Jan Erik Waider
Northlandscapes

Heidi: How did your background in visual design evolve into a deep connection with abstract landscape photography?
Jan: I have been self-employed from the very beginning of my career, starting out in graphic and web design long before photography became my primary focus. This independence allowed me to shape my own path and to travel early on, taking my projects with me at a time when remote work was far less common—and far more challenging—than it is today. Photography was always my passion and a constant companion on those journeys, especially in northern landscapes, which soon became my main geographical focus. I never had a traditional nine-to-five job—sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to actually have paid vacation. But then again, I’d probably spend that vacation the same way I already do on most of my trips—photographing from morning till night.
My design background strongly shaped the way I see and compose images. I’ve always been drawn to order within apparent chaos—structures that verge on the graphic or almost architectural. This naturally led me toward abstraction in photography, whether in ice formations, glacial rivers, or geological textures, often with a monochrome quality. Even in post-production, I approach my work much like design: reducing distractions, balancing tones and colors, and highlighting form. From the beginning, I cared less about the technical side of photography and more about aesthetics, emotion, and how an image resonates visually.

What draws you to work so closely with ice crystals, leaves, and bubbles, often in everyday settings?
I’ve always been fascinated by subjects with a fragile and transformative character. Ice is the most obvious example, but the same applies to weathered leaves, frozen bubbles, or patterns in water surfaces. These elements are constantly in flux, and each moment is unique—once it passes, it will never look the same again.
I’m naturally drawn to details and small structures, whether with a telephoto lens isolating fragments of an iceberg, a drone hovering low above a glacial river, or a macro lens capturing the texture of decaying foliage. These are motifs that most people overlook at first glance, but they hold an extraordinary beauty hidden in the mundane. I often describe this as nature’s own micro-architecture, offering endless abstract compositions—if you truly stop, look closely, and take your time. I sometimes joke that in another life I would probably have been a dog—constantly roaming around, sniffing out new things, and never getting bored.
This is also why I never tire of returning to the same landscapes. Even after dozens of journeys to Iceland, the rivers, glaciers, and volcanic landscapes never repeat themselves. Their transformations keep me curious, and every visit feels like discovering something for the very first time.

How many days are you creating seasonal imagery in these remote settings, and what is your set up?
Each year I spend around three to four months in the field, with one extended journey to Iceland lasting six or seven weeks and several shorter trips to other northern regions. I travel slowly, often with my converted off-road van, which doubles as a mobile workspace. It allows me to wake up directly at the location I want to photograph, or to simply wait out a storm—whether with a cup of coffee or by watching a favorite series—until the weather shifts.
My focus is usually on the transitional seasons—spring into summer, or summer into autumn—when landscapes are in flux and light can be particularly dramatic. Being alone in remote areas is not always easy, and solitude comes with its challenges. At times it can slip into a sense of true loneliness, but over the years I’ve learned to manage those emotions and to simply accept such days as part of the process. Traveling this way has taught me a great deal about myself—what truly drives me, what I am afraid of—and it has profoundly shaped who I am.
Of course, my camera bag is always too full—like everyone else’s—but in the end I keep returning to just a few lenses. I work with a Nikon Z8 paired with a small but versatile set: the NIKKOR Z 24–120mm for flexibility on hikes, the Z MC 105mm for macro details, and the Z 100–400mm with a 1.4x teleconverter for distant structures and abstract compositions. A DJI Mavic 4 Pro drone, along with a backup unit, completes the setup, offering aerial perspectives of glacial rivers and coastal terrain. For me, reliability and adaptability matter far more than carrying an extensive kit—this way I remain agile and focused on the experience of being out there.

Maintaining a visual diary across remote expeditions takes careful planning. What’s your workflow from the moment you return from a trip until images are archived?
My workflow actually begins while I’m still in the field. I aim to import and back up the day’s captures almost every evening, make a first rough selection, and sometimes even start editing inside the van. This early process helps me identify potential series and keeps me from being overwhelmed once I return home. At times it’s only after importing that I fully recognize the potential of a subject, which gives me the chance to return the next day and expand on it.
Back in Hamburg, I approach the images with fresh eyes and more distance. That’s when I refine the editing—mainly tonal adjustments, color grading, and contrast—to translate the emotion I felt on location into the final photographs. I don’t alter the content itself—no adding or removing elements, no replaced skies. My approach is about refining atmosphere and mood rather than reconstructing reality.
Archiving is a structured process: final selections are keyworded in Lightroom Classic according to a consistent system, backed up both locally and in the cloud, and also exported as high-res and low-res files for website and social media. From Lightroom, images are then uploaded directly via PhotoDeck to my searchable online library, for clients such as photo editors, magazines, and print customers. My library also features curated galleries based on themes, colors, and locations. This structure allows me to quickly respond to client requests, even when I’m traveling.

Do you work alone, or is there a team or network supporting image licensing, post-production, or logistics?
Most of the time I work alone, both in the field and in running my business. Solitude is an important part of my creative process—it gives me the freedom to shape my days entirely on my own terms and to connect more deeply with the landscapes I photograph. At the same time, I enjoy collaborating when it makes sense and value the exchange with others.
For certain aspects I rely on trusted partners: I outsource the production of prints to specialized labs, and my PhotoDeck library provides a professional infrastructure for licensing to clients worldwide. I also consult regularly with colleagues and peers, and I’m well connected within the photography community in my niche. When it comes to specialized topics—such as licensing frameworks, pricing, or marketing—I often seek out coaching, which helps me stay sharp and navigate an industry that is constantly evolving. And of course, I outsource my taxes as well—otherwise I would probably lose my sanity.
Through my many repeated journeys to Nordic countries such as Norway, Iceland, and Greenland, I’ve also built a strong network that extends far beyond photography colleagues. It includes production companies, logistics contacts, and local guides—connections that make complex projects in remote areas not only possible but also more efficient.
In the past, I worked with a photo rep, which gave me valuable experience in client relations and licensing. Today I handle most of these aspects myself, combining my design and marketing background with the independence I value as a photographer. This mix of autonomy in the field and selective collaboration behind the scenes ensures that my work stays personal, consistent, and true to my vision.

Tracy Hills, Outrigger scaffolding kit, June 2022.

Tracy Hills, Independent Construction Water Truck, August 2021.

Newly-Paved Streets at Sunset Southwest of the I-580, Tracy Hills, CA, December 2023.

Yogan Müller

Heidi: Your Tracy Hills imagery highlights ecological crises—like water access and wildfire risk—in a New Topographics context. What visual strategies did you use to balance documentary clarity with emotion?

Yogan: What I discovered in Tracy Hills took what I’ve been exploring for the past 10 years to a whole new level. In 2015, I documented a similar development in SW Iceland. Think new streets encroaching on rough lava terrain. Iceland prepared me for Tracy Hills, where scales were multiplied by 10.

On the first trip to Tracy Hills in August 2021, the entire Central Valley was shrouded in smoke from the Dixie Fire, which became one of the most devastating wildfires in California’s history. Setting foot in Tracy Hills, the noonday sun was filtering through the high-altitude haze, all the while casting an incredibly bright light on hundreds of houses under construction. It was 100°F. The raging fire up north and the marching construction enterprise seemed so dichotomous.

It was hard not to feel emotional when photographing this material, because it was a 1:1 reflection of the developments The New Topographics photographed in the region fifty years ago. That, of course, became a huge photographic challenge. However, for someone who hails from France and had the opportunity to further the conversation laid forth by the New Topographics was something very special. All the landscape books and photobooks I had poured myself into, all the sprawl pictures I’d avidly studied, had found a contemporary manifestation in Tracy Hills.

Walking the landscape made me feel solastalgic. Solastalgia refers to the emotions we feel when we know we are seriously altering the climate without taking sufficient action, despite the unequivocal evidence of change. At the same time, I felt the urge to photograph everything around me. I was shooting like a crazy fool. That was wonderful. So much material for my art laid around in the form of objects, textures, colors, and materials. I couldn’t stop.

The clarity you mentioned is crucial to me. In my recent projects, I have strived to distill complexity into cohesive pictures. If I think about it, it comes from my math background. Mathematics is so elegant, abstract, and simultaneously practical. Theorems, for example, often compress extremely complex concepts into a single proposition or, better, one absolute formula, from which the most vivid representations emerge. I like this idea. It informs large swaths of my work from the past several years.

All those concepts, concerns, and emotions are baked into the book, which launches this fall with Radius Books. Britt Salvesen and Greg Foster-Rice generously wrote two essays for the book. I am beyond grateful. With Radius Director David Chickey, we decided to shortcut some of the pages. That strategy creates powerful visual encounters and collisions between images and spreads. You can visibly see Tracy Hills sprawl into the edges of the ecosystem that supports the sprawling development, which has been my ultimate goal while photographing there.

Tracy Hills, double-page spread, photo courtesy of Radius Books.

Drones and LA Water Narratives, self-published book, UCLA Design Media Arts, March 2024.

Tell us about your self-published water-infrastructure book?
This self-published book is the culmination of my winter 2024 undergraduate class at UCLA Design Media Arts, where I introduced drone photography.
Students learned FAA rules, safety, and how to fly. They utilized this knowledge to focus on the Los Angeles Aqueduct that brings life to Southern California. By happenstance, my class convened shortly after the 110th anniversary of the Los Angeles Aqueduct inauguration on November 5, 1913.

I’ve always thought of drones as tools to enrich our sensory perception. I want to embrace this positive outlook and steer clear of all the other negative connotations drones are associated with.

We surveyed the aqueduct from Sylmar to Owens Lake, CA. Sylmar is where the aqueduct enters the city. The Cascades, visible from the I-5, are rather spectacular. Owens Lake, on the other hand, is, historically, the first source of fresh water for Los Angeles. Today, however, it is an engineered behemoth where the LADWP conducts dust mitigation experiments called “Best Available Control Measures.” I spent time flying there to

Airborne view of one of LADWP’s dust mitigation techniques (sprinkler irrigation), Owens Lake, CA, February 2024.

Downstream, the self-published book is a collection of diverse voices, co-designed, printed, and hand-bound by my students. I led the design and printing, and we had a lot of fun working together. This water class, survey, and book inaugurated a long-term project with the LA-based 501(c)3 Pando Populus. I will be glad to share more when the opportunity arises.

What unique storytelling potentials do photography books offer compared to exhibitions or online platforms?
A photobook is, in and of itself, a magical device and an art form. Once a show is done, it’s done. It may endure in installation pictures, memory, and sales, but it’s fundamentally done. Whereas a book circulates, reemerges, can be subject to awards, new printings, and pops up in fairs and shops far from its place of production, and years after its release. In other words, a book lasts longer and may reach a wider audience over time.

When pictures, pacing, typography, and paper work in unison, a whole world unfolds in a photobook. The very act of turning pages elicits strong visual relationships between pictures and spreads. The viewer is taken on a journey of visual encounters, emotions, and perception.

For me, a photobook opens a space for an intimate relationship between the viewer and the content. Turning pages is a sensual experience. A freshly printed book smells good. The paper has a texture that rubs on your fingertips. And pictures are visual stimuli. A photobook transforms distant subjects into an up close, felt, and even embodied experience.

I think it’s anthropologist Tim Ingold who, somewhere, wrote about the words printed in the silent pages of a book. This holds true for a photobook. I like to populate this silence with pictures that visibly encapsulate sound. Flipthrough video here

Online will always be a place in flux. For me, it’s a good space to design complementary, immersive experiences through full-screen galleries and otheri nteractive interfaces. As such, a website can be a wonderful space to share the research and creative decisions that shaped a photobook.

Your practice includes photogrammetry, drones, AI, and book design. How do these tools influence your creative process and storytelling in both personal and editorial work?
Embracing photogrammetry, drones, and AI pushed me to undertake a profound overhaul of how I use photography.
That came from teaching and engaging with faculty, students, and staff at UCLA Design Media Arts. Our department embraces new technologies wholeheartedly. Over time, I increasingly saw and used photography as an expanding field, and a medium porous to rapid, often radical technological advances–think of generative AI, for example–and a medium that has never ceased to shapeshift since 1839.

Teaching these tools and topics had me learn them inside out, which naturally pushed me to stay curious, alert, and hungry for the newest iterations. That’s one of the wonderful gifts of teaching.

Now, bearing the ecological crisis in mind, I can’t help but ponder the overlap of exponential technology and our exponential environmental footprint, a hallmark of the Anthropocene. I guess both are rooted in the idea that there are no limits to what we can do, which is, in a way, true – human ingenuity often seems unlimited – although it’s clearer and clearer that this is undermining the very conditions limitless endeavors are predicated on.

Practically, photogrammetry has thrust photography into the third dimension. Drones take it to the skies. AI taps into the enormous visual archive that is the Internet. Books open photographs to a fuller sensory pictorial appreciation that is tactile and intimate. It’s incredible to think we have easy access to such tools. At the same time, they have a dark side that can’t be ignored. That’s what artists have been doing: using the tools while critically engaging with their underlying problematic dynamics and foundations.

I am really into drones at the moment. Flying high, you decenter yourself by seeing the complexity of the world around you. I am here, on my feet, immersed in the world, piloting, and simultaneously aloft, contemplating it in flux, 50, 200, 350ft in the air. That’s what I mean by “drones enrich our sensory perception.” I am fascinated by the artistic and technical possibilities of remote sensing, so much so that I’ve launched a drone photography business called Topographica. I serve architecture, construction, and public art clients in SoCal. Drones are incredible tools to contextualize and elevate installations and constructions. They are also incredible tools to create 3D, 1:1 digital twins of real-world projects through photogrammetry. With them, artists and operators can document, map, archive, and tell stories based on data-rich, airborne images.

“Overshoot” launched in 2025 how did this idea come about?
I am grateful to Aline Smithson, Founder and Director of Lenscratch, for letting me create a dedicated space for ecologically-minded visual practices and conversations. Overshoot stems from a deep care and love for the environment, ecological arts and justice. We live in ecological overshoot. That is the central premise of the column. In homage to Donna Haraway, I want to “stay with the trouble”.

Overshoot also stems from the central claim of my practice-based PhD thesis–completed in 2018: photography is one of the tools that brought us into the Anthropocene. In hindsight, this line of inquiry, which I’ve explored in my manuscript and fieldwork in SW Iceland, was a reaction to what I learned when studying photography in Brussels. I’d often hear: “That’s just an image,” which always resonated as “photography is nothing more than an image.” That not only seemed at odds with all the time and care I’ve always put into planning trips to Iceland and making photographs there, but also didn’t take into consideration the historic and metabolic ties between photography and energy.

Overshoot holds space for conversations, portfolios, and scholarly essays that directly engage with this moment of ecological overshoot. Ecologically-minded works and practices abound and are incredibly diverse. My goal is to offer artists a platform to share, discuss, and promote their work. I am also curious to know how they’ve come to grapple with the ramifications of ecological overshoot.

I’ve just interviewed Siobhan Angus. Siobhan published an important book with Duke University Press last year titled “Camera Geologica. An Elemental History of Photography,” in which she traces the mineral extraction, use, and flows that have shaped photography over space and time. That is a fascinating and richly-layered history I’d encourage everyone to read. Her interview will be out on September 12. As a brand, Overshoot attempts to capture the exponential rise and use of photography. We still say we “shoot” images, and frequently mention the information and visual overload we experience online every day. That is also what informed Overshoot’s visual identity.

Alex Turner: Blind Forest

We caught up with photographic artist Alex Turner, whose work lives where vision meets sensation and ecology meets memory. In his acclaimed Blind Forest series now showing at Marshall Gallery, Turner uses thermal imaging to reveal the hidden life of trees—turning them into living witnesses, storytellers, and  ethereal portraits of our changing world.

Your images often make the invisible visible. What drew you to thermal imaging as your primary tool in Blind Forest?
Alex: What drew me to thermal imaging was its ability to reveal what’s normally invisible not just heat, but a different way of seeing vitality, presence, and change. In Blind Forest, I wanted to portray trees not as passive background elements, but as active, responsive organisms—beings that store energy, regulate their environments, and bear witness to time in a way few other living things can. Thermal imaging allowed me to visualize those hidden dynamics: the conservation, transmission, and loss of heat within and around each tree. But it wasn’t just about ecology—it was also about cultural memory. Many of the trees I photographed hold long histories, both ecological and human. Some were cultivated by Indigenous communities for food and medicine; others stand on sites of forced labor, displacement, or violence. Trees have absorbed these layered histories, and the thermal camera offered a way to suggest that embeddedness. Heat becomes a kind of residue, a trace of what a tree has lived through or is currently enduring. In that sense, thermal imaging became a way to look at trees not only as biological subjects, but as cultural witnesses.
I was also interested in repurposing a technology typically used for surveillance, hunting, or fire detection—tools often associated with control or extractive thinking—and turning it toward something more reverent and speculative. The resulting images resist literal interpretation; they ask the viewer to slow down, to sit with ambiguity, and to consider the forest as a place where both natural systems and human histories are in constant flux.

What are the ethical considerations behind obscuring or withholding your image locations?
Withholding specific locations is both an ethical and conceptual choice. On one level, it’s about protection. Many of the trees I photograph are old, vulnerable, or located in ecologically sensitive areas. Publicizing exact coordinates can unintentionally invite harm—through increased foot traffic, extraction, or even vandalism. In an age of geotagging and digital overexposure, some places need anonymity to survive. But there’s also a deeper philosophical and cultural reason. Many of these trees hold significance not just ecologically, but culturally—especially to Indigenous communities who have long-standing relationships with these species as sources of medicine, food, and spiritual meaning.

Withholding location becomes a gesture of respect, recognizing that these trees are not simply photographic subjects or aesthetic objects, but beings embedded in cultural systems of value and care that precede and exceed my presence as an artist.

More broadly, I’m less interested in offering a precise where than I am in encouraging a deeper look at the land, how we relate to nonhuman life, how we carry stories of place. By withholding coordinates, I invite the viewer to encounter the tree not as a destination or trophy, but as a living presence. This choice also pushes back against the extractive tendencies of both landscape photography and colonial mapping practices. Naming a place, claiming it, and presenting it as “known” can flatten its complexity. In Blind Forest, I want to keep some things partially obscured—not to mystify, but to honor the idea that not everything is ours to name, frame, or expose.

What role does fieldwork play in your practice—how do you locate and build relationships with your subjects?
I spend a lot of time hiking, researching, asking questions, and building relationships. With Blind Forest, that meant working closely with arborists, forest ecologists, historians, and Indigenous knowledge-keepers to locate trees that carry not just ecological significance, but cultural and historical weight as well.
Sometimes a tree is introduced to me through a historian or ecologist; other times I come across one by accident, and then spend weeks or months trying to understand its context—how it fits into a broader ecosystem, who has cared for it, what it has witnessed. I try to return to sites multiple times, sometimes across seasons, to watch how the tree responds to heat, drought, wind, or fire. That temporal intimacy feels crucial.

It’s not just about finding “beautiful” trees—it’s about seeking out complexity, endurance, and entanglement. And it requires a certain kind of humility. These aren’t blank canvases or passive subjects; they’re living beings embedded in systems that far exceed my own timeline. Fieldwork, for me, is about cultivating a practice of attention—being present, doing the research, and recognizing when to step back.

How does your work address climate and ecological loss without relying on traditional documentary tropes?
I’m interested in climate and ecological issues, but I try to approach them through a slower, more reflective lens—one that resists the spectacle and elegiac tendencies often found in traditional environmental documentary work. Rather than show devastation directly—burned forests, parched landscapes, suffering wildlife—I focus on subtler forms of presence and absence. The thermal images in Blind Forest don’t depict disaster as bluntly; they reveal systems under stress, energy in transition, and histories held quietly in living organisms. It’s a way of inviting viewers to feel their way into these questions, rather than confront them with fixed narratives. I think traditional documentary often relies on visibility to create impact—showing what’s been lost, what’s on fire, what’s at risk. And while that has real value, I’m drawn to a more speculative, even poetic approach. One that makes room for ambiguity, wonder, and grief to coexist. Thermal imaging helps with that—it doesn’t render the landscape in familiar terms, but through a register of energy that is less about appearances and more about relationships: between organism and environment, between past and present, between perception and reality.

If you could pass on one technical or philosophical principle to photographers working with landscape today, what would it be?
If I could pass on one principle, it would be to slow down—both technically and conceptually. Landscape photography has long been associated with grandeur, clarity, and conquest—the wide view, the decisive moment, the untouched wilderness. But in reality, landscapes are layered, politicized, lived-in, and constantly changing. They deserve more than just aesthetic appreciation; they deserve attention, patience, and humility. Slowing down might mean spending more time with a place before photographing it. It might mean learning its ecological and cultural histories, or questioning your own presence within it. Technically, it could mean working with processes that stretch time—like stitching, long exposures, or analog materials—not for nostalgia’s sake, but to make space for complexity. Philosophically, it’s about resisting the impulse to extract a single, striking image and instead engaging with the landscape as a collaborator, not a subject. There’s so much urgency in the world right now, especially around climate and ecological loss— but I think slowness can be a form of resistance. It lets us listen more carefully, look more closely, and imagine more responsibly.

Can you walk us through that moment in the clonal Aspen grove—when you realized the coyote was there? What were you feeling, and how did that experience shape the resulting image?
I was camping alone in the middle of the aspen grove when, late at night, I heard something rustling nearby. It was pitch black—I couldn’t see a thing. I reached for my thermal scope and spotted a coyote, no more than twenty feet away, perfectly still, staring directly at me. It sent a chill through me. There was something unsettling in that moment of mutual recognition, but also a profound sense of asymmetry. The coyote, with its excellent night vision, could see me plainly. I could only return its gaze through the mediation of a camera.

That moment shifted something in me. I became acutely aware of how dependent I was on technology to perceive what was otherwise invisible to me. The thermal scope didn’t just reveal the coyote—it revealed the limits of my own perception. And in that same instant, the forest around us—specifically, the clonal aspen colony I was there to photograph—took on a different kind of presence. The coyote wasn’t a singular visitor; it was part of a continuous ecosystem, one in which I was the outsider, looking in.

What made you decide to keep the coyote out of focus, and instead focus on the tree behind it? Was that choice aesthetic, conceptual, or instinctive in the moment?
In my previous project Blind River, I used remote sensing technologies triggered by movement to capture subjects as they passed through the landscapes of the U.S.–Mexico border. That process—especially the AI recognition software attempting to isolate figures from their surroundings—raised compelling questions about how we determine what is distinct from a landscape, and why. Who or what is considered a visitor? A trespasser? A part of the scene or apart from it? With Blind Forest, I wanted to invert that logic and shift the focus entirely toward the landscape —specifically, the trees—as enigmatic, sentient, and sometimes charismatic subjects. It was a move toward a more ecocentric perspective. Everything else—humans, wildlife—would become secondary. Deliberately placing the coyote out of focus was shaped directly by my experience with the animal. It became a way of acknowledging that this place wasn’t about the drama of my human- wildlife encounter. It was about the quiet, persistent presence of the forest itself—an ancient, interconnected organism. The coyote became part of the story, but not the center of it.

There’s a lot of talk in photography about capturing the ‘decisive moment.’ But your process seems to stretch that moment across time and space. How do you think stitching affects the way we experience time and presence in an image like this one?
I think it’s important to explain the stitching process, because it speaks directly to some of the deeper conceptual undercurrents of the work. At first glance, it may seem like you’re looking at a singular moment in time. But each image is actually composed of over a hundred smaller frames, stitched together over the course of up to an hour. That temporal stretch is embedded in the final image, even if it’s not immediately visible.

I’ve always struggled with the idea that photography is primarily a medium for capturing a single, decisive moment. That notion implies a kind of narrative closure—that the moment photographed contains the essence or climax of a situation. But in reality, most events and environments are far more layered and unfolding. Freezing a single frame can flatten that complexity, and at worst, it can project the illusion of objectivity—a supposedly ‘truthful’ instant that’s actually shaped by countless subjective decisions: where you stand, when you click the shutter, what you include or exclude. In Blind River and again in Blind Forest, I’m interested in challenging that sense of fixed truth and instead suggesting that narrative—and presence—is continuous. With Blind Forest, the subject matter itself encourages this shift. Trees appear still, even static, to the human eye. But they are constantly exchanging energy with their surroundings.

Thermodynamics upends our assumptions about their stillness. Heat moves, radiates, dissipates—those rates of change make time visible in subtle, surprising ways. The thermal camera doesn’t just record temperature—it reveals time embedded in matter: a burned scar, a cooling trunk, a stressed limb. The forest becomes not a frozen scene, but a living system in flux. And through the stitching process, I’m trying to honor that slowness and complexity—to hold space for presence that isn’t defined by the instant, but by duration, accumulation, and transformation.

Kriston Jae Bethel

Heidi: You studied journalism and political science at Temple University and transformed into a lecture adjunct. How did that academic foundation shape your approach to documentary and protest photography?

Kriston: I think my choice to study both journalism and political science was more a function of who I am and what I want to see in the world, so in a sense, the same thing that drives my approach to photography is what led me to my academics. The two are intertwined, but a core part of who I am is that I like to understand people and I love to learn how things work. I do believe having that formal background allows me to think more deeply about the issues I cover and try, as much as possible, to see what’s unfolding without inserting my own emotions. Of course, as a visual journalist, I’m also trying to capture the feeling behind that, so I can build a connection with the audience. But it also lets me have much more nuanced conversations, which can help people feel at ease or even open doors that may otherwise remain closed.

As noted in Diversify Photo’s “Solutions Photography” talks, trauma-informed long-form story creation is central. How do you ethically build trust with protest participants—especially in emotionally-charged environments?
When you’re working in a crowd of people, whether it’s dozens or tens of thousands, I think the first, and hopefully easiest part, is to just be a genuine human being. I take the time to talk to people, I’ll answer questions about what I’m working on, or even make a portrait of someone just because they asked. You’re not there to participate in a protest, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have humanity. I think this is even more important when you’re working with people whose viewpoints may differ from your own. It’s the little things that I think go a long way, even non-verbal communication like a smile or a nod, that help people feel at ease. Authenticity is key.

How do you maintain that journalistic neutrality when covering emotionally charged social justice issues, where public sentiment often runs high?
I think there’s a misconception about what neutrality means and how we handle it as journalists. I mean, nearly everyone wants to believe that they’re neutral, that they’re completely unbiased, that they’re thinking with their head and not their heart. If that were true, politics would probably be a lot more boring and social media would be a much kinder space!

But the fact is that we’re not robots. The important part of being a journalist isn’t that you exist without personal opinions or feelings, but that you don’t let those get in the way of your coverage. We all come with our own life experiences that shape who we are and how we see the world, but when you’re doing the work, it’s important to discern how those may affect your perceptions. I think good journalists learn to allow themselves to feel, without letting it override their reporting.

There are a thousand tiny moments where decisions are made as a photographer – the stories we pitch, where you choose to point our camera, what we leave out of the frame, what makes our final edit. Things like gender, ethnicity, orientation, religion, economic background – all of these qualities shape our world view, giving us unique knowledge and insight. But it’s important to acknowledge these, especially in cases where they may lead to privilege, so we can minimize blind spots.

In high-pressure work, how do you stay flexible—able to fully feel intense moments and then bounce back—and what small habit helps you reset?
Something you and I talked about is this idea of “emotional elasticity” – being flexible with your experiences, your life, your emotions. When talking to my colleagues and friends who work in the industry, a lot of people are feeling the toll of working in a field that’s often driven by high pressure moments, while capturing intense emotions that you’re deeply embedded in. It can be a lot to manage, but it’s important to stay healthy through that. Whether you’re seeing a therapist or journaling on your own, talking it through with someone else or just doing mental check-ins with yourself. For me, I try not to center my entire being around the work, but have outside interests. I rock climb, I coach and overall practice cultivating a positive mindset. I think trying to push things down without recognizing your own experience is a good way to burn out. That’s where the ability to remain flexible and resilient becomes important, so that you can experience everything in the moment, but still come back to who you are.

How do you, as a coach, foster resilience and empathy in your athletes—helping them face failure, handle negative thoughts during long runs, and grow not just as runners, but as people?
I coach high school track and cross country, predominantly working with distance athletes. This is something I do simply because I enjoy being there for them, but it’s a lot less about the athletics than I think most people think. When you have to run a distance event, there can be a lot of time in your head for negativity to creep in and take over. What we try to teach is resiliency, the ability to overcome, how to come back after failure. It’s not about never having those negative thoughts, but how you deal with those emotions. These are the lessons we’re really working on and sport kind of just comes out of it. I hope the thing they’ve learned after graduating isn’t how to be a better runner, but how to be a better version of themselves.

There really is a tremendous amount of pressure on young people today. I think we’re suffering as a society from a lack of empathy and willingness to actually listen to one another. This has us pushing further and further in opposite directions, looking for confirmation more than critical understanding. Combine that with the internet and social media that allows us to see what we want – this has us in a very challenging position right now. Bringing it back around, I hope that my work helps us build a more resilient society, that helps us grow closer together, to see the tough things and understand more about what the other is feeling.

You were embedded in the flagship Philadelphia action, among an estimated 80,000 protesters on June 14. How did you ensure your images reflected both the collective voice and the individual stories within such a massive crowd?
Scale is always impressive and often provides a sense of how important or urgent an issue may be. It’s the big picture. However, it’s also crucial to take viewers into the ground level and create images that capture emotion (something I seem to be talking about a lot). I’m constantly looking through a crowd and trying to find a variety of emotions and moments that tell us how people are feeling. There’s always something that stands out to me. And in addition to that, I’m always trying to find something that may subvert expectations. I’m not always successful, but It’s definitely something I’m keeping an eye out for.

Crowd density and police presence bring unique risks. How do you assess and manage personal risk while on assignment—especially in fast-moving situations?
I want to preface my answer by saying I’m not a HEFAT (Hostile Environment First Aid Training) instructor and anyone looking to learn more about how to stay safe in potentially hostile environments should definitely look into taking a course. That said, there are a lot of steps you can take to keep yourself safe, but the first thing to know is your level of risk tolerance. You have to be honest with yourself about how much you can handle, depending on your training and experience, and to not exceed that. Then you have to have a risk assessment. Who might be working against you, what threats do they pose and how do you mitigate that. In regard to physical safety, having eye protection, head protection and respiratory protection are all things you should have on hand.

What are two key things to consider for anyone covering fast moving situations?
I think the two most important things are 1. Good communication and 2. Having a field buddy.

To the first part, always talk to your editors about your plan, then remain in communication with them throughout the day. And if you’re going into something alone, make sure you have someone at home to keep updated. This could be a partner, friend or family member. Before the protest, I reached out to several other freelance colleagues that were going to be covering the protest and got us all in a chat with one another. While we were all working for different publications, I wanted us to all be able to rely on one another on the ground. This was all in addition to remaining in contact with my editors and security team.

To the second part, having someone in the field with you that you can rely on really does increase your safety level. During the protest, my colleagues and I checked in with one another throughout the day and later in the evening, many of us traveled together, so no one was alone. Things can get more unpredictable when it starts getting dark. A group of protestors separate from the “No Kings” event gathered outside the Federal Detention Center and marched through the city, leading to some conflict with law enforcement. Having someone that can see the things you miss, especially in situations like these, could be the difference between going home and taking a trip to the hospital.

There’s a lot more that can be said about this, like maintaining situational awareness, deescalation (whether it’s with protestors, law enforcement or just someone on the street), when to blend in and when to stand out, but I would highly recommend taking a course for those interested in pursuing more of this type of work.

At the end of the day, the number one thing to remember is to use good judgement and avoid risks beyond what you’re prepared for, because you’re more important than a photo.

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Mountain Gazette

Editor: Mike Rogge
Art Director: John Coleman
Copy Editor: Kim Stravers
Managing editor: Doug Schnitzpahn
Office Dog Boss: Quinn, Mike’s BF 

 Mountain Gazette has had multiple lives since its origins in the 1960s, including its most recent resurrection in 2020 under your lead. What drew you personally to this legacy publication, and how are you preserving its original spirit while modernizing it for a new audience?
I liked the alternative side of Mountain Gazette. I’m drawn to creative, outside-the-box thinkers and you would be hard pressed to find anyone more outside the norms than the 60s and 70s writers, photographers, and artists of those early issues of Mountain Gazette. The late-Tom Benton designed the second ever cover of MG. He also did the first ever Earth Day poster and much of Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo campaign for sheriff of Aspen. It would be wrong for me to try to find the next Hunter or John Fayhee. Rather, I search for writers, photographers, poets, artists, weirdos who carry that spirit of seeing the world differently than those writing the ins and outs of gear reviews, advetorials, and overblown everything-ness of modern outdoor writing.  I’m editing a Best of Anthology book to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Mountain Gazette’s founding. I have discovered the spirit of those early writers—embedding in a rodeo, following an obscure sport to obsession, writing about music and the outdoors—spans across generations. As far as modernizing it, we allow readers to subscribe with a credit card. It used to be a check or cash in the mail. Other than that, we try to keep it real. Keep it core. Keep it us.

Your love and print and its revival run deep for you, can you share with our readers your POV on independent publishing?
Independent publishing gets a bad rap sometimes. The image of ordering 1,000 books, selling none, and having boxes in a garage for eternity is not lost on me. The reality is without private equity backing you, independent publishing is a bootstrapper’s endeavor. And I like that. Sales not going well? Do something about it. Magazine sucks? Do something about it. As an independent publisher I’m free to work with whomever I’d like whether that’s Harry Bliss and Steve Martin or some young dirtbag journalist making a really good point in a Substack post. Independent publishing is freedom.  Recently I came to terms through my agent on a book deal with Penguin Randomhouse and their subsidiary Clarkson Potter. As a 20 year-plus ski writer, it’s a dream project, dream team over at Clarkson Potter, and dream scenario. Next week I will go to work just a few blocks south of Central Park. As an Adirondack born and raised kid, that feels like walking on the moon. I am greatly looking forward to learning how it all works in traditional publishing. I see the benefits of both indie and traditional publishing. I’m grateful I no longer have to choose which path to follow. “I can ski both lines” is how I’ve been thinking about it.  At Mountain Gazette, I’m the editor, owner, publisher, trash guy, HR, and what I’m getting at is I wear many hats. Our General Manager Austin Holt has taken a lot off my plate as has Meghan Rogge who is our VP. Conor Sendak our VP of Sales has taken excellent care of our advertising partners by setting realistic expectations and delivering.  We’re a small team and we’re constantly refining our way of doing things. We’re in the pursuit of making our title the gold standard when it comes to publishing, working with contributors, and taking care of our readers. We are not perfect. Far from it. The work is never done. There are a lot of indie titles, but there is only one Mountain Gazette.  With this book I’m working on, I get to work with longtime contributors from the ski world who I consider family. I’m still meeting the team at Clarkson Potter, but they’ve been nothing but supportive. It’s nice to join a team. It’s nice to build one, too. 

You famously bought the rights to Mountain Gazette for “a few hundred bucks and a Coors Banquet.” Beyond the romance of that moment, what were the biggest challenges you faced in relaunching a print-focused magazine in a digital era—and how did you build a passionate readership around it?
I have been called a romantic person by more than one person in my life. I tend to get romantic about the small moments in life. The world was in the middle of the global pandemic, pre-vaccines, and I figured I should spend my time making something good for the world rather than freaking out about everything. My original intent was to grow the subscriber base to 1,000 people or so. A friend and former Mountain Gazette editor Peter Kray has always told me to write what I wanted to read. I wanted to make a magazine I couldn’t find anywhere else. I wanted it to be big, really big, pages, great writing, surprises, and just find things in the world that made me say, “Wow. That is fucking cool!” I haven’t gotten bored yet.  I’ve always believed if you focus entirely on the editorial the readers will find it. They did. My favorite stories from subscribers are when they have friends over for a dinner party or to have a drink and the magazine is on the table. Their guests stumble upon the magazine and say something to the effect of “What the heck is this?” I believe we get a lot of new readers that way. We hear a version of this story all the time.  We’re also print-focused, but in no way digital ludites. I’ve made what’s called “digital content” for two decades now. Print gave me a chance to focus. It gave me a page count. We could all use more page counts, some limits. Just because everything can be posted all of the time doesn’t mean it’s good. McDonald’s makes a quick meal, but it also gives you a stomach ache if you eat it all of the time. It’ll actually kill you. Digital media is fast food. It’s hard to find the good stuff online. The good stuff is in the real world. We should all try to remember that more.

The NYT referred to Mountain Gazette as “gusty and wise” – You mentioned that “we went too far in the digital realm — and now we’re pulling it back.” How does Mountain Gazette intentionally design its print experience to provide that “lean back” feeling and stand apart from the overwhelming pace of digital media?
John Branch did a great job with that piece. The first thing we, John Coleman, our art director, and I did was talk about how a magazine should be pieced together. The best way to do anything, in my opinion, is to talk a lot about what’s wrong with the way things are done. Start by not repeating someone else’s mistakes. Print magazines for a while now used crappy paper, too many poorly designed ads, not enough pages…it all reeked of desperation to do anything to keep the lights on. We pushed our advertisers to make ads that were above all beautiful. We also took a note out of podcast formatting and made it clear that ads would appear at the beginning of the book and at the end of the book. The feature well would be uninterrupted by ads for the benefit of the reader’s enjoyment. John and I determined we could do four-page features, but bigger ones would be better. The early Gazette had cartoons, so I reached out to my friend Cy Whitling and he’s had a cartoon in every single issue of the revival. Later, we found Mike Handzlik also known as The Dead Dirtbag. He pairs so well with the Jaded Local column. He and Hans are a good team. I brought on Harry Bliss and Steve Martin. Harry is one of the best artists I’ve had the privilege of working with. I like the way his mind works and how he dissects the world with a pen. Saying Steve Martin is funny is an obvious thing to say, but in our email interactions we can debate the funniness of a single word. He emailed Harry and I about the strip a few hours after he hosted the monologue of Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary show. Steve and Harry are dedicated to the strip and for that I am grateful. I feel this dedication to editorial cartoons is a major thing that separates us from others.  On our features, we get weird, we get soulful, we get rad, we get serious, but everything has to have heart and a perspective. We don’t phone a single page or line in. We try to publish what others would not. That’s not to be provocative. We don’t do anything for shock value in the magazine. That’s for the internet. We don’t need to get you with a headline. If you have the magazine, we already have you in the community. So we just lay it all out in a way that’ll make you put down the phone, pour a nice beverage, and take a deep breath. And to be honest with you, I don’t think any part of digital media does any of what I mentioned above. That’s what sets us apart. We don’t do silly dance videos. Maybe that sets us apart? Maybe we should do silly dance videos. I don’t know. I think I’d rather make two good magazines then go do literally anything else. 

As part of a broader resurgence of high-end, niche outdoor journals, Mountain Gazette has embraced collectible large formats and minimal online presence. How do you balance being “unapologetically analog” with the need to grow a modern readership and engage digitally without diluting the print experience? What was your inspiration for the large format – or was it simply to represent vast and wild spaces?
We have never shared a single story in the magazine online. And we won’t. Our readers pay good money for the magazine. It’s their magazine. We owe it to them to not cheapen by giving it away for free. We can use the internet for what it was intended to be—a tool. We’re sitting with around 30,000 subscribers right now. I don’t believe there are other titles sitting at those numbers. It’s our job to communicate with our readers. We keep our magazine exclusive to print. Our online presence is mostly for advertising to get the title in front of more people, make a few jokes, sell a few t-shirts. I find the more our team engages online the less happy we are. Recently, we threw a show at the Crystal Bay Club here in North Lake Tahoe with the band Grateful Shred. We had over 300 people show up. I met local readers, but also a group of 9 people who drove up from Los Angeles to Tahoe to see the band and hang with other Mountain Gazette readers. It’s a community. No hashtags needed. The large format was inspired in large part by Victory Journal and coffee table books. I wanted to make a coffee table book twice per year. I don’t know what I was thinking but it’s worked out so far. 

Congratulations on the reprint of issue 203 – what makes that issue so special in your mind, Drew Smith shot the powerful cover story. How did the story pitch unfold?
Thank you. We have 6,000 additional copies coming off the press at the end of the month. We’re close to having our tenth sold out issue in a row. That makes me the single worst product forecaster in the industry. We typically slow down business-wise in June. School is ending. Summer is beginning. So I ordered a few thousand more copies than we needed, but when the world saw Drew’s cover…it just went nuts. We sold out in about three and a half weeks. We actually didn’t even use our marketing materials to promote the issue. They weren’t ready in time. The cover did all the work. That felt special and it’s really a testament to Jim Morrison, his vision for skiing the Great Trango Tower, and then pitching the story to me on the Granite Chief chairlift at Palisades Tahoe. He’s the only person to ever successfully pitch me on a chairlift. Another first for Jim.

Trango (TNF movie)  is set in one of the most dramatic alpine environments on Earth. What were the biggest challenges editing the 18 page spread story to show the scale and vertical exposure of the Great Trango Tower as well as the isolation for the reader?
John and I did our best to edit down the selections, but ultimately we leaned on Jim over a Zoom session or two and a few phone calls to share with us the ins and outs of the journey. When Jim’s eyes lit up at parts in the story, we knew those were the images we needed to find a home for. Authenticity is important to our stories. There were plenty of rad shots Drew took that didn’t make the cut. That’s what happens when you work with insanely talented people in print. It can’t all get into the feature. The Trango film does an excellent job telling the story of the expedition. We wanted to tell the story of Jim’s experience, what his heart was telling him to do or not do, and the consequences of decisions in the mountains. For me, the film and the feature are entirely different and complimentary. For the design, we try to stick to singles and spreads for images. An 11×17 page lends itself to vertically oriented shots. The spreads can show the vastness and remoteness of the range. Drew has a great eye and the variety we had to work with was a ton of fun for John and me. 

Mountain Gazette began as Skier’s Gazette in 1966 and evolved into a cultural touchstone by the 1970s, featuring icons like Hunter S. Thompson and Edward Abbey. Looking back, what do you think made the magazine resonate with readers during that era—
and what lessons did you learn over the past few issues?
Counter culture is needed in the world. We can’t let those in power tell us how to have fun, how to love, how to feel, or how to live a meaningful life. Skiers’ Gazette began with horror stories of the US Ski Team from former members. That’s just not something people wrote about in 1966. Powder wouldn’t come along until 1972. I like to think it was directly or indirectly influenced by that anti-establishment story in Skiers’ Gazette. I’ll have to ask the Moe Brothers one day. It’s not hard to see one story show folks that “this is not the way” and then another picks up the narrative and says “actually this way is kind of fun and funky.” That kind of speaking out is important. As storytellers we focus too much today on the intended outcome of a piece, but I believe the message and the medium are more important. We can pretend, as editors, that we can control outcomes, but we cannot. The best we can hope is we put something powerful into the world. We don’t build the fires. We can, however, create the spark. 

Abbey and Thompson, they lit the match. The Jaded Local column by Hans Ludwig, today, he does the same thing. Cy Whitling does the same thing. Jason Roman, Megan Michelson, Amanda Monthei, Ari Schneider, George Sibley, Emily Leibert…they write and shoot and create art from their hearts. It’s never mailed in. That way of creating resonated then and it is what resonates now. We work with people who genuinely give a shit. 

Over the last few issues I’ve learned a few things. Number one is that if our team at Mountain Gazette isn’t right, nothing can be right. Thankfully, I have the best team with me right now. Two is that there is no end to editorial. Just when I think I’ve figured out the formula, it needs to change. The world evolves and so does the magazine. What someone loved about MG 194 might not be what they love about MG 204 this fall. We have got to evolve our editorial as the world changes. We’re at our best when we reflect how the outdoor world actually is. That is an on-going job. I’ve been wrong about many things. I don’t enjoy running a business as much as I love making a magazine. We switched printers. That was unexpected, unfortunate, but the right move for the future of the magazine. Being wrong is just a chance to grow and learn. I’m grateful our readers allow me to do that. If I end up being more wrong than I am now, from an editorial standpoint, if I feel like I’m slipping or the readers let me know the edge is gone, I’ll step aside and allow the next editor of the magazine to take it down the next path. The goal here is to not die in this chair. The goal of this revival is that another one will never be necessary. 

How do photographers get in touch for potential story ideas?
We have a submissions page at MountainGazette.com. We receive over 6,000 story submissions per year for around 40-45 slots over two stories. It’s hard to get in our pages, but I promise when you do it’ll be worth it.

Issue 200 marked a creative milestone for Mountain Gazette, with Tom Benton’s golden aspen leaf not just serving as cover art, but as a visual metaphor for the magazine’s deep Colorado roots, artistic, “soul ride” aesthetic What made that particular image—and Benton’s legacy—so essential to this moment in the Gazette’s history?
I love Tom Benton and all of his work. He’s someone I wish I could have met. Powerful messaging through simplicity is the hardest creative act in the world. Benton was a master. I have one of his originals hanging in my living room. For the 200th issue, we felt it was deeply important to pay homage to the Colorado roots, specifically Aspen, Colorado, and the freak, gonzo, dirtbag, ski bum culture that inspired our magazine and generations of people.

How big is your creative team?
John Coleman is our art director. Kim Stravers is our copy editor. Doug Schnitzpahn is our managing editor. Quinn is my dog. I am the editor/Quinn’s best friend. We work with a handful of contractors on retainer.

What’s something you want photographers to know about Mountain Gazette?
Shooting with your subjects dead center works for Instagram, but not for magazines. Use the rule of thirds and quit putting all the rad stuff in the middle. It ends up in the gutter. Shoot for print. Shoot with a goal in mind. Intention is everything. Have fun. Be different.
   

Photographer: Sacha Stejko

I had the pleasure of serving on the 2025 Communication Arts Photography Competition jury—a fantastic opportunity to step outside my usual discipline and review photography alongside my esteemed peers. One standout moment was discovering Sacha Stej Sacha, an Auckland-based photographer represented by Image Driven Content. Her accolades include being named one of the top 200 advertising photographers globally by Lürzer’s Archive and being recognized as one of the 23 World’s Best Sport Photographers by The Agents Club in 2023. I recently had the pleasure of catching up with Sacha to discuss her award-winning image.

Your photography is known for its cinematic and powerful portrayal of women—what are the key elements you look for when capturing intensity and resilience in your subjects?
When I’m gearing up to capture my subjects, there are a few key elements I always keep in mind. First and foremost, getting to know my subjects is essential. I want to know what shapes who they are. Before the shoot and even during it, I dive into conversations that reveal what makes them tick.

Once I have a sense of them, I try matching their emotional tone; if they’re fiery and passionate, I want that to jump off the frame. I aim to include a piece of who they are in every shot, whether it’s a glimmer in their eye or the way they hold themselves. I strive to create an image they can recognize, one that resonates with their energy. It’s all about connection, and that’s what I love most about photography: being able to freeze a slice of someone’s narrative, a moment of resilience and intensity, in time.

In your “Girls in Sports” campaign for 2 Degrees, you highlighted both strength and vulnerability in your subject. Can you talk about how the casting went and what direction you gave?
This campaign was shot alongside a TVC, and the fantastic Director Taylor Ferguson did the casting. When I met these young women I could see that they radiated talent and spirit. For this brief, I wanted to capture that passion and grit. They don’t just play the game—they own it. I love the dichotomy between their sweet appearances and the fierce determination they display on the field – there is nothing more badass than seeing these girls in their element. Take the rugby girl, for instance. I asked her to sprint full speed towards the camera, like she was dodging the opposing team. In that moment, she transformed into a powerhouse charging at me like a freight train, the fire in her belly blazing as she zoomed closer. It was exactly the energy we were after.

How do you balance storytelling with advocacy in your visual work, particularly around gender representation?
Women in sports face a harsh reality—they often get overshadowed, and it’s disheartening to see that women’s sports internationally don’t get the same spotlight as men’s. That’s why campaigns like this are so crucial; encouraging fans—especially from a young age—to rally behind these amazing athletes.

In my visual work, I find that storytelling and advocacy naturally go hand in hand—probably without me even realizing it. As a woman photographer, I’m drawn to capturing fierce, strong women because I know just how powerful we can be. In a society that often tries to box us in or undermine our strength, it’s crucial to keep that fire alive. That passion burns even brighter as a mother to a spirited young daughter. I want her to see women as capable and unafraid, sensitive and kind, just like the women I photograph.

How do you ensure your images challenge traditional portrayals, particularly of femininity and athleticism, while still maintaining authenticity and emotional depth?
I’m usually guided by how I want the image to feel, especially when it comes to capturing femininity and athleticism. My images become a deep dive into an energy that connects the viewer to the subject. I want to create an atmosphere where the audience feels confronted, pulled into the frame, and unable to look away.

I find authenticity through genuine human connections, digging beyond the surface, whether I’m photographing a seasoned athlete or someone new to the sport. There’s something superhuman about athletes; they possess more than just physical strength; they embody resilience and discipline. There’s a profound sacrifice that comes with striving for excellence, and that narrative fascinates me. Each image I capture is a testament to that journey—an exploration of what it truly means to balance vulnerability and power.

Can you talk about the role visual media plays in shifting public perception and promoting equity, especially in underrepresented communities and activist movements? 
Photography holds a unique power in shaping public perception and promoting equity. As a visual person myself, I’ve always felt that a single image can convey emotions and stories far more effectively than words ever could. It’s the raw authenticity of a photograph that can resonate with someone’s heart, breaking down barriers and connecting us all on a fundamental level.

Through the lens of a camera, we can reveal the complexities of human nature and amplify voices that often go unheard. In this visual storytelling landscape, images become tools for change, not just documenting reality but actively reshaping how we view each other. Ultimately, photography fosters a shared humanity that can inspire action and fight against injustice. They remind us that, at our core, we are all just humans with similar desires for love, acceptance, and dignity.

A school playground in the neighbourhood of the Belchatów coal-fired power plant. Kleszczow, Poland.  November 14th 2023.

Climate Visuals: Alastair Johnstone-Hack

Heidi: Archival and historical records play an important visual role in the future of accountability – who did what, when, and with what impact? What type of photography are you looking for to support these themes?
Alastair: Absolutely, and photography can bring this kind of accountability to life in ways that words and data can’t. At Climate Visuals we are predominantly working with photojournalistic imagery, prioritising photography that tells real stories and engages, educates and informs audiences. 

In the most obvious sense, photography can powerfully highlight what is going on, raising awareness and driving public concern. This could be in an immediate, more news focused context, or over a longer period of time. With the latter, the value really comes through in the power of images to show a change over time, to make clear what has happened, changed, been lost or damaged. Some of these changes may be visibly dramatic and obvious, but they could also be more discreet, happening at a scale or pace not immediately visible day to day. In both instances, photography can be a powerful tool in recording and archiving, and in highlighting and proving a reality. 

To maximize this potential for engaging audiences we are often looking for images that distill wider issues into tangible, relatable human-focused stories – what was the effect on a community? How did that community adapt to the changes? We’re also looking for images that go beyond overly familiar visual stereotypes and tell stories in new, compelling ways. We are now all familiar with images of polar bears clinging to melting ice, forest fires sweeping across hillsides, and smokestacks pumping out pollution into the air – and there’s no doubt that these photographs have powerfully contributed to the public image of climate change. But it is our responsibility as photographers and picture editors to build on this and seek new ways of telling these stories and to continue to develop how we visualize these issues. Think about how complex, intersecting issues can be distilled into tangible stories, how your audience might approach an issue and what kind of imagery they are likely to respond to. 

Photography has the potential to fulfill an evidentiary role and then go further, going beyond literal illustration to demonstrating to an audience why something matters. We are looking for photography that can do this – telling the stories of what is happening and then providing a compelling narrative for the viewer to engage with. 

Abandoned homes along the only road traversing Isle de Jean Charles. Home to the Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians that have inhabited this narrow island since the 1830s. Located in the Terrebonne Parish, LA, the island and its residents have been in direct threat from hurricanes and sea level rise, which has led to a controversial resettlement project for the community. The increased and consistent threat of climate related events for the island has resulted in a majority of residents moving away, with only 5 families remaining on the island. February 8, 2020. Photo credit: Juan Diego Reyes / Climate Visuals

Proof of degradation, before and after comparisons and human rights angles come to mind, what else?
All of those themes are very important. I’d add highlighting the impacts of climatic changes both locally and globally, the inequality of how impacts are felt, and foregrounding any systemic issues at the heart of a story.

I’d also say that connecting all of these angles into a compelling narrative is an essential role for photography. From an editorial perspective, photography presents a powerful opportunity to knit all of these elements together, again coming back to the idea of helping audiences to engage with what is going on, why a story matters, why they should stop scrolling and engage in more detail, and why this subject deserves their concern. In distilling complex issues into tangible stories, photography can play a vital role in taking climate storytelling out of the abstract, humanising technical details and building a compelling, relatable sense of why stories matter. 

What examples came across your desk recently that felt powerful to you?
We recently worked on a project looking at the effects of air pollution on communities in Indonesia, Poland, South Africa and the UK. In South Africa, photographer Gulshan Khan made some great work with communities in the Highveld region, showing the serious health effects of air pollution in the area. These effects were part of the so-called Deadly Air Case, where the poor air quality over the Highveld Priority Area was deemed a breach of residents’ section 24(a) constitutional right to an environment that is not harmful to their health and well-being. These photographs, combining striking portraits of affected individuals with documentary images of daily life and compelling general views really tell the story of the effects on the local community.

Maria Nkosi* demonstrates how she uses a few times a week for her asthma at her home which is a street away from a mine in Clever, Witbank, Emalahleni, South Africa, on November 28, 2023. In 2021 the High Court in Pretoria confirmed a judgement in what was called the Deadly Air Case, that the poor air quality over the Highveld Priority Area is a breach of residents’ section 24(a) constitutional right to an environment that is not harmful to their health and well-being.  *not her real name. Photo credit: Gulshan Khan/Climate Visuals

Samuel Nkosi* walks through a plot of land next to a mine where he farms vegetables which he donates to the church in Witbank, Emalahleni, South Africa, on November 28, 2023. *not his real name. Photo credit: Gulshan Khan/Climate Visuals

A map of the Vosman area drawn by founder Vusi Mabaso hangs on the wall of the offices of Vukani Evironmental Movement (VEM) discuss the issue of informal miners called Zama-Zamas at their offices in Witbank, Emalahleni on November 28, 2023. VEM is a non profit organisation that was established in 2016, focused on environmental justice issues like Air Pollution, Climate Change and Energy, Water and Sanitation. Photo credit: Gulshan Khan / Climate Visuals

Similarly, in Indonesia, photographer Aji Styawan photographed taxi driver Istu Prayogi in Jakarta who was part of a group of residents of the city who filed a lawsuit relating to air pollution problems. In portraits and reportage of daily life, these images help to ground an expansive problem in real world, relatable stories.

Istu Prayogi (58) working as an online taxi driver, looking for passengers amid the traffic in Jakarta, Indonesia, on November 16, 2023. Every morning he coughs and spits out ripples of thick blood, affected by the air pollution. In 2016, Istu was diagnosed with respiratory problems, referred to as Acute Respiratory Infections (ARI). In August 2019, Prayogi as part of a group of 31 residents who are members of IBUKOTA (Capital) Coalition filed a citizen lawsuit to the Central Jakarta district court related to air pollution problems. They sued the President of Indonesia, the Minister of Health, the Minister of Transportation, Minister of Environment and Forestry, Governor of Jakarta Capital Special Region, West Java and Banten Province. One of their demands is regarding improving regulations for handling air pollution in Jakarta and its surroundings. Photo credit: Aji Styawan/Climate Visuals

Away from our work, I thought that Chris Donovan’s photography of St. John, New Brunswick, recently featured in the New York Times, was a standout example of the power of deeply reported visual storytelling to communicate complex, intersecting stories to an audience and I was really pleased to see the work given the space to tell the story in this way. 

Ewa Pisarzowska worked for over 25 years in the coal mines and salt extraction industry in Rybnik. She lost work during the pandemic and so did her partner, they soon could no longer afford to rent an apartment and for a few months lived at their friend’s place. Recently they rented a studio apartment with central heating, but without furniture. They struggle to pay for food or electricity. Ewa sometimes helps at the “Wspolny Stol” center, she looks for food, still edible but not for sale, in dustbins near big grocery stores. To save money on electricity and still know what is happening in the world she often uses TV as the only source of light in the house.  Rybnik, Silesia, Poland. December 14 2024. Photo credit: Kasia Strek / Climate Visuals

While photography could be a game-changer for climate litigation, there are real, structural, and even ethical barriers that prevent the kind of visual storytelling and documentation that would truly support justice-centered climate work. What do you see as the biggest barriers?
Firstly, time and money. Much of what Climate Visuals advocates for has detailed, in-depth, photographic storytelling at its heart, which as we all know is often expensive and time consuming to produce and all too often out of reach for many. Relatedly – display space. This kind of photojournalism needs to be afforded the space on publication to get into the detail and hold a narrative structure. Whilst there are outlets publishing fantastic, long-form and in-depth, visual reporting, the opportunities for this are only ever decreasing, whilst all the while the dominance of single-image distribution via social media grows. This is a challenging environment for the kind of imagery our evidence tells us audiences want to see. 

Interlinked with these three challenges is the appetite for a less literal, limited and illustrative role for photography in the coverage of climate change. As above, much of what our evidence base encourages becomes more possible when photography’s role in storytelling is not restricted to place-holder, generic images at the top of web articles and in social media thumbnails. Whilst digital platforms provide near limitless opportunities for complex and in depth visual storytelling formats, all too often comprehensive reporting is accompanied by generic, familiar imagery and the potential for compelling and engaging photography is missed. 

As a photography industry we need to continue to push for the expanded role that I’m sure we all believe images should fulfill. We need to seek evidence and rationale for this expanded role to build that justification – be it research evidence like at Climate Visuals, or case studies of high performing exemplary content through audience metrics. It is with these kinds of insights that you can build a case and achieve the necessary buy-in. 

Beyond those structural barriers, I would highlight a couple of other key issues, firstly the safety of participants. This must be at the heart of any considerations about visual coverage of climate litigation and include the full spectrum of potential image uses into the future. Appearing in imagery and being linked to litigation could bring with it significant personal and community risks for participants. Truly informed consent and frank, detailed and empathetic conversations including all available information with any potential participants is essential. Added to this is the ethics of using individual stories to represent wider, more systemic issues. This needs to be carefully considered on a case by case basis, and individuals and their stories need to be appropriately protected, for example with clear limitations on how, where and when imagery can be used. Ensuring that a diverse range of perspectives contributes to the visual coverage is also key. As commissioners and photographers we must collaborate with communities in telling their stories, seek to work with photographers connected to the stories, locations and contexts they are photographing and prioritise expanding the diversity of perspectives seen by audiences. Only by doing this can the full potential for engaging, empathetic and ethical, justice-centered climate visual storytelling be realised. 

Visual evidence-based imagery can serve as critical documentation in legal cases – how are you verifying these images are not manipulated?
Climate Visuals works to, and promotes, photojournalism industry best practice with regards to image manipulation. With commissioned work we are collaborating with trusted photographers who know, understand and actively represent the values and ethics that underpin our work. With submitted images we work with a set of submission guidelines that include standards for manipulation as well as ethical best practice. In addition to these safeguards we carry out verification checks on imagery through a mix of processes including OSINT analysis of content, scenes and locations, fact checking of details and caption information, and working with trusted local partners to confirm image and story details. 

We also prioritise accompanying images with detailed caption information and encourage its inclusion when images are used to ensure that further detail, context and nuance accompany the images.

The solar park located outside the village of Feldheim, Germany on February 21, 2023. The park produces  enough energy to meet the yearly electricity demands of approximately 600 households consisting of four individuals each. Feldheim is the first village in Germany to be completely self-sufficient in energy. With the help of wind energy, photovoltaics, biogas, biomass, a regulating power plant and a local heating network, the village covers its own needs. The large amounts of surplus energy generated in the process are fed into the public grid. Photo credit: Ingmar Björn Nolting / Climate Visuals

What role do you see photography playing within political activism to support the themes of climate change and justice?
Photography can play an important role in helping audiences understand and relate to complex issues. From performing an evidentiary role, recording and highlighting what is happening around our planet, to driving public concern and opinion, there’s a long history of photography playing a powerful role in the issues of climate change and justice. In our ever increasingly image-saturated world I still believe that photography has an essential role to play here, but I do think that the way in which it can play this has changed. I believe that the potential for single photojournalistic images to take on ‘iconic’ status and go on to represent whole issues is now greatly reduced, the volume of new imagery being produced and consumed, and the speed of its consumption, is just too great. Instead, photography’s power as a tool for in-depth, empathetic storytelling, across different platforms and use contexts, should be prioritised. In a highly competitive visual environment, compelling visual reporting presents an opportunity to capture audiences’ attention, inform and build understanding, concern and empathy. To do this however, photography’s role in telling stories of climate change and justice needs not to be restricted to pure illustration, but instead to have the scope and freedom to tell these stories in depth, from a diverse range of perspectives, and with adequate space on publication. Only then can photography fulfil its full potential to humanise complex issues and build empathy, ground stories in a reality that audiences can relate to, and build a weight of evidence behind concerns. 

I also think photography can play an important role in helping audiences to visualise a future. It can show how a situation could be improved, how a community elsewhere came together and solved a similar problem, and what opportunities could come were a cause to be fought. Photojournalism’s role in telling constructive stories shouldn’t be overlooked – we know from our research that images of climate change impacts are very emotionally powerful, but they can also overwhelm audiences. One way to combat this is to pair them with images highlighting tangible, relatable actions that audiences can take, or visual reporting that shines the light on ‘what happened next’ – it’s vitally important to record and show the devastating impacts of climate change, but don’t stop there, seek ways to demonstrate future potential through imagery too.

Firefighters are surrounded by a scorched landscape as they continue to work to tackle a large moorland wildfire in the Goyt Valley, near Buxton in the Peak District. Derbyshire, England. 3rd May 2025. The blaze caused extensive damage to vegetation in the area. Credit: Alastair Johnstone-Hack / Climate Visuals 

Rachel cycles her children to school on a cargo bike, through busy traffic, in Didsbury, Manchester, UK. 2nd February 2024. Photo credit: Mary Turner / Climate Visuals

How did you get involved in Climate Visuals and what are your core themes?
I came to Climate Visuals from my previous role as Deputy News Picture Editor of The Times and The Sunday Times newspapers in London. Before that I was an agency news photographer in south west England. I have long been a keen follower of the work Climate Visuals was doing to combine research insight with practical, usable guidance and resources, and jumped at the chance to get involved. 

At the heart of what we do is our evidence base – this underpins our guidance and the resources that we provide users. It is founded in an original piece of research looking at audience responses to different climate images and led to our 7 Climate Visuals Principles. Since then, we have continued to expand our understanding through further projects, including ones focussed on photographing the ocean and climate link, diversity in images of England’s green and natural spaces, best visual practice for working with those with, or who are from, Indigenous and forest communities of Central and South America, and guidance for photographing extreme heat.
Alongside our guidance resources we run an image library which contains thousands of images that exemplify our findings. Many of these are available through licences that allow for free non-profit, editorial and educational use – making compelling and engaging images of climate change available for those who often find them out of reach. You can browse the library here.

If a photographer wanted to submit images, are you centered around specific themes?
I’m always interested to hear from photographers and see any work people think we might be interested in. Our thematic focus depends on the specific projects that we are working on, but broadly I’m always excited to see images and stories that fulfil our guiding principles/evidence and tell new, compelling environment and climate stories. Whilst we aren’t always able to accept submissions, I am always seeking to expand our network and awareness of photographers working on climate and environment stories in case the opportunity arises for collaboration.  

How does the funding work and is there any assignments, or is this all submission based?
It depends on the project we’re working on – we work with a mix of commissioned assignments, such as with this project on air pollution, and submissions such as with our Ocean Visuals and Visualising Climate Change initiatives. For updates on what we are currently working on you can follow us on social media @climatevisuals.

Aidan Klimenko

Heidi: Your work has an impressive range – it would be hard to categorize. You mentioned your work asks questions. What questions you thinking about in your recent personal work.
Aidan: I’ve always been drawn to photography because I’ve seen it as an access point to the world. A license to ask, to look, and to learn. Sometimes I find answers, but most often I just find more questions. With this current work that I’m making while in grad school, I’m taking my interest in landscape—an interest that’s been fostered in objectively beautiful places like Antarctica, the Amazon, and Patagonia—and applying it to the contemporary urban, corporate, and residential environments of Los Angeles.
The questions that I’m finding myself thinking about while I walk around and photograph stem from my personal experience of moving to a big city for the first time after years spent living on the road, mostly outside in nature. LA is bizarre and layered. It’s a mix of so many things without really having a centralized, defined identity. And it’s home to a lot of this American obsession with concrete, stucco, and bright colored walls that I’ve been finding myself interested in using as elements to question our relationship with this environment we’ve built and surrounded ourselves with. I’m using this time in school to learn about creating work that provides space for the viewer to have their own relationship with the images—space to ask their own questions instead of making images that are limited by the answers they provide.

It’s interesting, you’re challenging what a wall is – using that typology to question the meaning of a barrier or confining something. Is this an act of resistance in your mind?
Yes, I think so. Or, at least it started out that way. When I first started walking around Los Angeles, it was easy to make work that directly contrasted the open air, natural landscapes that most would think of when they consider the term “landscape”. The images came easily, but quickly felt cliche. Somehow singular and predictable in their general pessimism. It’s easy to focus on the strictly negative–especially here in LA. It’s a dirty city with a massive unhoused population contrasted with insane wealth, all in and around and on top of itself. To treat it only as one thing—whether grimy or glamorous—would be a very narrow point of view. There are so many aspects to LA, and as I continued to walk and to photograph, I began to find myself interested in the complexity of these layers and in how they’re represented in the community architecture of subways, storefronts, traffic markings, and yes, walls. So much of it is colorful and built to look nice, but ultimately to direct or deter us in one way or another. Not meant to be comfortable. Liminal in nature. You’re allowed here, but only to a certain capacity and not for very long.

And then, layered onto these surfaces of glossy colorful paint or polished steel are traces left—markings, scribbles, covered graffiti or hand prints that show a back and forth that is sometimes violent and other times subtle. Visual responses to this landscape, or in resistance to it.

It’s been a fun exercise to shift from relying on obviously compelling subject matter (like penguins in Antarctica or secluded communities in Greenland) to make compelling images. I miss spending my time in nature, and I’m sure that’s seeping into my work. But this has been a very rewarding chapter that’s leading me in a direction that I’m finding quite engaging.

Rather than responding to a market need and losing control of your photographic voice, you are staying true to your development.
Hey, I’m trying! Your best work will always be the stuff you’re passionate about. I’ve always believed that leaning into finding and establishing your own voice as an artist will eventually lead to an identity that’s more uniquely yours rather than a style that looks like everyone else’s following whatever the latest trend. And on top of that the work that is the most fun to make often is the often strongest. Good things come from good work so I try to stay true to making work that inspires me.

I’m still very much on this path of finding my visual identity and am constantly reminding myself to prioritize making work that gets me excited. But doing this is easier said than done, especially when you depend on your artistry for income. In my 20’s, my answer was to live in my truck. By not needing to keep up with rising rent costs I was able to pursue projects that I resonated with rather than having to sacrifice my vision to pay bills. But I recognized this as somewhat temporary solution—despite lasting 7 years on the road without paying rent!—and not likely a sustainable long term path that would lead to the things that I wanted for adult-me, like a stable family lifestyle. Now that I’m in LA, married and starting a family, things have changed and that discipline of staying true to the work that inspires you is much more difficult. LA is an expensive city and my continued path of finding my place within its working professional photography scene has not been a direct one or particularly easy. But it’s led me to some interesting places—some of which have resonated in surprising ways, like commercial fashion and architecture and others not as much. I’ve tried to remember that it’s hard to know whether or not you like something without ever trying it. There are lessons to be learned in even the most unexpected places and on the most unpleasant of jobs.

How do you exercise discipline and fight the temptation of trends?
I’m as tempted by trends as anyone and I’m happy to experiment with new ideas and see what sticks. I take with me whatever I think I can use to get closer to my evolving identity and leave the rest behind.

How does fashion and architecture interplay in your images, does one inform the other?
I’m curious about what connects us, both across continents and within our communities. My work has always touched on environment, sometime on a personal or cultural level and sometimes in more remote, abstract ways. But even when I’m in the middle of nowhere I’m thinking about how we are affected by these places and how we in turn affect them. Fashion reflects how we present ourselves to one another socially—how we choose to either fit into a social environment or stick out from it. One of the many “threads that connect us” if that’s not too on-the-nose. And I think architecture deals with how we as a society choose to interact with our physical environment. The building materials we use, the colors we choose, the space we give ourselves (or don’t) reflects so much about our societal values, our place in the world and our relationship to it. The work I’m making in school is architectural and while it doesn’t directly feature people (yet) it is still very much about people.

Your Antarctica work is a sharp contrast to your state fair work in both tools and approach. Tell us about the approach for each.
Both my Antarctica and State Fair work are ongoing projects and contrast each other (and themselves) as they are both unfinished collections of images made over the span of a few years and a few different developmental stages in my photographic path. I’ve had the privilege of having visited Antarctica a handful of times since 2019, and each time I go down I’ve experimented with different viewpoints and perspectives. This often manifests in a variety of obsessions with different cameras and the aesthetics that each camera system provides. From grainy black and white 35mm to color 4×5 film to digital medium format… who knows where I’ll be in my journey of endless experimentation the next time I get the opportunity to get back down there.

As far as the State Fair goes, my wife’s family runs a chocolate chip cookie company at the Minnesota State Fair. I was never a big state fair goer growing up but since it now looks like I’ll now be going every year to bake cookies until the end of my days, I figured I’d better make some images along the way. I started with my 4×5 over my shoulder finding quieter moments amidst the dusty chaos of fried food and farm animals. The 4×5 is an ice breaker. People are curious about it and much more willing to have their photo taken than when I carry a more “normal” looking camera. But after starting back at school I was tasked with trying something completely different. Give up control. So I decided to lean into the chaos, ditch the tripod, shoot digital, play with flash, and shoot from the hip (maybe glancing at the camera’s fold-out screen, maybe not). I’ve recently been combining the 4×5 images with the digital in editorial pitch-deck PDF’s with the thought that it shows the breadth of my technical skills while covering a single event.

After commercial and editorial success, here you are back with creating more personal work – asking more questions – what are you hopes for pushing the personal body of work?
I’ve written like 10 different responses to this question and still don’t know if I’m any closer to being able to answer it. I’ve been pushing into the commercial and editorial worlds and I’ve certainly had wins here and there but I have by no means found any sure-footedness in either. While I continue to pursue financial stability I keep coming back to the mindset that I mentioned above: make the work that makes me feel something, at any cost, because that will be my strongest work. All the “wins” or “successes” I’ve had seem to have stemmed from work that I’ve made solely because I’m passionate about it. Personal work.

However, when I was last in South America making Autopista Autopsia, I wasn’t quite able to find the creative flow that I’ve heard other artists talk about. I was pushing my personal work in a new direction but I was having a hard time knowing how to get there. Listening to interviews and reading about the making of projects and books that I’ve always looked to for inspiration, I would hear stories about how one image would effortlessly lead to the next or about how good it felt to be making the work that artist was making. I, on the other hand, was feeling blocked up and I didn’t know how to move past feeling like I was forcing the work. On top of it all, I didn’t feel like I had the right community to turn to for constructive criticism. For too long, I was using social media as the only arena for showing personal work and getting feedback.

I needed help rethinking my creative process and reestablishing my relationship to the medium altogether.

The pursuit of a MFA in photography will absolutely not provide a road-map to success in the commercial world. In fact, if anything, it’s sure to steer me in a completely different direction all together. Though I do think it will bring me closer to creating work that points me towards the core of my artistic identity. And the stronger the personal work that I can put out into the world the more likely it’ll lead to that next “win”.

I won’t ask you about your truck, when was the last time you heard from the previous owners?
The truck! The previous owners are a Swiss couple who are currently living out of their van somewhere in Europe. We follow each other on Instagram and I drop them a line every few month with photos or with mechanical questions about this or that as all the manuals they left me are in German. It’s a very wholesome relationship that I hope to have with whoever I pass the truck along to, someday, maybe.