Antarctica

I spent six seasons working in the Antarctic at McMurdo Station.  It was a place of incredible beauty and incredible desolation.  The Antarctic is like being on another planet.  A planet devoid of life.  It made the fragility of life on this planet not an intellectual exercise but a gut level reality.  It deepened my appreciation of all things.  Our planet is literally alive, but not everywhere. Even on our rock there are places where life does not exist, at least nothing you would recognize as alive. 

It was also disconcerting to look up at an alien sky, a night sky I did not recognize.  Nothing was familiar, nothing to align myself with.  I can almost imagine how astronauts feel.  The common and the ordinary were gone.  I have found that making scanner photograpy images forces me to engage with my environment, to observe it and to see it with fresh eyes.  I never stop looking now, it is a gift. I am more aware of my world now.  Stop to look at that leaf, look at that flower, look up once again at that night sky, and realize that the common and the ordinary are anything but common.  Everything is a miracle.

Robert