He has visited the Everest region for over 500 days on over a dozen trips and amassed a portfolio of photos that have been exhibited in museums in the USA and Nepal.
MONROE, NC, September 21, 2022 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Jeff Botz has been included in Marquis Who's Who. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
A skilled artist, photographer, photo printer and author, Mr. Botz was born and raised in a family of four rowdy brothers and a sister in post WWII New Jersey, USA. In high school he was president of the student council and after that was always very sensitive to issues of governance and geopolitics. His college experience at Tulane University, and then NYU, was as an economics major but he left mid junior year during the social and consciousness revolutions of the early seventies. Mr. Botz was a Conscientious Objector to the war in Vietnam.
His first work experience was in his father's textile importing business but he quickly exited and with a close friend co-founded a company to manufacture tennis and squash clothing named Boast, Inc. During his travels to Japan and Hong Kong for Boast, Mr. Botz in 1972 took a leave of absence to visit Nepal and the Himalayas for the first time and later, in 1976 to spend four months trekking and photographing in the Himalayas with his 35mm camera and Kodachrome film. He soon had the opportunity to build squash courts so exited the apparel company and built 11 squash courts in New Jersey and then in New York City including the first international-sized court in the United States. He owned a five court facility in Tribeca that had as its members some of America's greatest artists including Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray, Ross Bleckner and many others, all of whom he was on a first name basis.
In the early months of 1980 he led a group including entertainment industry lawyers to create an IPO for a company that would offer $1 million to each of the four Beatles to play a one-hour concert. The offering was approved by the AG of NY and the Federal Trade Commission but before the public offering was made, John Lennon was murdered.
In the 1980s Mr. Botz created an atelier style dye transfer printing company in NYC that primarily made display prints for fine artists and photographers. The client list included Ernst Haas, Joel Myerowitz, William Wegman, Eliot Porter, Chuck Close, The Light Gallery, and Pace-McGill Gallery, amongst others. Printing and interacting with these and other photographers gave Mr. Botz knowledge of the working methods of some of the best photographers in the world and the encouragement that he may be able to produce fine photography himself.
When Kodak stopped making dye transfer materials in the late 1980s Mr. Botz was determined to be behind a camera and actually make pictures at any level. Thus he became a lowly college and university yearbook photographer with the conviction and determination to become a 'real' photographer. In 1998 after the worldwide success of Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air which despite its success had not a single picture of Mt. Everest in it, Mr. Botz determined to return to Nepal and try to make an iconic photo of this world's tallest mountain. Because of his small format camera experience in the Himalayas in the '70s he wanted to use the much more rigorous and expressive technique used and taught by Ansel Adams to capture the grandeur of the world's tallest mountains.
Twenty years later, he has visited the Everest region for over 500 days on over a dozen trips and amassed a portfolio of photos that have been exhibited in museums in the USA and Nepal, and appeared on the covers of books and in magazines. In his commitment to making a true portrait of this tallest mountain, Mr. Botz has become aware of the history of the naming of the mountain by the British in 1857 and is convinced this act is another example of British colonialism and an injustice to those countries. His current collection is titled Everest Not Everest and incorporates photos and essays outlining the naming issue.
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