It took me a couple of hours before it really clicked. I’ve spent years looking at these images on screens, editing them, organizing them, grouping them by location or timing. Everything lives the same way in that world, the same size, side by side, flattened into a grid.
Walking into the finished gallery and seeing everything printed, large and spread across the room took a minute for me to really digest.
Some scenes that felt massive in real life I ended up printing small. A 12x18 of camp with 7,000 ft mountains towering over you in person. And somehow that shift in scale made them more interesting to me, not less. It forced me to look at the work differently, to separate what something felt like in the moment from how it can exist as an image on a wall.
When I opened all the boxes and laid everything out, I didn’t know how I wanted to hang them. My first instinct was to group everything by location. Tahoe here, Alaska there, mountains together, maybe some city stuff mixed in on the sides. It made sense logically, but it didn’t feel right once it was physically in front of me. So I scrapped it and started over.
I began mixing locations, focusing more on color and feel than geography. Letting one image lead into the next based on how it looked, not where it was taken. That shift changed everything. The room started to feel cohesive in a way I didn’t expect, and the work began to speak to itself instead of being organized by a map. One image that stood out immediately was Nocturnal Cascades. I hadn’t seen it printed before, and the deep blues printed exactly how I remembered them standing on the side of the cliff in Oregon, which doesn’t always happen.
I had been out in the mountains for a week on a Red Bull shoot, one of those career goal jobs I’ve been working toward for a long time. We wrapped at 7:30pm the night before the opening, and I immediately started figuring out how to get to the show opening. I had pretty much accepted that I wouldn’t make it and would miss the opening entirely prior to this moment.
I ended up connecting with a pilot and flying over the Sierra in a small plane. On the way back we passed over Yosemite, which was a pretty surreal moment. That’s really where my connection to the outdoors started to really stick, so seeing it from that perspective on the way back to Mammoth like this felt like things coming full circle. Also a bit of a rock-star moment.
That gave me just enough time to step back and watch people interact with the work. Some moved through quickly, some stopped and read, and some barely looked at all. A few people stayed longer than I expected, and those were the moments that stoked me out. Watching someone stand there and connect two images from different walls, recognizing they were related even though they weren’t grouped together, was something I had hoped would happen but didn’t know if it would. Seeing that connection was pretty important to me, maybe as much as going out and creating the work itself.
I don’t think this experience changed what I’m drawn to photograph. I’m definitely still pulled toward challenging to reach places, early mornings, long approaches, and moments that often require a bit of discomfort to reach. But it did reinforce something. Seeing people respond to the work the way they did made me realize that what I’m drawn to isn’t just personal. There’s something I've been creating that people I don’t know also appreciate.
If anything printing all these images made me think more about scale. Some of these environments are hard to comprehend in a single frame. That sense of scale doesn’t always read the way it felt in person, and that’s something I’ll continue to think about, whether through print size or how I frame those moments in the future.
This body of work is essentially a collection of different moments from my life. Some of these images have been printed before, some have been sold, but none of them have ever lived together in a single space like this. Seeing them all in one room, across four walls, in a 45 FT long gallery space in a region where I grew up, was the first time it all came together in a physical way.
The show will be up through the end of May 2026. If you’re in the Bay Area, it’s worth seeing in person. The scale and detail don’t translate the same way on a screen.
After this, I’d like to keep it moving. Let it travel from space to space and see how it lands in different rooms, kind of like a band taking a set on the road and touring.
If you have a place that could host a set of 29 prints like this, I’d love to hear from you.
-Nick
