PLACE OF BLUE SMOKE
Place of Blue Smoke is an ongoing series of color photographs made entirely within the most remote reaches of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Since 2023, I have returned to this terrain again and again, drawn by a desire to better experience its complexity. The work reflects a sustained attention to the subtle and not-so-subtle forces that shape this landscape and have done so for millennia. These photographs are not meant as documentation, but as personal responses, records of presence, rhythm, and return.
As of October 11, 2025, I have completed seventy backcountry hikes, covering 1,311 miles and 301,415 vertical feet, spending 23 days, 12 hours, 25 minutes, and 18 seconds in active motion through these mountains.
My interest lies in the phenomenological, at times unexplainable, qualities of this landscape, how it is felt, perceived, and experienced over time. This way of working is shaped in part by learning from the Cherokee people, who originally inhabited this land and understood it not as static scenery but as a living presence. Their relationship to the landscape was rooted in reciprocity, story, and reverence, embedding meaning, spirit, and memory into place.
The deeper I go into this work, the more I accept that some things resist naming. What draws me to these mountains cannot be, and should not be, fully explained. Photography, for me, is a way to stay close to that sense of depth and ambiguity, to exist within it without needing to resolve it. These images give form to the ongoing connection I search for each time I enter these mountains.