"Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere."  - Blaise Pascal

“What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”  - Albert Einstein

"If we do not permit the Earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either."
- Joseph Woodkrutch

"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land."  - Aldo Leopold

REFLECTIONS

The wilds of Alaska and Antarctica stands for a places of intrinsic value, beautiful and removed. Any journey to such places is an  invitation to understand and appreciate what is wild, and inspires us to reflect, far away from the mainstream of human experience, about what our proper place on this earth might be. Here the geography is so singular that our presence is inseparable from our desire to see: here we are the only figure on the figureless ground.   Antarctica’s lunar and harsh landscape forces us inward, rather than outward, providing us with a new perspective about ourselves and the world we live in. In Alaska, we can meditate on the temporal nature of our existence brought home to us by an extreme environment where humans are insignificant and vulnerable, dependent on complex life support systems to stay alive. Alaska and Antarctica humble us. Their landscape are too extreme, too empty, too unearthly to find adequate representation. It exceeds our metaphors, our very language, and challenges our perceptions of the physical world and of ourselves. Here, at what some would consider nature’s emptied edges, human perception can be pushed most precisely.
                                                                                                                     
We are – every one of us – a force of nature. Regardless of where we live on this Earth, we intimately belong to nature. We all do. In Alaska or Antarctica, it is easy for the human spirit to feel primal allegiance to nature and everything that is wild. It reminds us who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. But we don’t need to go to Alaska or Antarctica to realign our relationship with nature and discover our sense of wonder. We can feel a sense of connection by standing on a sea shore and becoming one with the sea and the land; we can walk in the woods and feel connected to the trees and the earth; we can gaze at the sky and feel part of the universe.

Some of my images represent a more abstract quality or characteristic of nature, such as beauty, symmetry, form, tone. These abstractions are often more evocative than the overall images of the physical landscape. These images are meant to reconnect us to the spirit of the place that sustains and nurtures us, in Alaska, Antarctica, and at home.