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Matt Payne
Matt Payne is a landscape photographer and mountain climber from Durango, Colorado. He’s the host of the weekly landscape photography podcast, “F-Stop Collaborate and Listen,” co-founder of the Nature First Photography Alliance, and co-founder of the Natural Landscape Photography Awards. He lives with his wife, Angela, his son Quinn, and his four cats, Juju, Chara, Arrow, and Vestal.
In the fjords of Chile, somewhere between Ushuaia and Puntas Arenas, I watched William Nourse lean over the edge of our sailboat, not to capture the looming cliffs or moody skies like the rest of us, but to photograph chunks of ice slicing across the Starboard of our boat: small, graphic details most of us ignored without a second glance.
Later, when I saw the image, it felt more like a Rothko painting than a landscape photograph. Simple, precise, and quietly charged. It was then I realized that William isn’t chasing drama; he’s chasing form. And beneath that form lives a question: what does it mean to witness beauty in a world we’re watching slip away?