New aerial photographs I made over the Great Salt Lake in the spring of 2013. This trip was funded directly by my 2012 Baker Prize. Thank you Baker Fund!

Since 2004, I've frequently made my way to Burning Man, the awe-inspiring art and survival fest held each August in the Black Rock Desert of Northwest Nevada. The images one sees of Black Rock City almost always feature the amazing and audacious "public" artwork that fills the open spaces. But I'm always just as enthralled with the creativity and energy participants pour into personalizing their own camps. These images are the beginning of an effort to document this exceptional and unique phenomenon that pops up for a week each summer and then disappears without a trace, along with the entire city of 50,000 people.

My trip to Black Rock City in 2012 was funded by my 2012 Baker Prize. Thank you Baker Fund!

The Arctic is at a critical turning point. For most of human history, the forbidding region has been inaccessible to all but a few small groups of indigenous subsistence communities and elite European explorers. The twentieth century brought new exploration and increased industrial activity to these remote northern areas, but the cold winters and ice-packed oceans have proved to be formidable barriers to mass industrial expansion …until now.

Global climate change has recently resulted in the warmest years on record, while increasing worldwide energy consumption has led to more aggressive searches for fossil fuels and other mineral resources. As the planet warms, and the sea ice melts at a record pace, stakeholders in energy, extraction, shipping, fishing, development, and tourism are gearing up to take advantage of the region’s suddenly increasing accessibility. Small communities are poised to become major hubs for transportation and extractive industry, while long fabled sea routes, including the Northwest Passage, are about to become viable for commercial shipping and tourism.

My goal, over the next decade, is to document in photographs the colonization of a new space, and to record the dramatic changes certain to occur in the remote areas of northern Alaska, Canada, Norway, Greenland, and Russia. I will be working in collaboration with Michael Burger, a creative writer and environmental lawyer.

In the summer of 2013, we made our first trip to northern Norway -- the most fully developed Arctic region -- where government and industrial entities are preparing to take advantage of the substantial changes just beginning to take shape.

This trip was funded directly by my 2012 Baker Artist Prize. Thank you, Baker Fund, for making the launch of this ambitious project possible!