“The end of the world” is a phrase usually associated with 15th century European explorers navigating to the ends of the earth. My utilization of this phrase as the title of this work is not quite as dramatic. Nevertheless, the fundamental trappings are the same.

After all, there is a reason Alaska is known as “the last frontier.” Alaska is home to one of the most diverse sets of geographical and geological substrates in all the world. Such disparate terra firma is that which I desire to be at the forefront of many of my color and black-and-white fine art photographs.  I especially wanted such to be the focal point (once again, sorry for the pun) in “The End of the World.”

As a brief summary of my own explorations associated with this fine art work, let me just say that The End of the World has a dual meaning: it is to represent the virtually unparalleled makeup of Alaska itself and at the same time the title is meant to denote the hours of hiking, wading, foraging, and waiting (for just the right moment, of course) that, by the end of the day, made me feel like I had veritably traveled to the end of the earth to capture what you now see before you.

Some observers of this photograph have almost suspected that the foreground constituted a combination of landscape terrain taken from the moon, planet earth, and Mars. These witty observations represent a credit to the remarkably varied nature of so much of Alaska. Yet even more specifically, these comments are a reflection upon the widely dissimilar nature of the landscape textures one finds throughout the largest state in the United States.

As a landscape photographer, the one of the primary goals of my fine art photography is to capture texture. Texture is often a seriously neglected component within much of landscape photography. More broadly, one of my greatest desires as an artist is that my photographs will enable the viewers to reflect upon their own experiences with various surface and constituent qualities of disparate terra firma and therefore be able to bring those abundant memories to bear as they feel with their eyes the textures presented in each of my works. Whether one is speaking of thick and sinewy clouds within the firmament, the jagged angles of a particular mountain side, the bark on a fallen tree within a lush stream, or combinations of various fibrous-like hues forming a harmony of color (as with my color abstract photography), I want the viewer to be able to feel the subject of the photograph itself. As an artist who is naturally attracted to a wide variety of textures, it is my foremost objective to seek to make such textures as visceral as possible within each of my fine art photographs.

With respect to this specific textural representation, i.e. The End of the World, texture indeed forms the foundation of this work. As alluded to earlier, with this work I wanted to present Alaska in all its extraordinary uniqueness as far as the comprehensive distinctiveness of this region of the world. Yet at the same time I wanted to call attention to the particulate qualities of the three principal areas of this work: the foreground, the mountain range, and the skyline.

In summary, there are very few places as wholly extraordinary as Alaska. I sincerely believe The End of the World captures such remarkable uniqueness.