Photography and nature share a long and storied relationship that dates back almost to the medium’s very beginning.
The first photographs of nature appeared in the early to mid-19th century, from William Henry Fox Talbot’s early photogenic drawings of plants and outdoor scenes using contact printing — including leaves, ferns, and the view from his window at Lacock Abbey — to Daguerreotypes and Calotypes in the 1840s.
In 1855, Frenchman Gustave Le Gray made unprecedented steps with his series of seascapes and maritime studies, composed with a dynamism not previously seen in photography. His image The Great Wave, Sète is considered one of the first photographs to convey a sense of motion. At the time, photographic chemistry posed a technical dilemma: if Le Gray exposed for the sea, the sky would appear empty and overexposed; if he exposed for the sky, the sea would fall into silhouette. His solution was to combine two separate negatives, one for the stormy clouds, the other for the churning sea, producing a seamless and dramatic evocation of nature’s elemental power.
Of course, it would be remiss not to mention Ansel Adams when talking about photography and nature. Widely considered the most important landscape photographer ever, Adams captured the breathtaking natural beauty of the United States in large-format, black-and-white images that are still revered today.
His gift for photography was discovered during a family trip to Yosemite National Park in 1916, when he was given an Eastman Kodak Brownie box camera by his father. The vast, captivating landscapes left a deep and lasting impression, as he later famously recalled, “I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite.”
Photography became his means of engaging with the natural world, a way to explore, understand, and honor its beauty. Driven by a profound love for wilderness and a desire to see it protected, he spent his life creating awe-inspiring depictions of the American landscape, work that not only helped define the genre of landscape photography but also played a vital role in shaping U.S. conservation policy and the protection of national parks.
From the sweeping grandeur of Adams’ vistas, nature also became a vehicle for symbolism, mood, and metaphor. The Pictorialist movement, for example, embraced soft focus and painterly effects, as seen in the work of Edward Steichen, whose wonderful depictions of misty woods and twilight forests evoke dreamlike introspection.
In contrast, Modernists like Paul Strand pursued clarity, structure, and precision, seeing nature not as a backdrop but as a subject through which to explore form and truth. Others, like Edward Weston and Ruth Bernhard, turned to its intimate, elemental details, photographing shells, peppers, and plants with sculptural precision. Stripped of context, these organic subjects became vessels for exploring line, texture, and light, a search for the universal in the specific.
Today, the relationship between photography and nature is explored in a myriad of ways. We live in a critical moment — the Anthropocene — where the evidence of climate change and human impact on the planet is visible all around us, and worsening by the day. For many photographers, this forms the core of their practice.
Artists like Edward Burtynsky, Mishka Henner, and Tom Hegen create striking large-scale images that reveal the dramatic effects of human intervention on natural landscapes, from coal mines and salt flats to vast infrastructure projects. Others focus more directly on the consequences of climate change, documenting melting glaciers, drought-stricken terrain, and the slow, painful transformation of ecosystems under stress.
Alongside these more overtly critical approaches, many respond to the current moment by emphasizing the fragile beauty and transience of the natural world. Photographers like Ning Kai & Sabrina capture its delicate textures, fleeting rhythms, and ethereal light in the face of accelerating ecological challenges. Others, in contrast, highlight its majesty, — its dramatic, awe-inspiring power — seeking to convey the same sense of wonder they feel when standing before its vastness.
Nature reflects something essential about humanity, our own fragility, resilience, and mortality. It shows us the cycles of life and death, growth and decay, reminding us that, like the natural world, we too are temporary.
Perhaps this is why, beyond its beauty, we as humans are so drawn to it, and why photographers since the very beginning have sought to document it. For in capturing nature, they capture a part of ourselves.
“To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.” — Ansel Adams
All images © their respective owners