What means Wilderness to you?

Thoughts

A few days ago, my friend Patricio Robles Gil asked me to write a few sentences about what wilderness means to me. I was based in Kotzebue at the time, doing aerial work to document America`s Western Arctic. It is a huge wilderness area that not very many people know about – but let me get to that in another post……

Between the shoots and the editing, I sat down and asked myself that very simple question. Coming up with an answer in a few sentences was not that easy. After all, wilderness is the reason why I became a nature photographer. Wilderness is the reason why I wanted to be an exchange student and come to America as a teenager. With over eighty million people in a country smaller than the state of Montana, there is little room for wilderness. As wilderness had disappeared in Germany, I longed to explore it in the American continent. The word wilderness envelops so many promises, feelings, memories and emotions for me that it is hard to define.