I grew up on rural Long Island, a camper and adventurer in that surrounding forest, marsh, and water world even before I was a Boy Scout. My friends and I would project our fantasies upon this environment turning it into a vast gameboard, a place where exciting things happened, real and imagined. Later, in college, after stabs at majors in physics, zoology, economics, English, and American History, I began drawing and painting and with that, finally felt I was on to something. I pursued these disciplines at the University of Colorado and then at Yale before beginning a career of teaching at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. Along the way I discovered that photography best suited my disposition as it provided me a most satisfying way to think about the world.

‘Nature is Culture’
Since we are part of Nature our fate is to perpetually engage Her. Ansel Adams did and left us with images of this breathtaking stage upon which we find ourselves such tiny players. In these self-absorbed times he helped restore our sense of scale and place. Therefore it can only be a good thing for each of us to be in closer touch with our inner amazons, although I believe that the wilderness, or so-called untrammeled Nature, isn’t at all. She is the source of belief itself and a more evolved cultural phenomenon than any city, super computer, or symphony. For most of our human story She has been cast as a metaphor for what is frightening beyond knowledge. But Nature is not a stranger. By means of language, our most powerful tool, we have Her imagined and reimagined as always our most profound reference. Through Her we have projected our desire for meaningful and blessed lives while accompanying those wishes with our doubts and uncertainties. The sheer addition of images with which we have filled our history has persuaded us that Nature is what we say She is. Adam was really the last man to see in Her true wilderness. Now we’re Busch Gardens full bore. We name Her and minutely distinguish Her in songs, stories, pictures, buildings, parks, gardens and belief systems. Katrina and the warming globe are the latest pieces of our shared culture, as important as baseball, our obsession with youth, or our assumption that the sun will rise in the east.
In the interest of exploring my own feelings and thoughts about Her, I decided to look through photography at the array of elemental forms and inspirations She offers up in our National Lakeshore.

- Tom Mapp July 27, 2007