photography to get different meanings and different feelings and expressions,” DeHart said.

However, he didn’t give serious consideration to making photography his career early on.

“Honestly, I never was very career-minded, I was more interested in just learning and living a creative life,” he said. “Photography as a career came along a lot later, more like, ‘OK, how can I do this and potentially make a living doing it?’”

DeHart worked with inner-city kids through AmeriCorps, leading art workshops for two years before teaching during graduate school at the University of New Mexico. Now, several teaching jobs later, he said he hopes students leave his class with “a passion for art and a passion for their own expression.”

“There are so many ways to use art, both professionally and creatively and personally,” he said.

DeHart has been working in the department to curate an exhibit of contemporary Finish photography for display at WSU later this fall. The exhibit will include prints, videos and sculptural objects and will open in October, he said.