As a child growing up in Houston, "getting outdoors" meant lounging in a hammock on a manicured lawn, retreating indoors at the slightest discomfort. I never imagined that I would purposely subject myself to the hard work and inevitable discomfort of spending significant time outdoors. In 1987, after an intense university experience, I enrolled in a 90-day wilderness adventure which fundamentally altered the course of my life and precipitated a move to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was in Santa Fe that I first confronted the limitations of photography—my inability to make images that in any way captured my felt experience of the land in the desert Southwest--the beauty, the majesty, the light, the color, and my experience of feeling deep reverence, humility, and awe. Frustrated by my inability to represent what I experienced, I abandoned photography until years later when I began traveling with my children to places that were wild and untamed yet accessible. Watching them engage wholeheartedly—putting away their digital devices, becoming fully present in ways I rarely witnessed—reignited my photographic passions. Rather than attempt to capture the landscape devoid of human presence, I wanted to capture the relationship between humans and the natural world. This project is a visual exploration of the experience of awe and an invitation to consider humans' place in the natural world. What began as a fascination with the human desire to spend time in nature morphed into an investigation of the experience of awe and the ways in which nature nourishes and profoundly enriches our lives. Dacher Keltner, psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley describes awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.” Since 2011, I have made multiple trips to the dunes seeking to capture their ethereal beauty and inspire wonder and reverence.

Archival Inkjet Prints