Nile Root
Member Since September 2007
Artist Statement Nile Root, Professor Emeritus, College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology, has been active in the field of biocommunications for over 45 years. He is a Registered Biological Photographer (RBP), a Fellow of the Biological Photographic Association (FBPA) and a Schmidt Laureate, the highest honor awarded by the BPA - now renamed the BioCommunications Association, (BCA). He directed the RIT program in Biocommunications for over 12 years. He retired in 1986. While at RIT he was also the director of a government grant (1973-77) for development of a baccalaureate degree in the field of biocommunications. In 1986 Nile received the Award for Outstanding Teaching at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Nile served as a Photographer’s Mate in the U. S. Navy in World War ll. After his discharge, in 1946, he was employed by the U.S. Field Information Agency, Technical (FIAT), in occupied West Germany as a microphotographer. He traveled throughout West Germany microfilming captured documents.
Since 1965 Nile has participated in nearly every exhibit of biological photography sponsored yearly by the BPA. He has received over 50 awards including 16 First Awards for his photographs. He has had several hundred biological photographs published in books, professional journals and magazines.
After his retirement in 1986, he and his wife, Abby, lived in Japan for two years where Abby taught English in a Nagasaki college and Nile photographed. He also conducted seminars for a group of doctors who wanted to increase their fluency in English as it related to medicine.
Nile and Abby traveled throughout Southeast Asia. Nile photographed the total solar eclipse of 1988 from aboard a cruise ship in the Celebes Sea, near Borneo. They spent two weeks in China visiting major cities from Beijing, to Xian, to Singapore, days before the Tiananmen Square uprising.
When Nile and Abby returned to the U.S. they settled in Tucson, Arizona, partly so that Nile could continue with his interest in astronomy and in archaeoastronomy. In March, 1994, he published an illustrated paper in Sky and Telescope magazine on an ancient sun-watching station near Tucson. His research on this site has continued to the present. He has many images of distinctive shadow patterns on prehistoric Native American petroglyph celestial symbols: patterns made during the solstices and the equinoxes, usually at sunrise.
His interest in petroglyphs, pictographs, and prehistoric ruins has led him and Abby to travel throughout the Southwest in recent years. Two of their favorite sites are Chaco Canyon, in New Mexico, and Canyon de Chelly, in Arizona. Nile has made hundreds of photographs of petroglyphs at Three Rivers, and Boca Negra Canyon in New Mexico, and at Painted Rocks and Signal Hill in Arizona. He has interesting photos of pictographs that are about a thousand years old from Chaco Canyon, and from Hueco Tanks, in Texas.
During his years in photography he has had 26 one-person exhibits of personal creative images in U. S museums, galleries, and universities, as well as in two galleries outside the U.S. He has also been in over 40 group shows. He recently completed a one-person fine art exhibit of computer enhanced images, CHINA. The exhibit opened in February, 1999, in Tucson. A subsequent one-person exhibit cyberZENopened in February, 2000, in Tucson.
He died in Tucson, Arizona on April 2, 2004, at the age of 77.
Click to save as artist's preferred kit 
