Welcome to my first collection in a series of portraits of places!

I’ve begun to think of landscapes as almost animate beings. In my mind, landscapes’ places in historical narratives, the cultural and political lives of the people who reside within their borders, and the color schemes of their wildernesses all act as characteristics and markers of their identities. Even the particular sensation and quality of a place’s air upon the skin can speak to its so-called personality.

I love the idea of a place holding an identity, and I think it’s beautiful to imagine a landscape building and holding identity through its inhabitants. That imagined identity would evolve through human migration, animal extinctions, and the creation and destruction of cities. Roadways and street lights and mourning doves on telephone wires. Mines and the people within them, moving beneath the skin of the hills, farmers retiring their fields for other dreams, little kids chasing cats to the outskirts of towns. Hungry foxes leaving the wild moors for suburbs, for trash cans that spill over. We would all play moving, influential parts in a changing story. It’s a poetic idea that lends a useful spotlight to real issues that matter to all species’ lives.

There is also significant beauty in the thought that a landscape itself holds an original identity of sorts, irrespective of time and shifting inhabitants, and that the lives that are made on that land are shaped by it. In reality, both thoughts hold truth. We evolve, and so does the wilderness, and so too do the houses we build.

The idea of an animate landscape doesn’t come from my own imagination, of course; it can be found within thousands of years’ worth of different cultural narratives and traditions. I can’t speak about the notion of land holding identity without giving reference to the Inca people in particular, whose belief systems and traditions I learned about while traveling in Bolivia and Peru. They held environmentally intuitive and beautiful beliefs and stories about the role of landscape, particularly stone, as a part of the living world. Becoming familiar with that cultural history for the first time brought the human-land relationship of my own country to light. The contrast was stark and fascinating. Americans have historically perceived and interacted with the natural world in an isolated manner; we tend to think of ourselves as separate from rugged wilderness in particular, and of the earth as less than animate. We would do well, I think, to pay attention to other cultural examples of human relationships to land, to other practices and ways of thinking about it, from both history and the present day.

Often when I travel, I come into a landscape that is new to me with very little true understanding of its “identity” and context in the world. I always hope to connect to some authentic sense of the essence and character of places, rather than rely on the stories I’ve heard as an outsider. Connecting to the people, the stories and the landscapes that make all places “who” they are has been my way of doing that these days. Exploring the notion of land holding identity has inspired me as a traveler to seek even deeper connections to the realities of both land and citizen. Northern Ireland has been a fascinating place to get to know so far, and I am so looking forward to hearing more of its story. Below is a collection of images I’ve taken here. By no means can they capture any whole identity, and of course they showcase Northern Ireland through my American eyes alone. I hope, though, that this series might inspire us to follow our curiosities to truer stories about all landscapes and cultures.