The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

This third and last of my selection of black-and-white landscape photography books focuses on contemporary work by living photographers with a strong presence in the art world, ending with artists younger than me. The books engage with the land as a dynamic space shaped by history, time, and elemental forces. They are all part of my collection and personal favorites. Not only have I thematically paired them like in the previous selection, but I have grouped the pairs to illustrate recurring motifs in contemporary landscape photography. The land may be viewed through the lens of human intervention, revealing the traces of civilization through subtle or overt marks. Some turn to the raw, elemental, untamed aspects of nature, capturing its turbulence and ephemerality, while others reduce the landscape to near abstraction, stripping away reference points to evoke a more visceral, psychological experience. Even if those approaches to landscape photography are alien to you, there is much to be learned from studying the visual strategies at play.

What makes these works distinctly contemporary is their departure from traditional landscape photography’s conventions of clarity and beauty, which was a common thread in the previous list. Instead, they embrace fragmentation, process-based experimentation, repetition, and an awareness of photography’s role in shaping our perception of place. Whether through sequences that challenge linear storytelling, alternative photographic techniques that embed time within the image, or unusual compositions that blur the boundary between representation and abstraction, in the work of those photographers the landscape is both a physical reality and a conceptual space. They invite reconsidering how we see, inhabit, and interpret the land today.

Robert Adams: Listening to the River (1994)

Robert Adams (born 1937), is influential for his unflinching and stark depictions of the evolving landscape of the American West, revealing both its beauty and the impact of human encroachment. Of the ten photographers in the “New Topographics” exhibit which could be argued to be the starting point of contemporary landscape photography, he is the most sensitive to the natural world. Some of his most influential books such as The New West depict developments, but Listening to the River takes place in the anonymous, workday landscapes of the American West, conveying a sense of place through straightforward and unembellished images of rural environments. The book is distinguished by its innovative use of sequences from two to seven images on each spread following multiple strategies. They create a sense of being around and moving in the landscape through a contemplative journey that explores with a poetic sensibility the fragile balance between nature and human presence.

John Gossage: The Pond (2010 reprint)

John Gossage (born 1946) explores the urban and suburban landscape in subtle and psychologically charged photographs that reveal their overlooked and ambiguous aspects. Although a prolific bookmaker with over thirty publications, it is his second monograph that became one of the most seminal and groundbreaking books in photographic literature, even though Gossage stated that in 1985, they couldn’t give the book away. Nowadays it is trendy for photobooks not to have a photograph on their cover, that was groundbreaking then – the reprint reverses the colors. The Pond chronicles a walk to and away from a pond in an unremarkable stretch of land at the interface of the city and the country, a then-new territory many have explored since – and has become my most recent focus. There is a fondness for the natural world as a place of redemption or loss. Yet, the images stay away from celebrating beauty. Instead, they experiment with photographic seeing, maintaining an ambiguous tone that leaves interpretation to the viewer, yet another hallmark of contemporary photography.

Mark Klett: Revealing Territory (1992)

Mark Klett (born 1952) explores time and history through conceptual landscape photographs of the American West. He is mostly known for his pioneering contributions to rephotography – the practice of creating a contemporary image that perfectly aligns with a historical image – and for extensions to the methodology. My favorite of his several rephotography books is Yosemite in Time (2005). Besides the dialog with significant images from past photographic giants and the connection established between them, the rigorous technique yields insights into environmental changes. However, the book does not fit this list because some photographs use color. Instead, in the more personal Revealing Territory, Klett uses 4×5 Polaroid Type 55 film (also one of my favorites until it was discontinued in the early 2000s) and embraces the materiality of that process through its edge markings and the addition of handwritten captions to the prints. This approach lends the images a sense of immediacy and direct engagement with the landscape, blurring the line between photography as documentation and as an artifact of experience. The book presents a multifaceted portrait of the Western landscape, incorporating images that range from expansive desert vistas to human interventions, underscoring Klett’s interest in the evidence people have left of their experience of the land.

Mark Ruwedel – Westward the Course of Empire (2008)

Mark Ruwedel (born 1954) blends historical inquiry with contemporary concerns about land use in America. Based on extensive research, Westward the Course of Empire traces the remnants of abandoned railroad lines that once symbolized the expansionist ambitions of the 19th century. The book is a typology of these forgotten paths through the land, revealing the scars left by human industry and the slow reclamation of the land. Ruwedel’s restrained, methodical compositions and rich black-and-white tonality underscore the transience of human endeavor, making this a powerful meditation on history, landscape, and the passage of time.

Hiroshi Sugimoto – Seascapes (2015) (*)

Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) is one of the most important conceptual photographers of our time. Photographed on an 8×10 camera like his other projects, Seascapes may be his most radical project, as it presents an austere and profound vision of the ocean that pushes minimalism to its extreme. Each image follows the same compositional structure, dividing the frame equally between sea and sky. The world is reduced to a simple horizon, excluding other elements such as clouds or rocks, and long exposures dissolve surface detail, transforming waves into ethereal, time-suspended expanses. The repetition and subtle variation in atmospheric conditions and light evoke a sense of eternity and stillness, as the scenes could have been witnessed by the earliest humans. (*) Photographed over several decades at locations around the world, Seascapes comprises over 200 photographs. When the book was published, I thought it was too many and passed. The book sold out and became prohibitively expensive, so I had to content myself with a catalog presenting a representative sample of the series among others, the 400-page Hiroshi Sugimoto (2010). The cover is pictured above, and it differs only slightly from the cover of Seascapes. That book is itself out of print, but the recent and shorter Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine (2023) by the same publisher is readily available.

Thomas Joshua Cooper: The World’s Edge (2019)

Thomas Joshua Cooper (born 1946) opus magnum project maps the limits of human exploration through images photographed on six continents over a quarter-century. Using exclusively a 5×7 Agfa Ansco camera made in 1898, Cooper makes only one exposure per place. His work, often created under extreme conditions and through extended expeditions to remote places, captures coastal edges and historical waypoints. Although they are about human exploration, mythology, and history, they are devoid of any human traces. Long exposures and abstract compositions generally excluding the horizon transform seascapes and landscapes into mythical spaces of emptiness. A pitch-black photograph taken at the South Pole on winter solstice contrasts with a whiteout near the North Pole. The sequencing follows a journey, leading the viewer through an atlas of seascapes that act as timeless, metaphysical places.

Jungjin Lee: Wind (2009)

Jungjin Lee (born 1961) fuses Eastern aesthetics and Western landscape traditions, creating textural and graphic images that transcend documentary representation, even when made in well-trodden nature locations. Wind, maybe her best-known book, studies one of the elemental forces that shape the land, capturing the movement of air, sand, and light in vast, open spaces. Printed on handmade and hand-coated paper, the images take on a textured, tactile, painterly quality, reinforcing their ephemeral yet grounded presence. The book’s sequence flows like shifting currents, immersing the viewer in an environment that feels both ancient and impermanent, emphasizing the dreamlike dimensions of the landscape.

Mitch Dobrowner – Storms (2013)

Mitch Dobrowner (born 1956) pushes Ansel Adams’s esthetics further, creating eloquently dramatic black-and-white landscape images using digital photography. Storms is about the skies, capturing the raw power and sublime beauty of nature’s most volatile moments. Bringing fine-art photography esthetic to storm chasing, the book presents a series of monumental, highly detailed photographs of supercells, tornadoes, and other severe weather phenomena, emphasizing their sculptural, almost supernatural presence. The sequencing builds tension, moving from distant formations to explosive moments of energy and destruction. Dobrowner’s precise compositions and deep tonal contrasts highlight the delicate balance between chaos and order, offering a cinematic portrayal of nature’s elemental forces.

Sally Mann – Deep South (2008)

Sally Mann (born 1951) has photographed in the American South since the 1970s with large-format cameras, exploring themes of memory and the deep resonance of place. Although she came to prominence with her silver-gelatin intimate portraits of her family, she subsequently turned to evocative and romantic landscape work using antique processes. Deep South is a poetic and atmospheric meditation on the landscapes of the American South, infused with a sense of loss and historical weight. Using a wet-plate collodion process that introduces imperfections and a quality that almost seems like a hybrid of photography, painting, and sculpture, Mann renders the landscape as tangible and spectral. The book’s elegiac tone invites viewers to experience the landscape as a site of memory, where past and present remain inextricably intertwined.

Chris McCaw – Sunburn (2012)

Chris McCaw (born 1971) is known for his unique process refined over time, in which he directly exposes photographic paper to the sun in hand-built ultra-large format cameras. The intense exposures, often taking hours or even days, result in an inversion of tonalities aptly called solarization, giving the images a unique, almost abstract quality. Sunburn, which represents the foundation of his imaginative subsequent work with the sun, captures the passage of time in a literal sense: the sun’s rays etch themselves into the emulsion while smoke comes out of the camera with a faint smell of roasted marshmallows as the gelatin of the paper is burned. The charred, sculptural, one-of-a-kind prints emphasize the raw interaction between photography and nature.

Ron Jude – 12 Hz (2020)

Ron Jude (born 1965) explores themes of memory, identity, and place through understated, conceptual photographs. 12 Hz departs from his previous color work where the landscape is a storytelling component, and also from the West Coast landscape photography tradition. Presenting a dark, primordial vision of the Earth, Jude digitally captures highly detailed and often claustrophobic, abstract images of rock formations, turbulent waters, and geological remnants that exist beyond human time scales. They are contrasted with equally claustrophobic chaotic forest floors. The book’s title references ultra-low frequency vibrations associated with seismic activity, reinforcing its focus on landscapes shaped by forces beyond perception, where human presence is insignificant.

Awoiska van der Molen – Sequester (2014)

Awoiska van der Molen (born 1972) is a rare contemporary photographer whose practice until recently was only in the natural world. Her monumental and often dark and abstract silver-gelatin landscape prints are intensely psychological, conveying solitude, silence, and an emotional connection to the land. Although photographed entirely in the Canary Islands during solitary sessions, Sequester is not about place or even composition, but tones, the alternance of light and shade, and especially mood. The images, made with long exposures in low light, presented one of the greatest challenges to reproduce in a book. They are black-and-white photographs with varying degrees of abstraction, often erasing any sense of the physical scale in front of the camera. Many feature a limited tonal range, from the deepest blacks to dark grays. The designer, Hans Gremmen, has done a brilliant job in translating the work within the constraints of a book, alternating regular pages printed on white paper with black pages onto which sections of the images are printed in full bleed with silver ink. This creates a striking, immersive experience faithful to a work defined by introspection that goes beyond mere representation to emphasize emotions and feelings.

Natural rock arches are rare in California’s deserts compared to places like Utah because of differences in geology and climate. Most natural arches form in soft sandstone, but California’s desert regions have mostly harder granite, metamorphic, or volcanic rocks. Freeze-thaw cycles and sustained water flows are less frequent than on the Colorado Plateau. Yet a few arches can be found in the Alabama Hills, Death Valley National Park, and Joshua Tree National Park.

Photographing Arch Rock

Joshua Tree National Park’s largest natural arch is a 25-foot Arch Rock near the White Tanks Campground. Back in 2013, when I last visited Arch Rock, the formation was already well-known enough to be mentioned in the two most popular national park guides at that time. Yet, none of the people I talked to were aware of the arch, and in each of my visits, I encountered only a few other people on the trail. This is even though it was a short half-a-mile loop, called the Arch Rock Nature Trail. As the trail winds through granite boulders, the arch remains hidden until the last minute. If you were not looking for it, you could easily miss it, as you have to squeeze through boulders on the south side of the trail.

Such a small subject offers so many possibilities. You can crawl through the arch and photograph both sides, which have distinct characters. The shape of the opening varies dramatically with the viewpoint, so it pays to explore around. Several compositions are possible including the entire rock or framing the opening more tightly. I find the west side from which one comes the more impressive. It is directly lit in the afternoon, but backlight also works well, especially with a sun star.

I returned at night and illuminated the arch with a camping lantern. In the opening image, I used the same lantern but added a color accent with the red light from my headlamp to the second image. I processed it with a warmer balance than the image below. Given that at day, visitors were infrequent, I was surprised that photographers showed up shortly thereafter. Even in the dark, this place was no longer just my own.

The Changing Experience of Arch Rock

By 2025, the Arch Rock had become known enough that my brother-in-law had placed it on his list. I relied on the notes in Treasured Lands, which say to start the trail in the White Tank Campground, opposite Campsite 9. Driving on the Pinto Basin Road from the north, I noticed a sign pointing to a parking area marked “Arch Rock Trail” towards the west side of the road, half a mile before the White Tanks Campground entrance. It made no sense to me since I remembered that Arch Rock, like the White Tanks Campground, is located on the east side of the road. At the entrance of the campground, we were surprised to see a sign prohibiting parking in the campground. Instead, we parked at a shoulder down the road and after walking into the campground, found the trailhead exactly as indicated in the book. However, on the nature trail, I was confused by several intersecting other trails that I did not remember. We suddenly found ourselves amid a steady stream of visitors. The sense of solitude I had once found here was gone. What had once been a quiet, somewhat overlooked corner of the park removed from the areas with larger rock piles and Joshua trees had become a well-trodden destination, a shift not just in its popularity, but in how one experiences nature.

I realized the other visitors had parked at the trailhead established in the interleaving decade. The small parking area inside the campground near Campsite 9 would not accommodate the crowd we saw, therefore the National Park Service directed day hikers to the Twin Tanks Parking Lot we previously saw. From there, the arch is 1.4 miles round-trip, instead of the 0.5 miles round-trip from the campground. I’ll have to make an update for the 10th printing of Treasured Lands.

Since it had been twelve years, I thought we’d follow the crowds even when we saw a sign pointing to “Heart Rock”. Visitors were lined up to have their picture taken with the aptly named rock. We looked around in the surrounding nook and crates for Arch Rock without success before backtracking to the previous trail intersection, from which we caught the older nature trail and located the arch. Including our group, there were dozens there, and we quickly took a group picture to leave the place to others. Needless to say, I did not attempt to photograph the arch. This was a different wilderness experience—one shaped not just by the landscape.

Seeking Solitude at Scorpius Arch

Although these days, my photography is no longer focused on national parks, I keep an intense interest in finding new experiences and places in them. The next day, Lanchi and I went looking for Scorpius Arch. Southern California photographer Chip Morton had named the little-known formation that way because when he captured night photographs of the arch in 2016, the constellation of Scorpio loomed above, while a scorpion was hanging out. The name suggested a fleeting intersection of the cosmic and the terrestrial, an alignment of time, place, and presence. Although the arch provided a marker for the visit, I was mostly curious to see an area of the park I had overlooked before.

The experience of visiting Scorpius Arch couldn’t be more different from Arch Rock. From the Joshua Tree National Park North Entrance Station, we drove about 40 miles along the mostly straight and deserted highway that forms the park’s boundary before stopping our Prius near a San Bernardino County roadside call box (62-712) in the middle of nowhere. The area, part of the vast Joshua Tree Wilderness, is undeveloped and has no trails, but walking across the desert along the flat wash plain was easy and rewarded with a close look at vegetation I had not noticed in the desert before, such as the curiously textured California Dodder, a parasitic plant consisting of a bunch of orange vines twisted like spaghetti.

Unlike Arch Rock, which is tucked around other tall boulders, Scorpius Arch rises directly above desert flats, facing the north – making it possible to photograph the Milky Way overhead. If you know what to look for, you can easily spot it from the highway, with a perspective comparable to the photograph above. Morton’s trip report makes it sound like quite an adventure, but if you hike straight to the arch, it is only a fifteen-minute walk.

It would be a pity, however, to only do a quick round-trip to the arch. As is almost always the case, the journey is more interesting than the destination. I wished it would have taken me more wandering before finding the arch – like Morton did. Afterward, we scrambled on the piles of boulders to survey the landscape. We spotted several formations that seemed on the verge of transformation, narrow gaps, and half-formed windows where erosion had nearly, but not quite, carved its way through, except for another tiny arch. Jagged heaps of weathered granite, stacked stories high, took on the eerie resemblance of colossal animal skulls, their hollowed-out depressions like vacant, staring eyes. We found a formation similar to the famous Skull Rock but without several dozen visitors around. In fact, for the entire duration of our visit, we didn’t see anybody, even in the distance. It was a stark contrast to the experience at Arch Rock—two versions of the desert, one shaped by access and popularity, the other by silence and obscurity. That is for the better, as I noticed patches of fragile cryptobiotic soil, common in Utah deserts, but rare in the California deserts. If you visit the area, please stick to sandy areas and rocks!

In the evolving dialogue between people and the land, these arches—both celebrated and obscure—become markers of changing relationships with the wild. Once a space of solitude and personal discovery, the landscape is increasingly mediated by infrastructure, social expectation, and digital circulation. The act of seeking an arch is no longer just an encounter with erosion and form but a negotiation between presence and absence. Once remote formations become destinations, their solitude is replaced by the weight of human attention. Where an arch might have once stood as a quiet anomaly of erosion, discovered only through wandering, it is now mapped, named, and indexed—its existence mediated through guidebooks, GPS coordinates, and social media posts. The untouched becomes inscribed, no longer just a geological curiosity but a site of expectation, shaped as much by human desire as by natural forces. Yet, in less-trafficked spaces, the experience remains ephemeral, the landscape still resisting categorization, offering a fleeting sense of discovery before it, too, is drawn into the network of known places. Within these spaces, the tension between accessibility and retreat plays out in real-time, revealing not only the physical transformations of the land but the shifting frameworks through which we construct wilderness itself.

http://www.terragalleria.com/blog/coyote-creek-trail-project

After spending a quarter-century photographing the vast, iconic landscapes of America’s national parks, I turned my attention to the landscapes of my own city, San Jose, California. This shift in my practice mirrors an evolution in environmental thought: from conserving distant wilderness to embracing an inclusive ecology that acknowledges the complex, intertwined relationship between human life and the natural world.

Within walking distance of my home, the Coyote Creek Trail—a paved recreational path bordered by a narrow strip of nature—weaves through the suburbs and between developments for twenty miles. Neither remote nor pristine, the trail is not a destination for awe. Yet, through sustained attention, its fragile beauty emerges, awakening a sense of wonder for the wildness in our own backyard. Over a decade of returning to this trail, I’ve become attuned to its changes over time—seasonal rhythms, wildlife patterns, and the cycles of drought and flood that shape Coyote Creek.

These changes also include the transient human presence along the trail. The creek’s watershed has been shaped by dams and engineering, and for many years, it was home to the largest homeless encampment in America. Though the Jungle has been cleared, makeshift shelters continue to appear and disappear with little notice. For some, the trail is a place to pass through; for others, it is a home in the most literal sense. The fleeting nature of these camps, and the lives that inhabit them, mirrors the ephemerality of the landscape itself.

This work is a meditation on a place where the boundaries between the wild and the human blur, capturing both natural beauty and the human stories embedded in the landscape. In the hope of inspiring an appreciation for even the smallest patches of wildness in our midst, I aim to evoke the wonder that can be found in the overlooked, moving beyond the distant and untouched to embrace the lived-in, the intervened-upon, and the local. In the Coyote Creek Trail, I have found a place that reflects universal themes of transformation—of nature, of people, and of how we understand our complex place within the land.

California faces a severe homelessness crisis fueled by high housing costs and a chronic shortage of affordable housing. The state has the highest percentage of unsheltered homeless people in the nation, with two-thirds living on the streets, in encampments, or in their cars. In San Jose, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, thousands of unhoused residents live along waterways like Coyote Creek. Once home to The Jungle, the nation’s largest encampment until its 2014 closure, the creek remains a fragile sanctuary for the unhoused, despite ongoing efforts to displace them.

Since 2014, I have visited the Coyote Creek Trail well over a hundred times, initially drawn to its natural beauty. Over the past two years, my work has also focused on the creek’s residents, particularly along the 12-mile stretch slated for clearing beginning in January 2025. Local policies, bolstered by the 2024 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Grants Pass v. Johnson allowing cities to clear encampments without shelter alternatives, have intensified efforts to displace these communities. The San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board has mandated that San Jose remove encampments from sensitive areas by June 2025, threatening steep fines for noncompliance. Meanwhile, the Santa Clara Valley Water agency has banned camping along 295 miles of creeks, further narrowing the options for those who call the creek home.

A significant part of this project documents this pivotal moment through intimate portraits and environmental imagery, focusing on the lives of individuals within the targeted area. The work reveals resilience, community, and vulnerability amidst systemic upheaval, juxtaposing personal stories with the broader forces reshaping their lives. It exposes the human cost of policies that prioritize environmental restoration while neglecting the root causes of homelessness. Offered an unflinching look at life on the margins, viewers are challenged to confront the stark inequalities in one of the world’s most prosperous regions and to consider urgent questions about compassion, justice, and the moral imperative to protect both people and the environment.

http://www.terragalleria.com/blog/2024-in-review-and-happy-new-year/

In 2024, although I went on two vastly differing trips outside of California, I traveled even less than last year. Instead, I engaged in reflection about my practice and focused again on photographing close to home, resulting in some progress towards new directions.

It was not entirely by design. There were many unique opportunities I missed, from the northern lights to the lake in Death Valley. The first half of the year was relatively active in terms of travel. We organized a ski trip and a backpacking trip in the Northern Sierra Nevada, both outings we had wanted to do with our family for a while.

Seeing how awesome a total eclipse was at my first viewing in 2017, I wanted to ensure we could witness the event as a family, especially since the next chance in America would take place in 2044. Texas usually displays less cloudiness than other locales further north, and Lanchi favors mild temperatures. Despite its oversized place in American geography and culture, within the family, I was the only one to have traveled in that state before. Besides visiting urban Texas destinations, we spent a day at Caddo Lake, whose swamp forest growing out of the water has emerged as a premier destination for nature landscape photography. Although I was there at the “wrong” time, I collected plenty of information and a few photos.

We traveled as far as Arkansas, where we visited – what else? – Hot Springs National Park that I had seen before in autumn and winter, but not in spring. Bathhouse Row was shockingly crowded, but the trails quiet. The park was located on the path of totality. As the weather forecast appeared slightly more favorable there than in Texas, we considered staying to watch the eclipse. However, the kids had had enough of the place.

Although eclipse day was forecast to be cloudy in Texas, we lucked out as the sky in Waco cleared minutes before the eclipse. Since the scenery was unremarkable, this time, I focussed on the dark circle in the sky, making close-up shots of the eclipse.

My journey through American Samoa’s National Park from late May to early June was an adventure of highs and lows. From cloudy snorkeling attempts and camera mishaps to hiking lush trails and experiencing Samoan hospitality, each moment revealed the park’s remote beauty and allure. Many visit only the developed main island of Tuitula, but as I did twenty-two years before, I aimed to also visit the two undeveloped islands of Tau and Ofu, which are seen by no more than a few hundred tourists each year. Ofu is the perfect setting for a tropical vacation, but given the expense, time, and carbon footprint of getting there, and because I had specific goals including a difficult under-over split photograph, I started the trip burdened by the weight of expectations and pressure. Because of that, while it was underway, the trip often appeared difficult and unproductive, as chronicled in a detailed personal account of my week on Ofu Island, although in the end, I recognized such a privilege it was just to be there.

Like the previous year, I had kept my September schedule open to return to Kobuk Valley National Park in northwest Arctic Alaska in my quest for night photographs in each national park. However, this year the favorable celestial window between arctic bright summer nights and nights with full moon was only a few days. Cloudy weather forecasts, combined with other factors, led me to postpone the trip to next year. I then left my calendar open through October for a road trip to pay a visit to one of my photographic heroes in his old age, but this, too did not happen due to communication difficulties. I thought that November may not be the best time to travel because of potential unrest, although it turned out that there were no claims of election fraud after all. When December came, the chances of Chiricahua National Monument and Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park being re-designated national parks appeared high – Sports Illustrated reported erroneously the latter as a done thing. Although Arizonans have been trying for four legislative sessions, there was a chance that a less worthy site would have beat them to the finish line even though the Georgians’ first bill was from this year. Hoping to keep my decades-long streak to be the first to photograph each national park, I remained on standby for legislation that did not happen – unsurprisingly in retrospect given how a government shutdown was again averted at the last minute.

Despite the apparent setbacks, the year was somehow productive. I read and engaged in overdue reflection about my practice to find more meaning. In the process, I shook up the compulsion to update my website and social media channels. I also made quite a few photographs. The Lightroom Library Filter indicates that I took close to 10,000 pictures in 2024, much more than in 2021 and 2022, and in the same ballpark as many other years. Not counting family photos taken at home, I photographed more regularly than I had ever done before, generally at least twice a week. In the past, like photographers such as Michael Kenna or David DuChemin, I needed to travel somewhere far away to find inspiration. With my new focus on the place where I live, this is no longer the case. I continued to photograph on hikes in local nature preserves (also here). Although worthwhile photographs have been the byproduct of those excursions, their family-oriented character reduced their photographic focus.

On the other hand, my visits to the Coyote Creek Trail were solitary and helped me produce more consistent work. The trail also lies closer to home than any other public land. The distance of 4.5 miles to the house is small enough that I have on several occasions walked out of my door, jogged to the trail, traveled a section of it, and returned home, all on foot and in a few hours. With a weekly visit that I always look forward to with anticipation, familiarity builds up quickly. The familiarity in turn makes me more attuned to changes. Through-hikers on long-distance trails such as the Pacific Crest Trail often say “The trail provides”. The Coyote Creek Trail is considerably more modest and less wild, yet it never failed to provide me with something new on each visit. Each time I started thinking that I had seen everything, it surprised me. I had taken pictures along its course for a decade, however it is only in the last two years that I did it with intention. That this changed how I approached the trail is a testament to the power of photography to make us pay more attention. The focus of those last years has made it possible to gather enough images for a book or two. I spent some time editing and hope for a publication in 2026. So far, as a warm-up, I have shown a few landscapes and some wildlife. In the next post, I will debut a more representative selection from the project with images you don’t necessarily expect from me.

If you have read so far, my sincere thanks for your interest in my work. I wish you and your family a belated happy new year 2025 full of happiness, health, joy, peace, and wonder.

http://www.terragalleria.com/blog/landscape-photography-1989-2024

In this narrative, I draw a parallel between the development of my landscape photography work over more than three decades and my view of the historic evolution of landscape photography and environmental thought.

I

Growing up in France, I did not experience natural, raw landscapes solely shaped by primordial forces of nature until I ventured to the high peaks of the Alps. Their inhospitable and dangerous terrain was possibly the only wilderness left in the old world. Entranced by the sublimity of the experience, I forged my first connections with the wild. When I picked up the camera, I was first a reporter wanting to share the wonders I discovered in the mountains. For a while, I continued photographing in that vein on my globe-trotting adventures motivated by novelty.

Although the medium’s pioneers like William Henry Fox Talbot and Gustave Le Gray have captured natural scenes, a sustained landscape photography practice did not appear until the second half of the 19th century. In England, Francis Frith and Peter Henry Emerson helped shape that pursuit. Still, the most influential work came from half a dozen American photographers who participated in federal and state survey expeditions from 1867 to 1879, such as Carleton Watkins, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, and William Henry Jackson. When America explored its little-known West, photography proved to be a vital tool. Survey photographers were simultaneously explorers, reporters, and artists, sharing discoveries with an eager public. Frontier myths of manifest destiny framed the work, and the photographers were responsible for faithfully reproducing wild places that people had never seen before. In response, while exploring a new subject and medium, they made new kind of pictures, eminently photographic and without artifice, that formed the basis for a new approach to landscape. Yet in terms of composition or the desire to convey the immensity of nature, their images shared some visual commonalities with the Hudson River School of painting that had invented the Western landscape.

The continent was subsequently tamed, but vast open spaces remained. A newcomer to America, I was entranced by its abundance of remote lands, and in particular by the beauty and diversity of the national parks. It was all new to me, and I felt compelled to translate my wonder into photographs. The parks offered a place apart from civilization with pristine scenery mostly untrammeled by man while accessible to almost everyone. In the wilderness, people are visitors—present only in passing. Their footsteps fade, leaving the wild unchanged, untouched by a permanent presence. Although the infrastructure of the parks made a visit easy, it was not difficult to get away from people and development if one enjoyed walking away from the roads far enough as roadless wilderness areas had been preserved. I progressively embarked on outings into more and more remote settings, especially in Alaska. The more remote, the better the experience felt.

The humanist tradition dominated French photography. For a nature lover, the prints from West Coast photographers such as Ansel Adams that I saw in California museums were a revelation. The result of a distinctively American vision illustrated by painters of the Hudson River School and writers such as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, their esthetic was rooted in the sublime. Celebrating the beauty of nature as revealed by the light, the images mostly excluded any hints of civilization. They provided a model for expressing the emotions and feelings of awe experienced in the wild by presenting landscapes romantically rather than just recording their appearance. Following the photographers whose prints I had admired, I adopted a 5×7-inch view camera for its unparalleled descriptive power. Working in color, I favored truth and clarity. The visually complex, widely encompassing yet detail-laden images allow the viewer to stand before the landscape as if they were there. Roaming the wilderness of the parks had been a transformational experience for me. I hoped to touch viewers of my photographs the same way I was. As an invitation to visit the national parks, and to celebrate the centennial of the National Park Service, I published Treasured Lands (2016) – a winner of twelve awards currently in its 8th printing.

The protected status of those lands was not a given, but instead the result of hard-fought environmental battles, in which photography had played a key role. The first interest of the 19th survey photographers was descriptive, but reportage occasionally led to advocacy. Images of Watkins and Jackson were instrumental in establishing Yosemite as the first wild public land in 1864, and Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872. Images of the land could touch a public who hadn’t been there. Heightened appreciation of its beauty and fragility resulted in support for political action that led to achievements such as the National Park System and the Wilderness Act of 1964. Inspired by the idea that art could make a difference, in the mid-1990s, I set out to work with advocacy in mind, following the tradition of photographers like Eliot Porter and Philip Hyde who created images for the Sierra Club books and campaigns. After being the first to photograph all the U.S. national parks with a 5×7 view camera, I subsequently turned my attention to lesser-known public lands such as the national monuments managed by the BLM, aiming to bring more public awareness to them in collaboration with grassroots conservation organizations. A quarter-century later, I was much gratified when the Sierra Club honored me with the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography, maybe a capstone for a career in nature photography. Leveraging new technologies, I have expanded my approach to nature subjects to the microscopic and cosmic levels. I also continue to make classic nature photographs, which are still necessary because they reveal the “absolute purity of wilderness, a purity we need to know” in the words of Robert Adams.

II After roaming some of America’s most remote lands, I realized that by comparison, the high Alps bore a significant cultural imprint, as evidenced by mountain huts near mountaintops, user trails even on glaciers, and fixed anchors on climbing routes. That cultural imprint marks to an even higher degree the perception of mountains by humans – the reason college friends introduced into their wild world.

At first, it appeared that before the settlement by Europeans, America’s landscape was largely virgin. However, as called out by the new Western history movement of the 1980s, this was an unscientific and socially regressive myth ignoring the indigenous people. Far from being the last remaining refuge from civilization and a place separated from humanity, the American wilderness is to some degree a creation of a particular culture at a specific moment in history. In less than a century and a half, the romantic sublime and the ideology of the frontier as a cradle of national character have transformed the idea of wilderness from a terrifying wasteland to a sacred American icon. We think of national parks as sites of preservation, but they are also sites of dispossession and reconstruction, partly manufactured landscapes built out of our desire for pristine nature. That their establishment often came at the cost of physically removing the people, both native and settlers, who habited them reinforces their artificiality. Those places that preclude people need active management to maintain the appearance of an unmanaged landscape. Increasing threats resulting from the global human impact call for more and more interventions. Ansel Adams and other modernist photographers, followed by an entire nature photography industry, depict a landscape from which people and their constructions are always absent. Yet the text of the 1872 law establishing Yellowstone National Park described it as “a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”

I was well acquainted with their terrain, but my collaboration with Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan on their film “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” (2008) awakened me to the concept of national parks. I became interested in a more complete picture of them, one that acknowledged that they are more than nature, they are a construct. Although visitors remember the scenery, for most it is the interplay between the human-made and the natural that defines their park experience. The reassuringly familiar park structures carry an educational and interpretive purpose that directs how we look at nature. In the early 2010s, departing from the iconography of the wild, I started to photograph what I saw as a material embodiment of the National Park Service’s work: designated overlooks where interpretive signs and landscape are in dialog, lodges decorated with park photographs, campground amphitheaters with educational programs, and roads engineered to create a scenic experience accessible to everyone. My images of the visitor centers, those structures quintessentially associated with the park experience, referenced the Claude Glasses found at Grand Canyon National Park’s Desert View Watchtower. Those small mirrors with a tinted surface, named after the painter Claude Lorrain, were popular with the English gentry who turned their back to the landscape to view a painterly version of it. The canon of nature photography deliberately obscured the connection between the scenic vistas and the human experience. Breaking the separation between photographer and landscape, before the popularity of the selfie, I made a statement about my presence in the landscape as a form of intervention, just like the national park itself.

III

Over the last thirty years, I have done more than four hundred national park visits. I returned multiple times to observe the changes brought by seasons and weather, develop a relationship with places, and inhabit them to some measure. Still, as the wilderness is defined by people’s absence, I was necessarily someone coming from the outside to look in. But there was a place I inhabited: the city I call home, San Jose, CA.

In the mid-1970s, the exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” marked a turning point from the romantic and nature-centric conventions of beauty. The New Topographics photographers declined to work in parklands or wilderness and instead documented the human imprint on mundane lands. The idea became influential because it related to the landscape of everyday life, opening the door for other photographers to find subjects closer to home. Criticism by scholars such as J.B Jackson and William Cronon subsequently pointed out that the wilderness movement embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is separate from the natural. The idealization of wilderness as the pinnacle of environmentalism encourages privileging some parts of nature at the expense of others. By adopting an excessively high standard for what counts as natural, we irresponsibly devalue the environment in which we live. The esthetics extolling the wilderness sublime could suggest that less pure places were not as worthy of attention. However, parklands and wilderness represent only a sliver of nature in contemporary America. More inclusive environmentalism needs to go beyond setting aside for posterity beautiful lands, making room for humble rural, suburban, and urban landscapes, and dealing with those everyday places that can be degraded or restored. By the 1970s, even the National Park Service started to embrace a more elastic definition of parklands to bring them closer to urban centers. Extending my work from national parks to national monuments brought me to areas such as the San Gabriel Mountains or the Organ Mountains lying at the doorstep of cities.

The New Topographics’s esthetic emphasized the banal rather than the sublime, favoring neutrality over emotion. My typology of national park structures spoke to the mind rather than the heart. When instead of limiting my photography to faraway parklands all over the country, I started to work closer to home, I tried to find emotional resonance in the places where I live. The power of the national parks and their pristine landscapes is that just being there is enough for us to feel wonder. But when we stand on lands that are not sublime, we can learn to experience some of that wonder. Aldo Leopold saw that “Wilderness exists in all degrees, from the little accidental wild spot at the head of a ravine in a Corn Belt wood lot to vast expanses of virgin country… [it] is a relative condition”. I am fortunate that two dozen nature parks lie within a half-an-hour drive from my San Jose home. I did not seek remarkable light but visited them midday, and briefly, like most residents. Yet I experienced some of the qualities of the wilderness in them, which images with romantic reverence could convey. Even in places where wild and human interpenetrate, I could sense the values of nature anywhere I looked with attention. The Coyote Creek Trail, the longest multi-use paved trail in San Jose, is surrounded by a narrow strip of public land. Galen Rowell had inspired me in my early mountaineering years. Rekindling his dynamic approach, I photographed the trail over ten years encompassing more than a hundred visits. I observed changes over the seasons and the years, not only in nature but also in how people live along the trail. I initially approached the trail through nature photography, and then I broadened my photography with the realization that it is a lived-in landscape. Although a small place, its dimensions embrace eternal concerns with the place of man on the land.

https://www.terragalleria.com/blog/imperfect-prints-for-sale

Having used the same printer for twenty years, I get a good sense of how to translate a digital file into a satisfying print. However, sometimes I miss, and for instance, the print comes out too dark, too flat, or the color isn’t quite right. When that happens, I make a tweak and reprint.

There are also a lot of little blemishes that can affect a print. A dust spot might have been missed while examining the digital file but it becomes obvious on paper. On my printer, on more than one occasion, the left edge of the print got a few streaks of ink because some part of the printer was not cleaned well enough. Since I always print with a white border, those streaks do not affect the image area, yet they are there and mar the border. It happens that there is a surface defect on the paper from manufacturing. It also happens that while handling the print I cause a small crease. Switching from the Epson papers to the heavier Lexjet Sunset papers helped with the later issue. I want to deliver customers nothing but flawless prints. When any of those mishaps happen, I redo the print. Having the ability to print in the studio makes it a minor inconvenience.

When the defects are too prominent, I trash the print. Unfortunately, coated photo papers cannot be recycled. But most of the time, defects are hardly noticeable. Feeling bad about throwing away those imperfect prints, I have saved them over the years. While I was reflecting on my years of printmaking, I examined some of the stacks of imperfect prints. For many of them, I could not even figure out at a glance the reason I rejected them, although there must have been one.

Therefore came the idea to offer those imperfect prints for sale at a deep discount. As for my regular prints, I will write the location and date, as well as sign the print. Instead of an edition number, I will mark those imperfect prints with the letters AP (for “Artist Proof”). Sometimes I already wrote an edition number on the print, before discovering a blemish. In that case, I will cross that edition number and write AP next to it.

Here are the prints on offer.

• 12×18 inch prints, $125 (regular price: $350): B&W prints, color prints
• 10×24 (height approximate) inch prints, $125 (regular price: $350): color prints
• 16×24 inch prints, $175 (regular price: $500): B&W prints, color prints
• 36×24 prints, $250 (regular price: $750): B&W prints, color prints

Shipping is free in the U.S. To view any image larger, click on the thumbnail. If you would like to order a print, use the button “Order Print” and place a normal order for the print of the appropriate size. In the special instructions box, indicate “Imperfect print”. During checkout, do not use the button “Confirm – Pay Online”. Instead, use the button “Confirm – Mail in payment”. Before proceeding further, I will try to transparently describe the issue that led the print to be classified as imperfect, and if applicable, send you a picture of the print. If after reviewing that information, you wish to go ahead, I will then adjust the invoice to the price mentioned above and email it you so that you can complete the purchase.

https://www.terragalleria.com/blog/twenty-years-of-printing-with-the-epson-9800

In a world where digital photography devices are often outdated within years, how likely is it to be using the same printer for two decades? Since 2005, my Epson 9800 has faithfully translated pixels into tangible art and is still strong. Besides providing a practical account of my long-term experience with a particular printer that can be applied to other devices, this article surveys the history of digital printing and discusses the benefits of making prints yourself.

Early digital printing

When I sold my first prints in 1994, fine-art digital printing was virtually nonexistent. Those color prints were made using the Cibachrome process with a traditional optical enlarger. The contrast color transparencies (5×7 inch slides) exceeded what the paper could reproduce, so the better labs produced a contrast mask – essentially a black-and-white negative of the image. When sandwiched with the transparency, its darkest parts corresponded to highlights and tamed them.

In 1996, Cymbolic Sciences introduced the LightJet, a digital printer that takes a file as input. It used photographic, silver-based, type-C paper for printing from negatives and RA-4 chemistry. The image is created by exposing the paper pixel by pixel with RGB lasers. As each pixel has a continuous RGB value, the resulting prints look exactly like traditionally made color photographs. The preferred medium was Fuji Crystal Archive, which came in three varieties, Semi-Gloss, Glossy, and Super-Glossy. It has the best longevity rating of any color photographic paper, 60 years. The previously most durable color photographic paper, Cibachrome, had a longevity rating of 35 years.

That year, I switched to LightJet printing. The image below shows the first LightJet prints I had made. The LightJet printers, joined by the similar laser chromogenic Durst Lambda and the ZDE Chromira are still in use. The Lambba is a more efficient printer, however, from the samples I have seen, the prints are not as sharp as the LighJet’s. Both of those printers use lasers and cost about $200,000. The Chromira uses LCDs, and costs “only” around $60,000. The prints are on par with the Lightjet. Because of the costs, maintenance, and size requirements, those printers are exclusively operated by labs, such as Calypso Imaging in Santa Clara then Santa Cruz, and West Coast Imaging in Oakhurst, both of which produced my prints for almost a decade. While picking up prints at Calypso, it was not uncommon to run upon some of the finest photographers in the area, people like Frans Lanting, Charles Cramer, or Bill Atkinson.

Early inkjet printing

Inkjet printers lay very fine droplets of ink on paper. Colors are formed by the juxtaposition of droplets of several primary colors. The first inkjet printers to produce high-quality output were the Iris printers that appeared in the mid-1980s. An Iris works by squirting a million droplets of ink from each of its four nozzles (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) every second towards a drum rotating at a speed of 150 inches per second. These droplets are given an electric charge to determine which should hit the drum, and which should be deflected to the waste system. Papers are typically fine watercolor papers or canvas. The term Giclee (a French word meaning “to spray”, although in slang the verb “gicler” has a different meaning) was coined in 1991 by printmaker Jack Duganne to refer to Iris prints. Nowadays it refers to any inkjet print on fine art paper. Iris printers were expensive and required meticulous care. The drum size limited the print size. They used dye-based inks that yielded vivid color and dense blacks but were not archival. Iris printers played a pivotal role in the early days of the digital fine art printing, however, they have been surpassed by nozzle-based inkjets in nearly every technical aspect.

The common inkjet printers are nozzle-based. Tiny nozzles spray ink droplets directly onto the paper. The nozzles are part of a printhead that moves across the media to build the image line by line as the paper scrolls in the other direction. Photographic inkjet printing emerged in the late 1990s. Using more types of ink than the four basic primaries, high-end photographic inkjet printers are a world apart from cheap office printers. They produce prints of remarkable appearance. However, early prints suffered from flaws that made them unsuitable for selling as artwork. Pigment-based inks are considerably more stable than dye-based inks, which produced prints that sometimes faded within a few years. However, the range of colors that can be reproduced (color gamut) was much reduced. They also suffered from serious metamerism – colors shift when viewed under different light conditions. A print that looked perfect in your studio under 5000K lighting, when viewed under more common tungsten or halogen lights would take an ugly magenta cast.

Epson revolutionizes fine-art printing

In 2002, Epson was the first to crack the inkjet fine-art printing nut with their “Ultrachrome” pigmented inks introduced in the 7600 and 9600 wide-format printers, which at last offered a combination of vivid color and reduced metamerism. Based on accelerated fading tests, longevity exceeded the Crystal Archive papers. No other device had that much impact on photographic digital printing. To experiment, I bought a smaller Epson desktop 13″ printer that used Ultrachrome inks (maybe the Epson Stylus Photo R1800). I found out that with glossy paper, there was an issue known as “bronzing”: different colors can have different glossiness, with the result that, under certain viewing conditions, the print will not look uniform but rather will have a patchy appearance. Semi-glossy papers exhibit this problem to a lesser degree. Matte papers do not suffer from bronzing. Since I took up large-format photography with the goal to make large prints, 13″ would not suffice.

I waited for the next generation of wide-format printers from Epson, which was announced in May 2005: the 7800 and 9800. They feature new inks, called Ultrachrome K3. Benefits add up: differential glossiness is much reduced, the output more neutral and linear, blacks considerably improved, the gamut slightly larger, and the print longevity better. As soon as it was available, I bought the Epson 9800 which costs $5,000 and prints 44 inches wide. The extra cost over the 7800 ($3,000) which prints 24 inches wide is easily justified by the possibility to make larger prints and lower paper costs.

The benefits of owning a printer

Those relatively affordable costs were my initial draw to inkjet printers. Prints allow you to scrutinize details, tonal transitions, and composition in a way that digital displays often mask. Seeing your work in print can reveal areas for improvement and elevate your technical and artistic standards. The digital printing process itself teaches valuable skills, such as color management, sharpening techniques, and an understanding of how images translate from screen to paper.

Because of the influence the West Coast photography tradition exerted on me in the 1990s, I felt I was missing something by outsourcing my prints to a LightJet lab. Placing a higher emphasis on the decisive moment and the act of capturing the image, some of the greatest photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész delegated the printing of their work to skilled technicians. For those who worked in journalistic or commercial contexts, speed and efficiency were critical. On the other hand, American photography celebrated craftsmanship and individual expression, encouraging photographers to control the entire creative process. Ansel Adams and Edward Weston saw prints as an essential aspect of their artistic expression and taught printing as a key skill. Adams famously referred to the negative as the “score” and the print as the “performance,” emphasizing the artistry of crafting the final image.

For a black-and-white photographer, working in the darkroom is a relatively straightforward decision, since they gain access to powerful possibilities with a fairly simple setup. The chemistry for color is more complex and more toxic. Despite that, the darkroom controls readily available to the color photographer are pale compared to what is possible in monochrome. Using optical processes, it is difficult to alter contrast and tones without provoking unwanted color shifts. The exception is the dye-transfer process, which is extremely time-consuming, expensive, and difficult. The availability of materials for that process is problematic since the few remaining experts rely on stockpiles of discontinued supplies. Preparing images for the Lightjet involved scanning the transparency, making it necessary to color-correct the scan by Photoshop. Once one has tasted the extent of the control on color photographs enabled by digital processing, there is no going back to optical processes. However, even though Calypso would eventually offer their LightJet for $6,000 upon closing in 2010, I did not have a spare large room in the house.

In-house printing capabilities let you have instant and low-cost feedback, and fine-tune prints in a way that would not be practical when you have to re-order prints from a lab. You can make sure that prints are produced to the highest standards. The print settings resulting in the highest print quality consume more ink and time, so in the name of efficiency, a production lab, especially one that often deals with commercial clients, may be tempted to cut corners. Another potential problem is outgassing. To prevent nozzle clogging, slowly evaporating humectant chemicals are incorporate into the inks. When printing coated papers, they are not absorbed by the paper and remain on the print long after it feels dry. As they evaporate over time, they can cause fogging in the inside of the glass when the print is framed. It takes time to cure a print and eliminate outgassing. In the image below, you can see the racks I use to air the prints. The accelerated method is to cover it with absorbent paper which acts like a sponge and draws out the gases from the inks faster than they would escape when exposed to air. The paper becomes wavy as it absorbs the chemicals, and you keep interleaving until the paper is no longer wavy. As a couple days are optimal, some labs may skip this step. When you sell artwork, you are not tempted to drop-ship prints, and instead can naturally inspect and sign the prints by hand.

Operating an Epson wide-format printer

The wide variety of printing media was an unexpected benefit of inkjet printing. Some of those papers mimic the appearance of traditional photographic papers, with a semi-glossy and glossy finish. When viewed by themselves, and especially if framed, the prints could easily be mistaken for silver prints. A side-by-side comparison reveals that they have a flatter look of ink on paper (because it is what they are) than traditional photographs, where the color is embedded within the substrate, giving the image more depth. However, in terms of resolution and color gamut, not to mention print longevity, they easily exceed Lightjet prints. Unique to the inkjet process is the possibility of using matte papers with equal sharpness and color gamut. The total absence of reflections in a print of that quality was not achievable by silver printing processes. When combined with textured or heavy-weight fine-art papers, prints of distinctive and refined appearance are possible. Inkjet printers are also equally comfortable with non-paper media such as canvas. They encourage experimentation with different media, adding layers of creativity.

One of the reasons inkjet printers are so affordable for what you get is that much of the manufacturer’s profit results from sales of consumables, especially inks. I have spent well over $20,000 in ink alone. In 2024, a 220ml cartridge for the 9800 has a market price of $130, which is 60 cents per ml, or $2271/gallon, which is much more cost-effective than the cartridges used in desktop printers, but still a damm expensive liquid. More recent Epson printers use even larger cartridges. However, you would need to print a lot, since Epson says their ink should not be allowed to stay in a printer beyond six months of first inserting. It takes about 1.3ml to print a square foot. With standard photo papers such as Lexjet Sunset Photo eSatin, which I prefer over Epson Premium Luster because of its heavier weight which makes it less fragile, paper costs are close to ink costs, resulting in a cost of about $1.5 per square foot. By comparison, the material costs for a LighJet print are less than $0.5 per square foot. However, labs charge around $10 per square foot. Although relatively high, the cost of inkjet consumables is much less than the cost of ordering a print from a lab, which in the long run makes the printer pay for itself if you print enough. It is no coincidence that labs such as Calypso and West Coast Imaging are now closed.

In retrospect, I could have seriously investigated refillable cartridges with third-party inks. Epson sells only one-time-use cartridges. I have discarded well over two hundred of them. They cannot be recycled. Inkjet printing pioneer Jon Cone estimates that Americans throw away more than 450 million ink cartridges yearly and that many still contain valuable ink. Cartridges come with a chip that tells the printer how much ink remains. However, the chip cannot measure the ink level and instead attempts to track the amount of ink used, often overestimating it by about 20%, a fact that had been established in a class-action lawsuit. Besides avoiding the waste of cartridges and ink, third-party inks represent a significant savings over original equipment manufacturer’s inks. Cone claims that his inks have longer in-printer life than Epson’s and are less prone to clogging. The downside is the risk that those inks do not measure up to the OEM inks in terms of print quality or longevity, as assessed for instance by the independent AaI&A. When the main function of the printer is to produce artwork for sale, the differences in ink costs aren’t that significant. I did not feel comfortable to use anything but the best, even though it came at an environmental cost. For black and white printing, the calculus is entirely different, since Cone’s Piezography system, which replaces all the OEM inks with 6 to 10 shades of carbon-based greys, has been proven to the highest standard in digital photographic black and white printing. The three black inks (K3) of Ultrachrome K3 already result in excellent black and white prints. If only I had space for another printer…

Epson issues

Epson printers use two different black inks, each one optimized for coated (glossy and semi-glossy) papers or matte papers. The catch is that only one of the two ink cartridges can be inserted on the 9800. Switching between them is more involved than just swapping ink cartridges. You need to purge and flush the old ink from the lines and charge the lines with the new black ink. As the ink lines contain 15ml per ink channel, this process consumes a substantial amount of black ink of both types (some color ink too) and fills up the non-reusable maintenance tank. It also takes time and could potentially affect the printer’s reliability.

Unlike the smaller desktop printers, wide-format printers are truly production-grade and built to last. Over the years, my 9800 has proved extremely reliable. The print quality has remained remarkably consistent. The printer works as well as it did on day one, with one important exception. It reports that since 2005, it ran nearly 48 liters of ink and 1943 meters of paper. The issue is that a lot of this expensive ink was wasted. With normal operation, 30% of inks end in the waste pad or maintenance tank. Then, there is the issue that over the years, the nozzles get more frequently clogged. If you print with clogged nozzles, the print quality can suffer significantly. Therefore, it is necessary to make sure they are clear before making a print. The 9800 does so by printing a test pattern and scanning it to verify it is correctly printed. If the printing is not satisfactory, indicating a clogged nozzle, the printer starts a cleaning cycle during which it forces ink through the nozzles at high pressure to clear blockages. The printer repeats those two actions automatically until the nozzles are clean, or up to five times. For the past few years, I sometimes had to repeat up to ten automatic cycles, which means fifty cleaning cycles. On average, an automatic cycle wastes about 25ml of ink. It just takes seven such cycles to waste $100 in ink, which always puts me in a sour mood.

Because the 9800 has developed that issue, one may think that the solution may be to replace it with a newer Epson printer. Considering not just print quality, but also reliability, Epson’s apex may have occurred in 2007, with the 7880/9880 differing from the 7800/9800 only by improved placement of the dots and a more vivid Magenta ink enhancing the gamut. Those discontinued printers are not easy to find, as their owners are hanging onto them. Major changes happened in 2008 with the 7900 and 9900 printers. A much welcome improvement was the ability to carry simultaneously a black ink suitable for printing on glossy paper and a black ink for printing on matte paper. Two additional inks, orange and green, helped expand the color gamut. However, while the new TFP print head improved the printer’s speed, it has become notorious for head clogs, maybe because the new nozzle spacing has become too tight. The 7890 and 9890 are essentially just 7900 and 9900 without the orange and green channels. The Epson P6000, P7000, P8000, P9000 share the same print head and therefore the same problems. Although with the 9800, automatic cycles waste a considerable amount of ink, I can run them until the nozzles are clear, which so far has never failed to happen. With the newer printers, Epson recommends you run no more than a couple of consecutive cycles, as doing more could damage the fragile print head. If after that, the head is still clogged, then you need to wait a day before the next attempt. Many users report no progress with the print head cleaning cycles. They have to manually clean parts such as the capping station, flushing box, or print head. Besides the final solution, the only remedy then is to flush out all the inks and install cartridges filled with a cleaning fluid to flush the print head. If a printer is to sit idle for more than a few weeks, this procedure should be done preventively.

Printing for one’s sake

Some measures help mitigate clogging. Removing the cartridges and shaking them weekly help the inks stay in suspension. Keeping the relative humidity in the 40%-60% range with a humidifier slows the drying of inks. But by far, the main thing is to use the printer regularly. My 9800 had become prone to clogging not because of its age, but my diminished use. In the late 2000s, I fulfilled almost 300 orders yearly, often comprising multiple prints. That number has dropped significantly. As a result, the printer sits idle for several weeks. Those “pro” printers are designed for a production environment. They effortlessly support intense use, but do poorly with light use.

I had installed the 9800 for business reasons and rarely printed for myself. Over the years, it has printed over $900,000 worth of artwork. As its frequency of use declined, I could either waste inks in cleaning cycles or use them more productively by making prints for my personal use. It is an easy choice. Instead of large prints for display, I make portfolio-sized prints, smaller than any I offer for sale. I try to activate the printer daily by printing at least two images on letter-size paper before performing a manual nozzle check. So far this is enough to keep the nozzles mostly clean. Whenever the nozzle check misses a few segments, just by printing, the nozzles often fix themselves. For work prints, I have always used scraps of roll paper, including the final part of the roll which suffers from excessive curling. However, for my portfolio prints, which end up in the hand rather than on the wall, I am indulging in fine-art papers although the cost is three times my standard paper in rolls. Their weight heightens the tactile feel of the paper, while their texture interacts with the light. The prints are stiff enough to be displayed on a shelf by itself. After trying quite a few, my favorite is Canson’s Platine Infinity Fibre Rag.

This new daily routine gives me great pleasure. I started it as a way to maintain my 9800, but this could have been done with an inexpensive 8 inch printer. Creating a print completes the photographic process, offering a sense of closure. A print transforms a digital file into a tangible object, offering a sensory experience that deepens your connection to the image. A print on quality materials without acid and wood pulp endures beyond our lifetimes, preserving your creations for future generations. In an age dominated by screens, making prints honors photography’s rich history and roots as a physical medium, reinforcing its value as an art form.

https://www.terragalleria.com/blog/wildlife-along-the-trail

“Landscape without wildlife is just scenery” is a quote used by Kris Tompkins, the subject of the inspirational Wild Life (2023) movie, to discuss the world’s largest rewilding project that she and Doug Tompkins initiated in Patagonia. It would appear that the ribbon of land along suburban Coyote Creek Trail isn’t doing too badly as a landscape. No rewilding has occured there, yet I have seen a varied array of wildlife along the trail, besides an incredible number of cats. While remaining within the city limits of San Jose, California, I have been able to have encounters with the Other in an unexpected place within walking distance from our home.

That is not to say that every trip to the trail resulted in a wildlife sighting beyond squirrels. Despite well over a hundred visits to the Coyote Creek Trail, I have seen a bobcat only twice. The protected red foxes are much easier to spot, as they like to stalk the Los Lagos Golf Course bisected by the trail. First appearing in the San Francisco Bay in the 1980s, they have been stealing sandwiches and phones from golf bags for two decades. In May of last year, I noticed a photographer carrying a telephoto lens, unlike me. As I came closer, he called me by my name. He was a friend from my years in Berkeley that I hadn’t seen for decades. Chris Gould had traveled from Marin County expressly to photograph those habituated red foxes. At sunrise the green is quiet and no golf balls are flying, but sunset is the time when pups come out of the den. I have seen wild pigs on four occasions. Confident in their strength, those dangerous animals are not skittish. Deer are more common, but given my self-imposed wide-angle lens for this project, I have not been able to get a close photograph as they tend to flee quickly. The namesake coyote has remained elusive. I’ve encountered quite a few in the hills. However, the riparian environment of the trail is not their preferred habitat. On the other hand, many birds make it their home, as detailed in the Santa Clara Valley Bird Alliance guide. Photographing birds with a wide-angle lens is a bit of a challenge, which is why the isolated small bird on the ground is such an unlikely photograph. By the way, in America, it is easy to take squirrels for granted, but the first time I visited from France, I was astonished to see one on the lawn of the White House in Washington, DC. I didn’t remember having seen any in urban or suburban settings in France. As a child, it was a treat to spot one in the pine forest of Montalivet by the Atlantic Ocean where we went camping in the summer.

I’ve posted twelve of my wildlife images from the Coyote Creek Trail below. After you look through these, please use the form at the bottom of this post to list your five favorites (the numbers are below the photographs). Thank you for your input. Comments are welcome!

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https://www.terragalleria.com/blog/the-trouble-with-wilderness

Finding meaning often begins with crafting a personal narrative. When we shape our experiences into stories, we discover clarity, purpose, and a deeper connection to ourselves. With that in mind, while reflecting on my work in landscape photography, I realized that its development mirrored the historic evolution of the genre, and also of environmentalism. I’ve crafted a more detailed story, however, what follows is a quick outline. I picked up a camera to document the High Alps in the documentary spirit of the 19th-century American survey photographers. In thirty years of nature photography in America’s public lands following the tradition of conservation-minded, expressive photographers of the modernist era such as Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, I became the first to photograph each of the 63 U.S. National Parks in large format. The post-modern era brought to photography the detached artistic vision of the New Topographics and to environmental thought the shift from preserving the wild as sacred and separate sanctuaries to also acknowledging it in human-influenced environments. In that spirit, I extended my work to the infrastructure of our experiences of nature and the landscapes of the places where we live.

Ironically, my work in the national parks was the accidental catalyst for the later evolution. After Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan invited me to be part of their PBS film series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009), I was privileged to meet some artists and writers interviewed in the series at promotional events. Among them, ranger Shelton Johnson, the series’s unexpected star, became a friend. Even though I did not meet all of the interviewees, I was exposed to their work for the first time, and several made a strong impression. Terry Tempest Williams spoke as beautifully as she writes. The eminent environmental historian William Cronon appeared repeatedly in the series to provide intellectual insights. I eventually found a collection of essays he edited, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1995), which examine the implication of different cultural ideas of nature for modern environmental problems. The essays challenge traditional ideas about nature, suggesting that what we perceive as “natural” is deeply influenced by human culture, history, and politics. Contributors argue that nature is not a pristine, separate entity but something humans constantly shape and redefine through their actions, beliefs, and technologies.

The idea was not entirely new. At that time, I was reading Alexander Wilson’s brilliant book The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (1991). Wilson pioneered investigating how our experience of nature is shaped and commodified by cultural forces, how landscapes are manipulated for human consumption, and how media, tourism, and industry influence our perceptions of the natural world. Yet it is the essay The Trouble with Wilderness: or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature included at the beginning of Uncommon Ground that most deeply influenced my understanding of the concept of wildness and sparked my interest in photographing nature closer to home rather than only in distant parklands. My travels in the wilderness and countries around the world had been motivated by the desire to encounter otherness. Could I learn to see it next door? In the essay, Cronon critiques the romanticized concept of wilderness as an untouched, pristine space separate from human activity. He argues that this idealized notion of wilderness, rooted in 19th-century American thought, has led to problematic environmental attitudes. By elevating wilderness as the only “pure” form of nature, we overlook the environments in which most people live and diminish the value of everyday landscapes. Cronon encourages a rethinking of nature as something interwoven with human history and culture, advocating for a more inclusive and responsible relationship with all environments—not just remote, protected wilderness areas. The influential essay is reproduced on Cronon’s website, but since it exceeds 10,000 words, I am providing a “Cliff notes” version below the photographs.

My home is in San Jose, California, the largest city in Northern California, yet two dozen nature parks lie within a half-an-hour drive. Some are reclaimed lands, while others are still leased for cattle grazing. I chose not to chase dramatic, fleeting moments of remarkable light but instead visited the trail during midday hours, reflecting the experience of most residents. By immersing myself in these ordinary conditions, I found an unexpected connection to the qualities of wilderness that persist, even in spaces adjacent to urbanized areas. Through the series Landscapes where I live (here and there), I sought to convey a sense of romantic reverence for these landscapes, capturing their beauty and spirit as they exist in everyday. Even in places where the boundaries between the wild and human-made blur, I discovered profound value in the presence of nature. This experience underscored the idea that a deep connection to the natural world is not confined to remote or pristine environments but can be felt anywhere—if one approaches with attention, sensitivity, and openness to the subtleties of the land. The Coyote Creek Trail, the longest multi-use paved trail in San Jose, runs through a narrow corridor of public land, providing a vital green space amidst urban and suburban surroundings. Initially, my approach to photographing the trail was shaped by the conventions of idealized nature landscape photography, seeking to highlight moments of pristine beauty within the environment. Over time, however, I came to recognize the trail as a lived-in landscape—one where the natural and human-made coexist and influence each other. The Trail will eventually be a black-and-white photography project, but at first I photographed in color. Those images represent a glimpse of the project’s start. The last one is not what it appears to be, hinting at an unexpected direction the project took me to.

After I finished school and began working, I stopped checking non-fiction books from the library. Instead, I used my newly available funds to buy books. I could then physically mark salient words or passages while reading. This more active approach helps me retain the material better. I continue it to this day. I was going to simply copy the sentences I had marked while reading the essay, but realized that rewriting them would be more respectful of the copyright. The 2000-word summary below results from this process. I hope that it proves as thought-provoking to you than it was for me.

https://www.terragalleria.com/blog/autumn-in-new-england

The first time I had flown somewhere just for the purpose of photography was when I traveled to New England in the fall of 1996. Beyond the pastoral scenes, the revelation of the fall foliage there turned out to be the starting point for my updated approaches to time and scale.

Back then, since arriving in California three years earlier, my photography had been limited to wilderness areas like national parks, and occasionally cities like San Francisco. The rural landscape in the Golden State is often dominated by industrial agriculture. Even family farms lack harmony with the land which I remember from the French countryside. Small towns are usually just scaled-down versions of larger modern towns. Before my 1996 autumn trip, I had been in Boston to visit MIT. Although I had noted its similarities with European cities, I had not set foot in the countryside of New England. Unlike in the West, many of the structures in rural Vermont date back to the 17th century. The countryside offered that cozy feeling of a long lived-in landscape. Villages nestled in valleys surrounded immaculate white steepled churches. Centuries-old farms and red barns dotted rolling hills and meadows. It was a perfectly picturesque pastoral landscape.

The locations I visited offered perfect compositions of rural New England scenes because I relied on a photography guidebook that listed 23 iconic “photo scenics” selected for that reason. Yet, I seldom encountered other photographers at those well-known locations, except for one early morning at the Jenne Farm. Seeing a dozen tripods was unusual enough to compel me to take several pictures of their lineup. As far as I can tell, the photographers were respectful, staying at a distance from the farm and close to the road. In recent years, social media has brought so many unruly visitors to Jenne Farm – some of them breaking into buildings to use restrooms – that the entire area had to be closed to non-residents during October. Authored by local photographer Arnold Kaplan, the modest self-published, 72-page stapled booklet did not include any photographs. Instead, it featured hand-drawn maps of each site with recommended tripod locations marked. Some may shun such an approach, but at that time it felt right for me, as I viewed myself as a travel photographer. For many years I continued to use guidebooks in new locations when looking for travel images. I found value in having a pre-selected list of places that have proved productive for others, knowing that once I am there, I am free to look for my compositions before comparing them with a reference, an instructive exercise.

The main motivation for my trip was to check out the renowned New England fall foliage. In most places in the U.S. West, the main contributors to fall color are aspens, cottonwoods, or oak trees. When autumn arrives, the color turns to various shades of yellow. The East’s plentiful maple trees add brilliant hues of oranges and reds, transforming the landscape into a vibrant palette of color if you are there at the right time. Nowadays, many websites track the progression of fall color. Still, finding the perfect window is not easy since conditions can vary from valley to valley and changes can occur overnight. For instance, between the two mornings I visited Jenne Farm, the change in foliage had progressed noticeably. With my usual luck, the best light and foliage did not coincide. The peak of fall color in Vermont can occur anytime between late September and mid-October, depending on the year. However, before the peak the abundance of greens provides some additional color contrast, whereas after the peak clusters of colored leaves no longer obscure the arboreal structures of the trunks and branches, enlivening their stark beauty.

I was astonished by the New England fall foliage. It was unlike anything I had seen before. Combine that with the attraction of fewer visitors, cooler temperatures, more dynamic weather, and reasonable daylight lengths, and you can see how I became so fond of autumn. I made a goal to visit each of the national parks during that season (see guide to fall foliage in the national parks). The power of the fall foliage displays in New England is such that it forced me to feel wonderment about the changes in nature. Since then, even when standing in places where that change is much more subtle, I have learned to experience some of that wonder by looking carefully. This appreciation of change is why I planned my national park travels the way I did, with several shorter visits rather than one extended stay. One single long visit is more relaxing, logistically easier, and reduces the environmental impact. However, multiple visits make it possible to see the parks in different seasons and with more variation in weather. In hindsight, the richer observations and experiences made the compromise worth it.

I had long admired the photography of Eliot Porter (see my survey of his books). In 1991, Nature’s Chaos was the first nature photography book I bought. Porter coined the expression “intimate landscapes” and his artistic practice is almost entirely focused on them. However, it is the awe-inspiring power of mountains that inspired me to start photography. In the West, as I found plenty of spectacular scenery all new to me, my first instinct was to convey a sense of their sublimity. On this New England trip, when it came time to turn the lens towards the natural world instead of depicting man’s imprint in pastoral scenes, I quickly grasped that the eroded mountains were no match for the Sierra Nevada. On the other hand, the intricate beauty of fall foliage was new to me. I realized that more intimate compositions may be better at conveying their beauty. I started to look for smaller scenes instead of grand landscapes. Photographers like Porter, John Wawrzonek, and William Neill made their photography look effortless. However, upon trying my hand at it, I realized that finding a great composition of something as simple as tree trunks with harmonious foliage is not as easy as it seems. Such scenes may appear routine, but it takes a lot of looking to discover a satisfying photograph. Working in large format, I shot sparely out of necessity. At the beginning of the trip, it was common not to find a single nature photograph during an entire day. However, by the end, my vision for those had improved.

It probably helped that I finished my trip in Acadia National Park because due to the coastal influence and elevation, the fall foliage peaks later there than in the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire. Being in a national park surrounds you with pristine – or pristine-looking – nature removed from the distractions of human development. Their power is that being there is enough for us to feel wonder. With efforts solely directed towards nature scenes, I made progress. Being used to the expansive scenery of the West, I was surprised to find that Acadia National Park packed such a great variety of scenery into such a small and easily accessible area: woods, coastline, lakes, and mountains. A significant extension of the National Park system in 1919, Acadia National Park was the first national park established in the East for a good reason: it is the crown jewel of the East Coast. I was lucky it was also the first national park I visited outside the West. The visit served to highlight the diversity of the parks and to reinforce my determination to photograph all of them, but now paying more attention to seasons and smaller scenes.