ALEX STRACHAN

“Go to a place, capture its cultures, its fascinations, and life passions, and bring those images to life to illuminate and inspire others. It’s not enough to simply show what happened … you must make the greater world understand what it felt like to be there when it happened.”

The authors, adventurers, image makers, illustrators, and creative artists from whom I drew early childhood inspiration were evangelists of a kind. Beryl Markham, Paul Theroux, Eliot Porter, Maurice Sendak, Peter Beard, Lewis Carroll, and others blazed the trail; I simply stumbled along in their path on the plains and mountains of creative inspiration. Joy Adamson wrote a book called Born Free, which I read as a small boy, and which gave me Zara’s Tales, West with the Night, and The Tree Where Man Was Born.

I would not make it to Africa until I was in my late thirties. My career as a journalist and fledgling photographer was by then set, but still, the plains of East Africa held a deep mystery— electrifying, exhilarating, gripping, heartbreaking, heartrending, inspiring, touching, sad and joyous by turns.

“The idea that image makers can enjoy photographs, and even be influenced by them, seemed to me to make absolute sense. But that was not enough. Inspiration, passion even, does not exist in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new believers must be brought into the conversation as well.”

My hope is that, somewhere in my work, there will be a glimmer of something, anything, that will intrigue you, perhaps encourage you to rise up and help turn the tide against the wanton destruction of what is left of the natural world around us.

“What aimless dreaming! The drone of the plane, the steady sun, the long horizon, had all combined to make me forget for a while that time moved swifter than I.”

Beryl Markham wrote that.

Words carry meaning, always.

And so, too, do images.

“Wilderness is not dependent upon a vast, unsettled tract of land. Rather it is a quality of awareness, and openness to the light, to the seasons, and to nature’s perpetual renewal.”

Openness to the light. And there it is, for all to see.