Abraham Saikley
Heidi: You once said the best advice is to “fill the frame with what you like.” In an era of trends and algorithms, how do you protect personal taste?
Abraham: I think personal taste, or giving expression to what is real and true within ourselves, is the basis for nearly all compelling creative endeavors. Otherwise, what’s the point? The poet Rilke said it best when he wrote, “I beg you to give all that up. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now… There is only one single way. Go into yourself… Describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty—describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity… And if out of this turning inward, out of this absorption into your own world verses come, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses.” This applies to any medium. I prefer to forget trends and conventions (or never learn them at all) and simply fill the frame with what moves me. Which part of the scene in front of me is saying something interesting? What evokes a feeling of aliveness in my body? It’s about honing in on this and stripping the rest away, using these feelings as a guide when composing images and throughout the entire creative process. Sharing my work has led to some wonderful things for myself and others, but I usually wait a while after a trip before publicly sharing anything so it doesn’t color my experiences or motivations.
You describe photography as a devotional act. What does devotion look like in practical terms when you’re alone in the wilderness with a camera?
This can look like eating cold-soaked couscous and frozen olive oil each night for two weeks while hauling an 80-pound backpack across the arctic tundra. Or going into the mountains of El Chaltén every time a marginal weather window appeared over six months, knowing I’d likely get thrashed by a violent storm and come back empty handed. Or shivering in my bivy sack on a snowy ridgeline, awestruck by the aurora dancing across the sky. Or bushwhacking down a muddy mountainside in the Alaskan rainforest and then pushing a shopping cart loaded with three weeks of gear through Juneau all night to make it onto a boat in time. Or letting light dictate my sleep schedule, navigating glaciers and steep talus in the dark and pushing deep into exhaustion in order to be where I want for sunrise. I try to approach with reverence and curiosity. A key piece while I’m out there is journaling to better preserve my experiences and use as a reference later when editing. I extensively scour Google Earth before stepping foot in the backcountry but build enough slack into my systems for spontaneous exploration once I’m there. It’s an integration of physical capacity, decision making in consequential environments, technical camera skill, attunement to the outer and inner landscape, and a whole lot of stubborn will in service of venerating a place that inspires me.
You studied neuroscience and philosophy before leaving that path for a life built around meaning and experience. How has that academic background shaped the way you photograph landscapes?
I’m incredibly grateful for my academic background, doing neurobiology research at Stanford and UCSF and studying both Eastern and Western philosophies with awesome professors. These inquiries have led me to believe that reality is probably far weirder and more mystical than any of us can fully know—not even in a faith-based way but by rigorously following the available evidence. That is a whole other conversation, but through academic study and repeated personal experience, I’ve become increasingly open to the possibility that landscapes are more than inert physical matter. I have an unmistakable affinity for specific mountains and valleys where the veil of ordinary reality feels thinner, where mountains feel like entities with unique dispositions and it seems like some sort of ancient awareness or energy is pulsing through the land. I don’t pretend to be certain about what is going on, but I’m not speaking metaphorically here either. I think this tracks with your earlier question about devotion. Landscape photography is most interesting and meaningful to me when using it to commune with these special places, and I’ve organized my life around doing so. Studying neuroscience and philosophy has also been part of an ongoing personal journey of healing, joy, love, truth, etc. With the help of a skilled therapist, this has included integrating aspects of myself that are suppressed or polarized. One example is the false dichotomy between strength and sensitivity. They are valuable parts of a whole and can support each other tremendously. When I’m able to give expression to both, a sense of wholeness and vitality naturally emerge within me. I notice similar dynamics mirrored in outer landscapes, like when warm delicate light adorns a rime-plastered granite monolith and in that moment everything surges with aliveness. In one way or another, most of my landscape images are about interdependent relationships between polarities. I like to play with these relationships to convey the character of the place and conjure dynamic tension, stillness, or both at once.
How do you assign photographic meaning to consciousness?
Photography can be used to express conscious states and subjective experiences in an immediate way that bypasses conceptual overlay. I especially consider this when making editing decisions. Your question reminds me of Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents.
There’s a recurring tension in your story between conventional success and inner alignment. What did the wilderness teach you that institutions couldn’t?
In academia and the rest of modern society, self-abandonment is widespread. Inner alignment is systemically undermined. I noticed a compulsion to always work harder, achieve more, posture to be perceived in a certain way, and conflate my worth and identity with what I did. I’m privileged to have attained a fair bit of conventional academic success to see how empty and futile this game is even when played well. I worked hard, reached most of my goals, moved the goalposts and reached them again, got recognition that momentarily felt nice, and learned a lot about the things I was genuinely interested in. Yet my day-to-day experience was no more joyful. This pretense simply doesn’t exist in the wilderness. While it’s easy to repurpose time in nature into similar achievement-oriented activities, even just a few days of real stillness in the wilderness can help us see through the whole charade. We become our environment to some degree. Spending so much time in expansive, austere landscapes has helped me shed layers of conditioning and begin uncovering an innate sense of wholeness decoupled from subtle forms of posturing. Relatedly, I suggest people read a beautiful poem called Clearing by Martha Postlethwaite.
You’ve spent years living out of your car and prioritizing experience over comfort. What have you gained creatively by stripping life down to its essentials and how does that map back to your philosophy studies, or ego consciousness?
Organizing my life so intentionally has made it possible to truly immerse myself in the landscapes I’m drawn to. Over the past four years I’ve averaged 300+ days/year in wild places, with four months in Alaska and the Yukon, two months in the Canadian Rockies, a month in the Himalaya, six months in Patagonia, two months in the Peruvian Andes, and most of the rest of that time in the Eastern Sierra and Southern Utah. Living out of my car greatly reduces distraction and financial overhead. It offers far more time for photography and writing, along with time for my growth as a person which of course feeds all forms of creativity. Some things need space and stillness to unfold. Observing the land and weather every day also builds deep pattern recognition. Often I’ll intuitively know how to position myself to capture interesting moments without being able to explain why. Mapping back to my studies, this lifestyle has helped abstract philosophical concepts like interconnectedness become more of a direct embodied knowing. The concept of connecting with nature misses the point in my opinion. We quite literally are nature.
What place has changed you the most—not as a photographer, but as a human being?
The Eastern Sierra changed the course of my life at age 19 and was my initial training ground, but Alaska at age 23 is the clear answer for several reasons. Many strangers supported me along the way, such as welcoming me to stay in their homes, assisting with trip logistics, and inviting me to hitchhike on a helicopter. Two companies put me on flights around Denali and Mount Logan to shoot photos for them. Countless unexpected acts of kindness revealed limiting beliefs I held around self-reliance and feeling undeserving of care and connection. This helped me see how much more wonderful life can be when I show up with my own abilities AND remain open to others. The scale and severity of the Alaskan wilderness elicited several profound experiences which have enriched my life ever since. What most stuck with me was an eerie grizzly bear encounter alone at night on a beach near Mount Saint Elias. With my fate uncertain as the huge bear walked toward me, the gravity of the situation consumed my entire being. My thinking sped up and time ground to a halt. Everything that wasn’t real was stripped away, including any sense of myself distinct from the bear, the rest of the landscape, the earth, the cosmos, and existence in the broadest sense. All distinctions fell away. It was all just one thing, indescribably vast and beautiful. In these same moments, my awareness seemingly split in order to deal with the situation at hand. I’m getting goosebumps thinking about it now, four years later. Every instinct was screaming at me to cower or flee, which is exactly what not to do with a grizzly bear. With primal terror coursing through me, I stood my ground and calmly spoke to the bear until it hopped up on its hind legs and trotted back into the forest. I was in awe of the strength and capability emerging from the depths of me. Knowing beyond doubt who I am when it really counts has changed how I carry myself. A quiet inner knowing has stayed with me. The encounter also grounded in lived experience rather than theory how sophisticated the nervous system is at protecting itself, and how fear and trauma responses usually make perfect adaptive sense. The bear gave me an undeniable, visceral reminder of how precious and limited my time here is, shifting my risk calculus and strengthening my resolve to live as fully as I can. Objective hazard has no place in my life now.
What body of work are you engaged in now, you have a list of inspirational photographers, who is on your mind lately?
I draw a lot of inspiration from landscape photographers who depict abstract scenes with exquisite post-processing and delicate interplays of light, color, and form. Alex Noriega, Jennifer Renwick, and Guy Tal come to mind among many others. A quiet awe arises when I view their work. I sense a subtle, unwavering honesty in nearly every image of theirs. It’s rare that I see the monumental alpine landscapes I’m most inspired by photographed with such precision and thoughtfulness. Often it’s hard enough to get to and from these places safely, let alone arrive with the sensitivity and vitality required to act as a vessel and create truly evocative images. Vittorio Sella and Bradford Washburn are timeless examples. Refining the varied aspects of this craft in the world’s most powerful mountain ranges, especially the Karakoram, is what currently excites me.
