All This Brutal Beauty

One weekend last winter I went to the forest on the verge of a full meltdown. Forest time with my camera is almost always really grounding for me. It was a brutally cold morning and nothing will force you back into your body like being chilled to the bone.

I ran back to my car to warm up enough to feel my fingers and spent a little time journaling – another massively beneficial activity when I’m on edge. I was trying to write about this feeling of forest and self – the rawness. For well over a decade now, I enter winter feeling like an exposed nerve. Over-stimulation and over-expectation leaves me in a state where I am far more sensitive to everything around me.

Journaling, I kept coming back to the line “All This Brutal Beauty”. It became a kind of mantra for my day – reminding myself where I am and why I’m there. 2025 saw me coming back to this time and again. For a while I mentally named a series of photographs with the phrase, but I can’t keep it there. It isn’t a series title, it is more of an approach or philosophy. All this Brutal Beauty is a label the feels like a description of my life – often lived as if I were an exposed nerve.

I find myself letting go of a lot of things these days. One of them is any pretense about what my approach to creation is. I honestly couldn’t tell you what I was thinking when I made any photo. I go to places I feel like I’ll find something, try to be curious about my surroundings, then I start snapping the shutter. Looking at the metadata, when I start pressing the shutter button, it is often only 1-2 seconds between frames. I’m not thinking. Nothing is being contemplated or considered. There is no “previsualization” or concept that I’m chasing.

I began taking art classes in second grade. I have pursued art and art education ever since. All of my education taught me that this isn’t a proper or serious approach – especially in photography. Everything needs serious consideration. Compositions and balance must be thought out. You need to calculate the proper depth of field for the scene, carefully pick your focus points, and make sure the exposure is correct for the scene. Yeah… right.

Years if training and repeating practice has had its influence and I can wing most of that from instinct or minimal thought. I unthinkingly create and spend the next several months or years trying to figure out what, if anything, any of it means. Eventually I name a series or group together photos of a similar aesthetic. Sometimes there is an obvious “something” that was on my mind. More often, there really isn’t. What I’m after, what I create, is a reflection of all this brutal beauty.