The awesome, majestic beauty of nature has given inspiration to photographers since the very beginning of the artform, no doubt evolved from centuries of paintings and drawings that drew upon similar landscapes.
Some photographers have made careers out of focusing on nature. Even if your focus is more on portraiture, fashion, or urbanscapes, there is still plenty to learn from the images of these incredibly talented nature photographers:
Gene Stratton-Porter
Born in the late 19th century, Stratton-Porter grew up in Indiana and was an active nature photographer, as well as a novelist and silent-film producer. She was a vocal and strident conservationist, passionate about protecting the vulnerable environments she so lovingly captured in her work.
Ansel Adams
Born in San Francisco, Adams had the chance to live in one of the most naturally diverse states in America, photographing desert, nature, and the ocean scenes in his unique style. Like Stratton-Porter, he was a lifelong environmentalist, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980 for his work shooting national parks for the United States Department of the Interior.
Karen Lunney
Lunney is a Brisbane-born, contemporary photographer whose work explores transition, liminal space, and where one thing has ceased and another not yet started. She has won multiple awards for her work, many of which use stark black-and-white photography to capture animals and their migration, as well as ocean shores and the light of sunrise and sunset.
Oriana Koren
Los Angeles-based artist Oriana Koren has exhibited their work in several major publications, and is known for both photographs of food and celebrity portraits, among others; their nature photography however is some of the best in the contemporary scene. Koren uses their background in documentary photography to create embodied, attentive, and lucid imagery from around the world, making for incredible, fully-realized images of nature.
Eliot Porter
Eliot Porter is best known for his vibrant color photographs of nature, but it was birds specifically that first captured his eye as a young, amateur artist. Porter wasn’t just interested in imagery, he also delved deeply into cultural studies of many of the locations he’d capture on film. Porter traveled around the world to photograph ecologically important and culturally significant places, including Utah, Maine, Baja California, the Galápagos Islands, East Africa, Iceland, Mexico, Egypt, China, Czechoslovakia, Antarctica, and ancient Greek sites.
Ludovic Coutaud is a NYFA alum and writer. For more information, click here.