I have spent 24 years exploring and photographing in the Sierra Mountains. The love I have of this wilderness is only equalled by my love for the art of landscape photography. Each time I venture into this place I feel a renewed bond. It is a space to experience creative stillness, wilderness connection, solitude, fear, discomfort, elation, and sublime bliss. When I enter here, I am pushed to shift the way I engage with nature and humanity.

DISCOVER is a solo, three week walk into the High Sierra mountains to explore creative solitude, disconnection, and simplicity. Carrying no electronics, I’ll wander alone for three weeks, navigating on and off trail, on a route of my own making. For creating images, I will take only a fixed lens, wide angle camera called a Hasselblad SWC, and fifty rolls of film. The simplicity of taking only one, mechanical, single-lens camera aligns with the simplicity I seek, lending time and attention to deepening my creative connection to the landscape. Landscape photography can be about many things: observation, patience, exploration, structure, contrast, transcendence. At its deepest, it’s a product of the artist’s interpretation of place, and a reflection of themself. This, to me, is what landscape photography is truly about. 

Three years ago, I did a project called Wander where I also walked into the High Sierra mountains for several weeks with no electronics or tent. I used only a wooden, panoramic pinhole camera to reduce photographic control and, for that project, enhance creative uncertainty. Working with this unpredictability taught me the power of stripping away creative control. I learned to see that limitation can free me to explore the landscape, and myself, in intimate and different ways. But ultimately, while the process of using a pinhole camera added to the experience of that project, the output did not convey my feeling of being in that wilderness, nor did it align with my landscape aesthetic.

On the surface it may sound like DISCOVER is a repeat but it’s not, it’s an evolution of the ideas behind Wander, and is also, in many ways, the culmination of all my time spent in the Sierra Mountains. Now I go back and use a camera system more in line with the essence of my landscape work, to really craft photographs highlighting the feelings of solitude in wilderness, the smallness of humanity in such places, and the power of connection through disconnection. The perspective of the photographs I make with the fixed wide angle lens of the Hasselblad SWC will enhance the immensity of these mountains while making the viewer feel the solitude. It is in those moments of vulnerability where a person can learn to really see where they are and why.

Journal posts

Posts from my journal that are specifically about the project.

The Camera

Photography Gear

• Hasselblad 903SWC camera

• B&W Filters: Red #15, Minus-blue #12, Yellow #8, 3-stop ND, 10-stop ND

• Gitzo Carbon Fiber Tripod

• 50 rolls of Ilford Delta 100 BW film

• Spot meter

• Various of items