Tyler Boley is a Seattle, WA native and has been making photographs of his surroundings since boyhood in the 1950s, beginning with plastic Sears cameras and bathroom darkrooms. While working most of his teens and twenties in music he became more seriously active in fine art landscape photography in the eighties, studying with Ruth Bernhard, Marsha Burns, Micheal Burns, Lucien Clergue, Linda Conner, Judy Dater, Frank Gohlke, Phillip Hyde, Mark Klett, Tom Millea, Richard Misrach, Ann Noggle, John Sexton, Jerry Uelsmann, and Brett Weston. At the now legendary Friends Of Photography he was exposed to the highest standards in image and traditional craft, and began exhibiting at the Silver Image and Equivalence Galleries in Seattle.
Photography of the unique Northwest landscape in particular has been an ongoing endeavor and is a constantly growing body of work, to date the largest amongst a variety of photographic pursuits. He continues to produce serious personal work, utilizing whatever methods deemed appropriate, from large film cameras to iPhone. Great care is taken with printing all the work using a variety of methods, he is an acknowledged master printer.
Also involved in commercial assignment photography, he regularly produced national award-winning work, appearing frequently in the Mead Show and Black Book AR100. His clients included Accenture, Aldus, Bloomberg, BNSF, Esterline Technologies, Expeditors International, Microsoft, Nintendo, Starbucks, Sun America, and many others.
After years in the darkroom working with silver, platinum, type C, and other experiments he became interested in inkjet photographic printing due to the possibility of using fine art papers, and the image control provided with digital editing. He became an experimenter and beta tester of early print profiling methods as initial available quality was not up to traditional standards. Tyler was a very early adopter of monochromatic ink digital printing and became an acknowledged expert. In the fall of 2003, Custom Digital LLC was opened to provide custom fine art black and white carbon pigment and color Ultrachrome ink printing services.
Due to the expanding reputation in fine digital printing, workshop teaching and tutoring activity began in 2005 with his first workshop at Cone Editions in Vermont, followed by a return in 2006, then continuing with workshops at Digital Stop in Berkeley California, Newspace Center For Photography in 2009, as well as various talks and presentations in the community.
Between 2014 and 2019 Tyler slowed then stopped work for others and now concentrates on his own work, photography, printing, and music.