Robert Turner Landscape Photographs

There are times when my camera frames a scene that sweeps fifty miles to the horizon without a trace of human life. Those times are rare and thrilling. More often, I work to frame out the footprint of man on the landscape. I submit that these images are no less capable of uplift. As a species, we have the capacity to respond to the essence of wildness in a place, even if that place is only an island in the larger sea of human commotion.

Happily, many of these islands are preserved in parks and public lands. Unhappily, some of them are being overrun—loved almost to death for the very uplift they offer. Perhaps, though, the key word is almost. Even as the quiet places become harder to find they become more valuable as scarce examples, indeed as symbols, of what Wallace Stegner called “the idea of wilderness”. His words were written in 1960 but they have as much meaning today as then. Perhaps more.

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