

Power and Emotion through Quiet Presentation

Matt Payne
Matt Payne is a mountain climber, adventurer, and fine art nature and landscape photographer specialising in unique and hard-to-reach locations and subjects, including the highest mountains in Colorado. Matt has climbed the highest 100 mountains in Colorado which is where his love for landscape photography began. Matt produces a podcast dedicated to that love affair called F-Stop Collaborate and Listen Matt's goal for the podcast is to create a space to have meaningful conversations with other landscape photographers all over the world.Matt also follows a very strict code of ethics as a nature photographer.
For the third iteration of this column, I really wanted to feature the work of Anna Morgan, a landscape photographer from the United Kingdom living in British Columbia, Canada. I admire Anna’s photography because of how it can evoke powerful emotion in such quiet presentations of colour and subject. Like most photographer’s work that I find myself admiring, I adore how her photography does not depend upon location nor conditions to portray interest, emotion, and mood. While Anna’s work does occasionally focus on locations that have been photographed a great deal by other photographers, she does so in a way that feels unique to her vision and way of seeing the world. In much of her photography, I get the sense that the subject is much deeper than a collection of simple objects in nature, rather, each image asks the viewer to reflect deeper within oneself to find something more.
Take, for example, her images of the desert, especially those taken in Death Valley National Park – for me they convey a sense of solitude, longing, peace, and silence – all things I greatly crave in my own daily life. Viewing these images instantly relaxes me and forces me to take pause and consider the actual weight of things going on in my life. These images help me put things in perspective and provide solace through photography. This is an example of something that I think that a great landscape photographer can do through their images – produce an emotional reaction beyond the obvious and ordinary postcard photo “oohs and ahhs.”
Another aspect of Anna’s photography that I really enjoy is