Artist’s Statement

I approach wild landscapes and wild creatures as subjects with agency, identity, and spirit. My work flows from my deep love and respect for all things wild, and a conviction that humans are part of the natural world, not its owners. Going into wilderness—especially mountains and northern boreal forests—feels like coming home. When I’m there, all my senses expand. I see and notice, hear and understand, smell and identify. The feel of rock, soil, trees, and elements is comforting and familiar at a deep, instinctual level. In wild places, I can just be.

My approach to photography draws on my training and education as artist, naturalist, and landscape architect. I’ve spent decades learning to read wild and built landscapes—not just cataloging what’s there, but understanding the relationships that have molded the place and its inhabitants. My formal education, years in the field, and dedication to lifelong learning help me to see relationships others often miss. I see the natural world as vast and achingly complex. I attempt to make sense of this complexity by showing connections within wild places like Yellowstone, the Northwoods, the Rocky Mountains, and the Arctic.

I have always been obsessed with light. I’m enraptured by it, moved by it, my emotions react to its qualities and patterns. I’m constantly watching light on the landscape, whether I have a camera in my hand or not—shadow patterns of clouds drifting across mountains, shafts of sunlight isolating features one moment and obscuring them the next, illuminating rain as it falls and the mists swirling beneath storm clouds. There are times when the quality of light is so nuanced, so exquisitely complex, that I know I’ll never adequately render it in a print, and so I don’t try. In those moments my only recourse is to remain in the moment and try to fully appreciate what the universe has given me.

Light creates our world. Without light, there is no form, no shape, no color, no contrast—just endless darkness. As a photographer, my role is to be an instrument for noticing and rendering light, and I’ve spent a lifetime learning its language. The Scottish have over 400 words for snow; the Sámi have over 300. I could easily come up with that many words for light. Blue hour, Golden hour, and all the subtle gradations between them. Light can be direct, reflected, filtered, hard, soft, and brilliant. Light sets mood. It reveals and conceals. It has direction. It creates movement. Different light transforms the same subject entirely—from mass to intricate detail, from spectacle to presence, from monumental to intimate.

I use light—along with scale, perspective, and composition—to shift how viewers see my subjects. My goal is perceptual intervention: to move what Carlos Castaneda called the “assemblage point,” the position from which we perceive reality. I want viewers to see wild subjects not as isolated specimens or scenic backdrop, but as individuals with agency and spirit, living in relationships with season, weather, geography, and community. Light evokes emotional states in us that cause us to perceive our world differently as the light changes. Visual artists have always known that and used it to create feelings and moods in us the same way that musicians use sound.

Early in my career I was obsessed with getting shots of wild animals that filled the frame—technically solid, but ultimately one note plucked from a symphony. Jim Brandenburg’s book White Wolf: Living with an Arctic Legend came out at the time and was a revelation. Jim captured the essence and spirit of Arctic wolves by showing them in the context of their harsh world. So I began including more context: a pair of Trumpeter Swans floating the Yellowstone River, alone in Hayden Valley; a single stoic bison in the vast sweep of the Lamar Valley during a blizzard. Photographs that reveal relationships, behaviors, and the complexity of ecosystems that close-ups can’t. I learned to give my subjects room to breathe.

Context, complexity, connection—and the light that reveals them. These are the building blocks of my art.