First Season

Young bears are different from old bears. They move with more urgency and less certainty, their bodies still growing into the landscape around them. We had come to this stretch of coastal Alaska by flat-bottom skiff that morning, working the gravel bars and river mouths along the coast, and found the bears already out - this young one moving with a looseness and energy the older animals didn't show. It was running the gravel bar at full speed, seagulls scattering in every direction, the wide open terrain of coastal Alaska spreading out behind it - green hills, blue water, flat shingle beach as far as the eye could see.

There was a joy in the movement that older bears don't often show - a looseness, a lack of self-consciousness. The gulls weren't a threat; they were obstacles to scatter. The gravel wasn't a surface to navigate carefully; it was something to cross at speed because that's what felt right. I was watching a bear in its first salmon season, still figuring out what it was capable of.

First Season is an image about beginning - about the particular energy of something that is new to itself and hasn't yet learned to conserve it. The vast Alaskan backdrop gives the young bear its proper scale: small against an enormous world, running hard, just getting started. On a large metal print, the sweep of that landscape holds its full depth, and the bear in motion carries the eye forward through the frame the way the bear itself was moving - without hesitation.