the project
The Great Alaska Project is a year-long documentary and fine art photography initiative creating a visual record of Alaska at a critical moment in its ecological and cultural history. Over four seasonal field sessions totaling twenty-five weeks, I will traverse the state documenting the landscape and the human communities whose lives are shaped by it.
Landscape photography will capture the scale, breadth, and beauty of the state, from the mountains of the Brooks Range to the glacial bays of the Inside Passage to the tundra of the North Slope. The work will not shy away from industrial development and mineral extraction, shown honestly as both a detriment to the natural environment and an economic lifeline.
Portrait photography will center on Yup’ik, Iñupiat, and Gwich’in communities. On the Bering Sea coast, that includes Newtok and Mertarvik, where the first full-scale climate relocation of an American community was completed in 2024. In the north and along the refuge, it means the Iñupiat and Gwich’in communities whose subsistence and whose positions on drilling are inseparable from that land. The work will also reach commercial and subsistence fishing communities whose survival is threatened by a warming climate. All photography of Indigenous subjects will be conducted with explicit permission, cultural sensitivity, and community review prior to publication.
Each of the four seasonal sessions will last five to eight weeks, allowing deep engagement with locations and communities, and the time to build the trust that in-depth documentary work requires. I will reach remote regions by intra-Alaska flights, bush flights, ferries, and fishing boats, supported by wilderness guides and Indigenous consultants under extensive safety protocols.
Images will be made using a monochrome digital camera system. Removing the color filter array yields greater resolution and tonal range in black and white, allowing large-scale prints with the detail this work requires, consistent with my lifelong black-and-white practice.