My photography is an expression of my intimate and life-long connection to nature. I believe that everything in nature, animals, plants, water, places, and the earth herself, possesses a unique and recognizable “spirit” or “essence” and that we are all unquestionably interconnected.
The ephemeral quality of nature and natural light ensures that no matter how many times I visit a place I’ll never see the same scene twice. My goal as a photographer is to combine my experience and training as both a naturalist and an artist to freeze those fleeting images of nature that excite me and strongly express the spirit of my subjects.
An award winning photographer, Brian Creek has had a love of nature and photography since he was a boy exploring the local woodlots, marshes, ponds, and streams surrounding his hometown of Fairmount, Indiana. First with a blue, plastic, hand-me-down Kodak Brownie Flash 20 and, eventually, graduating to 4×5 press and field cameras, 35mm SLRs, and for the last several years, full-frame digital cameras.
When he was a child his family owned a couple of local weekly newspapers in eastern Illinois. His grandfather was the publisher/editor and his father was a reporter/photographer. His father was his first photography instructor and taught him about the technical side of film photography, including everything he knew about working in the darkroom, where he was a real master.
Brian has been shooting Canon cameras since the mid-1980s when he decided to focus exclusively on nature, landscape, and wildlife photography. Brian’s parents loved nature and passed that love down to him, and he, in turn, passed it on to his boys. Growing up in a rural Indiana farming community Brian didn’t spend much of his free time indoors.
The family would often spend weekends and school holidays at state parks where there were larger blocks of preserved nature, nature centers, and interpretive trails. Brian soaked it up like a big, thirsty sponge. Vacations were usually spent “up north” in the Great Lakes states or Canada. Sometimes they would stay in a nice, cozy log cabin, and sometimes in a tiny fishing shack that was full of mosquitoes and had a family of skunks living under the floor.
They were all fantastic adventures, but left him eager to visit real wilderness.
That opportunity came during a two-week backpacking trip to Yellowstone in high school. That experience dramatically changed his world view and kindled a life-long passion for wild places that has led Brian to explore wilderness and natural areas across the US and Canada, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Scandinavia, and the Arctic. His home is the 22 million acre Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the last remaining large, nearly intact ecosystems in the northern temperate zone of Earth.
A lifelong student of nature, Brian studied natural history, art, design, photography and landscape architecture in college and has continued to learn about photography from so many great and gracious photographers. Becoming a better photographer has definitely made him a better naturalist, gaining a very intimate understanding of plants, animals, and natural associations as a result of observing them through the lens of his cameras for 40 years.
As a committed environmentalist, Brian is an outspoken advocate for wild places and wild things, and, through his photography, a witness for the natural world. He is appalled (as anyone with a conscience must be) by the global fragmentation, degradation, and outright destruction of precious natural systems by rampant human exploitation that has occured in his short time on Earth.
Brian Creek lives in Montana, near the north gate of Yellowstone National Park.
