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, Eliot Porter, Maurice Sendak, Peter Beard, Lewis Carroll and others blazed the trail; I simply stumbled along in their path.

I found creative inspiration as a young child in Joy Adamson’s Born Free. Born Free in turn led me to Peter Beard’s Zara’s Tales, Beryl Markham’s West with the Night, Pau. Theroux’s Dark Star Safairi and Peter Matthiessen’s classic  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 was by then set in stone — but still,, the green hills of Africa beckoned. They held a deep mystery for me — electrifying, exhilarating, edifying, 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 the casual visitor, and move them to rise up and help turn the tide against the wanton destruction of what’s left of  nature’s enchanted kingdoms.

“What aimless dreaming!” the pioneering aviator, navigator and Kenya resident Beryl Markham wrote in West with the Night, in 1942. “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.”

Words carry meaning, always. And so, too, do images.

Here’s the Vermont poet John Elder, in The Green Desk:

“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.

For there it is, for all to see.