The restorative power of Nature and Landscape has long been understood. In a modern world of digital communication, pandemic isolation and remote relationships to work and social contacts its no wonder people seek to connect with something basic, something real. Despite the distance we have created by seeking to dominate and control the Earth, we recognize the needed relationship and humbly return. We are actually part of Nature and not outside it.

In field and forest we find both the familiar and strange. Our evolutionary memory vibrates with experiences of survival and pleasure, risk and safety.

I took stylistic clues for this series from nineteenth century expeditionary photographers who included figures in their landscape compositions. These figures function to give scale to the land forms but also function with more complexity, indicating occupation and implied possession. They also suggest an alternate view point in visual narrative structure, an intriguing complication to “reading” the image. In these photographs people interact with landscape in multiple and personal ways, forging their own restorative contact with land and place.