About

My first camera came from a PX in Vietnam. I had no idea then that I’d spend a lifetime learning to wait for light.

I’m Gerald “Erro” Gutshall, a fine art photographer based in Altoona, Pennsylvania, known for monumental panoramic landscape photography and archival silver printing. My work is held in the permanent collections of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, and for ten consecutive years I created annual portfolios for the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies program, placed in United States embassies across 160 cities worldwide.

After two tours of duty, I returned home and discovered my true calling inside the darkroom at Cabrillo College. I went on to earn my Bachelor of Fine Arts at UC Santa Cruz, learning to cultivate a disciplined visual style of my own — all while raising my daughter as a single father.

Today, my practice centers primarily on large-scale color work. I seek out wide vistas you step into — from the monumental terrain of Yosemite, Glacier, and Banff to the quiet valleys of Central Pennsylvania and the untamed coasts of Costa Rica, and in cities around the world, from Ho Chi Minh City to Kuala Lumpur. Whether working in traditional archival silver printing or extended digital panoramas, I wait patiently for the light, creating work that is meant to outlast me.

Beyond photography, music and community have profoundly shaped how I see the world. At forty-nine, I bought two African djembe drums — a step that eventually took me into the villages of West Africa and led to founding Drums of West Africa in 2001. It was the depth of the culture, far more than the drumming itself, that inspired me.

Standing before the vastness of the natural world has always filled me with quiet reverence. I hope my work takes your breath away, just as these scenes took mine.