Why Abstract? What I'm Seeing Inside Tahoe's Most Beautiful Homes — And a Gallery Built Around It
Yesterday I had the opportunity to photograph a completed art installation for the Piper Gallery at a private residence in Martis Camp. If you’re not familiar with Martis Camp, it’s one of the most exclusive private communities in the Truckee–Tahoe area — the homes there are on another level. My job was to document the artwork the gallery had installed throughout the home, giving them images they could use for marketing, client presentations, and social media.
It was a great shoot. But more than anything, it reminded me of something I’ve been quietly noticing for years.
On location at a private Martis Camp residence, photographing an art installation for the Piper Gallery. (If the video doesn’t load, watch it on Instagram.) Scott portrait photos provided by Piper Gallery.
What’s Hanging on the Walls Has Changed
I’ve been photographing homes in the Truckee and Lake Tahoe area for a long time — first as a resident who fell in love with this landscape, and more recently as a commercial and real estate photographer who gets invited inside some truly remarkable properties. I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside talented local designers like Elisa Dinallo of Dinallo Designs, and through that work I’ve had a front-row seat to how the art inside these homes has evolved.
Here’s what I’ve been noticing: traditional landscape photography — the kind with a perfectly framed, perfectly lit postcard view of Lake Tahoe — is increasingly rare on the walls of the nicest homes I visit. What I see instead are large-scale paintings with texture and movement, abstract photography, and images that make you feel something before you can even identify what you’re looking at. Single statement pieces that anchor a room rather than a cluster of smaller prints filling a wall.
This isn’t just my impression. Interior designers and design publications have been saying the same thing. The direction in 2025 and 2026 is toward art-driven interiors — fewer pieces, chosen more deliberately, with an emphasis on the painterly, the atmospheric, and the abstract. The Martis Camp home I photographed for Piper Gallery yesterday was a perfect example. Every piece of art had been chosen to work with the architecture and the light — not just to represent a place, but to create a mood.
Autumn Abstract 2 — intentional camera movement transforms a stand of aspens into something closer to a painting than a photograph.
Where This All Started For Me
Here’s the thing — this isn’t a trend I’m scrambling to catch up with. It’s a way of seeing I’ve been developing for nearly thirty years.
Before I ever picked up a camera, I was taking painting and drawing classes. Those classes taught me to think about composition, color theory, light, and mood — not as technical checkboxes but as tools for creating an emotional response. I came to photography already thinking like an artist, and that foundation has shaped how I shoot ever since.
My first real photography teacher reinforced that completely. In college, I was lucky enough to study black and white photography under Richard A. Lou, who remains one of my all-time favorite teachers. He pushed us hard to think of the final print as a work of art — not just a record of something that existed in front of the lens. His assignments were genuinely challenging in the best way. One of his ground rules, which I still love: no pictures of cats. It sounds funny, but it was his way of telling us to stop reaching for the easy and obvious subject and start thinking about what we were making.
I recently tracked Richard down on LinkedIn and sent him a note thanking him for being such an influential teacher. Thirty years later, his voice is still in my head every time I go out to shoot.
A few years after that class, I picked up Art Wolfe’s book The Art of Photographing Nature, and it deepened everything I’d already started to understand. Wolfe’s ability to find the graphic, the painterly, and the unexpected within the natural landscape — to see abstraction in a place most photographers treat as scenery — was genuinely eye-opening. If you haven’t read it and you care about nature photography as art, track down a copy.
Icy Eagle Falls — water, ice, and long exposure combine into something more sculpture than snapshot.
The Tahoe Area Abstract Gallery
All of that history — the painting and drawing classes, Richard’s assignments, Art Wolfe’s influence, two decades of photographing this region — lives in a gallery I’ve been building on TruckeeTahoePhotos.com. I recently expanded it significantly, and I want to make sure you know it exists, especially if you’ve thought of my site primarily as a destination for traditional Tahoe landscape photos.
The Tahoe Area Abstract Gallery is different. It brings together the images that blur the line between photography and painting — long exposures that turn rushing water into something silky and dreamlike, aerial drone perspectives that reduce the Sierra Nevada to pure color and form, close-up details of ice and granite that feel almost sculptural, and intentional camera movement that transforms a forest into something impressionistic. These are the images I find myself most proud of. And increasingly, they’re the images that look most at home on the walls of the spaces where people actually live.
Donner Lake Aerial 7 — from above, the lake’s surface becomes something closer to abstract painting than geography. Note: A small paddle boarder can be seen on the lake.
A Note on Print Size and Media
If you’re considering one of these images for your home, a few things are worth knowing.
Abstract and painterly photography rewards scale. A 16x24 print of a snow abstract is lovely. That same image at 40x60 becomes a room-defining moment. My instinct, having seen a lot of prints in a lot of homes, is that most people underestimate how large to go — especially with images like these that have a lot of tonal subtlety and visual depth. The largest sizes in my catalog go up to 72x48 inches, and if you need something even larger, just reach out and I’m happy to provide a custom quote.
On print material: for images with movement, soft gradation, and texture — the snow abstracts, the water long-exposures, the foggy winter scenes — I particularly love metal prints. Metal enhances mid-tone contrast in a way that gives these images a subtle luminosity that’s difficult to describe until you’ve seen it in person. They look almost self-lit. Metal also works beautifully in modern interiors because there’s no frame required — the print is finished and contemporary straight out of the box.
For images with strong, warm color — the autumn aspen shots, the aerial lake views — canvas can add a softness and warmth that feels more painterly and suits certain spaces beautifully.
"Snowy Donner Lake 13" - Photograph of snow and ice on the surface of Donner Lake in Truckee, California. Large format metal prints bring out a luminosity in abstract images that’s hard to achieve any other way.
For Interior Designers and Design Professionals
If you’re a designer or decorator working on a project in the Truckee–Tahoe area — or anywhere else — I’d genuinely love to connect. I understand how important it is to find artwork that doesn’t just look beautiful in isolation but works within the specific light, scale, and palette of a real space. I’m happy to discuss your project, provide high-resolution image files for client presentations, and work with you to find the right image and the right format for your installation.
Feel free to reach out anytime through my contact page.
Go Take a Look
Whether you’re working with a designer, furnishing a vacation home, or simply looking for something on your walls that feels a little less expected — I hope you’ll spend a few minutes in the gallery. These are some of my favorite images from over two decades of photographing this region, and I think they represent what’s possible when photography stops trying to be a postcard and starts trying to be art.
Browse the Tahoe Area Abstract Gallery →
Scott Thompson is a fine art and commercial photographer based in Truckee, California. His work has been featured in Tahoe Quarterly, the Wall Street Journal, and Robb Report, and is available for purchase at TruckeeTahoePhotos.com and through Art Truckee Gallery in Downtown Truckee.
