To Behold
“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another”
Growing up in a small central Illinois town, I wanted nothing more than to see the world – to walk into the National Geographic photos of the Amazon and Antartica. Until I found myself working as a naturalist in a small state park in the foothills of the Ozarks. Getting to know that landscape intimately, day-by-day and season-by-season, fundamentally changed my dream. I wanted to dig deeply into one place, to discover it’s heart. When I arrived in the Roaring Fork Valley, I knew that I’d found that place. I seek Proust’s ‘strange lands’ in our backyard and struggle to see our home ‘through the eyes of another.’ Sometimes a change in perspective is all it takes for that the familiar to become new — perhaps to see our iconic mountains from a new angle or to look at snow, not as a field of powder, but as just a single flake.
All images are available at Elliott Yeary Gallery in Aspen, Colorado.