Trans-Canada Highway, near Lytton, British Columbia, Canada,
July 2011
I am not, by training nor inclination, a nature photographer. When God was passing out the Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell genes, I was in line for the Walker Evans and Pete Turner DNA. Still, if nature has been altered, trimmed, and adapted by the hand of man, then I am attuned to this mutation, and it piques my interest and captures my eye.
Case in point: These young growth conifers in the mountains of British Columbia. They fascinate me as to how mankind can harmonize with nature, in a Grandma Moses sort of way
I'll leave the Muir Woods to those who can do it way better than I.
was, by the time of his death, a largely forgotten figure in the photographic world. Along with Baltimorean 
, Mortensen was the last great exponent of Pictorialism: A painterly school of photography that was supplanted in the late 1920s and early 1930s by the purism of such masters as 
and 
.
, 
, 
, and Morticia Addams, but never came across as hodge-podge. In the early 1930s, his Los Angeles studio boasted such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich and Fay Wray, but it was Mortensen's grotesqueries and lurid pin-ups for which he would later be remembered.
, 
, and 
in hushed, reverential, tones.