Hilary Bralove – Portrait of a Photographer

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.

mattpaynephotography.com

There is a particular kind of photographer who treats the camera as a reason to go somewhere, rather than as the point of going. Hilary Bralove is that kind of photographer. Based in northern Colorado after trading Washington D.C. for the American West decades ago, she has built a body of work that spans badlands and coastal cliffs, alpine meadows and desert night skies, migrating birds and nesting owls. Her work is the natural result of someone who goes outside with relentless curiosity and happens to bring a camera.

Her bio is honest about how she got here: self-taught, shaped by failure, fueled by what she describes as YouTube University.

The image that stops you first in Hilary’s portfolio is a view over a vast badlands formation under a storm-dark sky. Curtains of virga (rain that evaporates before reaching the ground) hang from the cloud base at the horizon, while a thin band of gold light opens to the right. Below, layered sedimentary formations fold and erode in every direction: browns, chalky grays, banded silts that record tens of millions of years of deposition in the space of a single frame. The scale is geologic. The drama is meteorological. The image holds both without either overwhelming the other.