Ethos & Practice
Family extends far beyond
our own kind.
You have leaves in the oldest pages of your family album. Follow your bloodline far enough and you will hear them still: rustling between the vowels of your name.
The tree you climbed as a child shares an ancestor with you—one who lived well over a billion years ago. Though your lineages have long since diverged, both still carry related genes performing some of life’s oldest and most fundamental tasks.
But ancestry is only one of the ways lives are bound together. Say forest, and your mind probably summons trees. Yet a forest is not simply a collection of them. It is what countless species make possible for one another.
You, too, are an ecosystem, sustained by multitudes of microorganisms living in and on your body. The self we call singular has always been plural.
Still, the language we inherit can make these relationships hard to see. It is easier to call a forest timber, water a resource, an animal a pest or livestock, and land property than to stand there and remember: we are among lives with homes, hungers, and futures of their own.
Once we see them, different questions arise. Who else calls this place home? What does our presence change? What might we give back?
The oldest pages of your family album are full of leaves and there are pages still to come. Let them be full of life, too. Let them grow wild.
Code of Practice
How we create something matters as much as what we make.
1. Guesthood
We enter wild places as guests.
Every wild place is already home to lives other than our own. We move through it with the humility of a guest: treading lightly and staying on established paths wherever leaving them could cause harm.
We carry out everything we bring and pick up litter left by others. A small cotton bag always has a place in our pack for this purpose.
Throughout the year, and with particular care during breeding and nesting seasons, we pay attention to distance, noise, and signs of disturbance. If our presence causes an animal to stop feeding, hide, retreat, or repeatedly watch us, we have come too close.
2. Reciprocity
We do not enter only to receive.
A relationship asks something of us, too. What we bring may be as simple as a greeting, a poem, a song, an expression of gratitude, or an act of care appropriate to that particular place and moment. Whatever we offer, it does not purchase permission or entitle us to receive something in return. It is a way of entering into relationship without arriving empty-handed.
Reciprocity also means allowing the other to answer. To ask permission is to make room for refusal—and to let that refusal alter what we do. Before we photograph, gather, or make art, we pause and attend to what is present. What may be possible in one place or season may not be in another. When we cannot read the response with confidence, uncertainty itself is reason to step back.
3. Witness over Capture
From reciprocity grows our photographic practice.
To take. To capture. To shoot. The language of photography is steeped in possession. Our practice begins elsewhere: we seek to look with the living world, not merely at it.
Knowing the location of a badger sett does not entitle us to wait at its entrance with a camera. We do not pursue wildlife, disturb nests or breeding sites, use food or recorded calls to attract an animal, or stage an encounter for a photograph.
If obtaining an image would compromise the peace or well-being of another species, we let it go.
A photograph is not a trophy. It is the trace of a relationship.
4. Restraint
Care is also measured by what we choose not to do.
Loving a place does not make it ours, nor grant us rights or unlimited access to it. Sensitive ecosystems and undisturbed refuges are best honored by not entering at all.
Nor is every beautiful find ours to keep. A single stone or fallen feather may seem inconsequential in one person’s hand; a hundred visitors making the same choice is not. Before taking anything, we consider whether the place can spare it—and what would happen if everyone did the same. Most things are left where we found them.
The same restraint guides what we share. We do not geotag or reveal locations of nests, dens, or rare and vulnerable species. Often, visibility places a location or its inhabitants at risk, so we choose to keep those things private.
5. Truthfulness
Witnessing requires the refusal of manipulation.
We live at a time when almost anything within an image can be altered. That power has become so ordinary that leaving what was present intact is no longer the default. This alone shows how profoundly our relationship with photography has changed.
The images we share online are shown without retouching or manipulation. Only when a photograph is prepared for print do we make slight technical adjustments. Since screens emit light while paper reflects it, these are necessary to preserve the image’s appearance across the two media.
What you see is what was there.
6. Impermanence
We honor the cycles of return.
Creating Land Art has become a response to what we encounter around and within us. Gratitude, wonder, grief, and remembrance all have a place within the practice. A work may give thanks, honor a life that has ended, or mark a transition that would otherwise pass without much attention.
We create with fallen or abundant materials found on-site, or with plants we have grown ourselves. Any foreign materials are considered carefully and removed before we leave. We learn which species are protected, never uproot or injure a wild being, and take only what a place can spare, leaving plenty for other lives. Weather, animals, and decay are free to alter or dismantle what we have made.
Impermanence is part of the art.
Learning to let go is part of the practice.