A Wild Life of Photography
Robert is the oldest of three children and was raised by Phil Dotson, a legit, pro wildlife photographer. His father’s photography career started with illustrating outdoor fishing publications with pen and ink drawings in Alaska in the 1960’s. That work shortly evolved into a family business, Great Basin Film Co., producing educational wildlife photography. During that time, Phil published freelance work in National Geographic, Audubon, and other classic wildlife publications of the day.
For Robert, that meant dad hauled the clan on the road every summer in a red VW bus where Robert served as ‘key grip and photo assistant’. Loaded with a hatch full of Nikons, chambered with Kodachrome bullets, the Dotson family captured rattlesnakes and tracked down everything from fox squirrels to black bears. (Not cool for a kid to miss summertime friends, but beyond cool and meaningful when viewed in the rearview mirror of Robert’s creative outdoor passions.)
In the 1980’s Robert married his girlfriend of Irish decent – Kelli Sullivan. Mad love and five kiddos ensued with grad school at Northwestern University in Chicago (go Wildcats) in the middle of it all. Robert’s business career was frequented by technology breakthroughs and mega marketing campaigns featuring Jamie Lee Curtis, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Dwyane Wade and even Snoop Dog. He launched advertising and promotional creative for a myriad of new brands and product introductions, ranging from KFC Hot Wings® while at PepsiCo to the first commercial digital phone service in the U.S. under the brand VoiceStream Wireless®.
Since retiring at a relatively young age from the tech industry in 2011, Robert and Kelli now travel to the remote nooks and crannies of planet earth together—capturing the raw wilderness and its wild creatures as they are seldom seen. They carry their own batch of Nikons, which are now filled with high-speed digital memory cards (and yes, they are also hooking predatory fish as they fly fish along the way.) Robert’s outdoor photographic art marries up perfectly with Kelli’s interior decorator instincts, laden with paint chips and fabric swatches, to deliver the ultimate finished art pieces available to collectors and outdoor enthusiast alike.
Their home base shifts throughout the year between three outdoor worlds: Idaho’s Henry’s Fork River, Northern Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, and New Zealand’s beech lined river gorges. (Two of which house their English springer guard dog, Zipper.)
