This Land

It’s hard to explain a project that you didn’t realize you’ve been working on your whole life. It’s not like these photographs were shot on autopilot. I was just shooting in an attempt to show the beauty of our National Parks.

Only in the edit did I start noticing a trend, which I’ve been feeling subconsciously since I was a kid shooting Polaroid snapshots on cross-country family trips to the Grand Canyon, Painted Desert and the Great Smoky Mountains. The trend where I used people as nearly insignificant props in the vast landscape.

Not insignificant in the fact that we, as nature lovers or Americans, do not matter or play a role in the survival of these national treasures, but insignificant in the fact that we do not matter to the parks themselves – the trees, the mountains, the petrified wood.

The insignificance we feel while standing at the base of a granite tower or watching Old Faithful erupt is one of the many reasons we visit these lands, our land, this land, protected by an act of Congress many years ago.

Once you realize you mean nothing to the mountains, it makes them all the more powerful and beautiful.

Once you realize you are small and only a spectator, do you begin to realize how much this land really means to all of us.

These are just a few insignificant pictures of an insignificant project that I have collected in my quest to visit every National Park before I turn 40.

Cheers,

Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
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