Ah yes, the year that went as no one expected. Over the last decade I’ve made a habit of looking back on the previous 12 months of achievements and photography by creating a retrospective in the form of a blog post. For 2020 I almost didn’t bother. This year has been rough on a lot of folks for countless reasons; I’m certain you don’t need me to remind you of the hardships. But it would be wrong to write the year off and say we didn’t learn anything. Some people found new passions they weren’t aware of, a fresh breath of creativity into their work or life, and hopefully many of us learned how to manage stress while working through challenges.

This was a year without art shows for me. Many of you may know that I make the majority of my income through these shows while also having the wonderful opportunity to meet my collectors in person and see my artwork go up in their homes. Right as the show season was about to start the world turned upside-down and public events became an impossibility. Once the initial shock of the situation wore off, I turned my efforts entirely to my photography. If nothing else I figured it would be a great year to create some images since the summer schedule was completely cleared out.

I spent the majority of my year focusing on the open spaces of the prairie and deep backcountry where it was possible to comfortably maintain distance from others. What many people don’t realize is that the western half of the country became America’s playground in a way we’ve never seen before. With exotic summer vacations canceled, an unbelievable surge of humanity poured into the tourist towns and national parks of the west. Finding solitude meant hiking deeper into the wilderness or avoiding certain mountain areas altogether. For me it opened up opportunities to visit areas I normally wouldn’t have, with a schedule that was more flexible than I’ve experienced in my life. The end result was one of the most photographically productive years of my career. Even as I write this post I still have a stack of film sheets that need to be worked through from the year, I expect many more images will come once they have been sorted, scanned, and added to the gallery.

I want to give a sincere thank you to anyone who has helped support me this year. I owe my deepest gratitude to those who continued to purchase prints even though art shows were canceled. The incredible support of the film community through ebook sales and my drum scanning services has been appreciated more than you can imagine. This year also gave me the time to start working with wood and crafting my own frames, it was great to see the success as I released these handmade framed prints. Thank you all for helping me get through this unusual year! Let’s all hope for great things in 2021.

With all that said, it’s time to share my personal favorite images from 2020 in no particular order. It was truly hard to cull down all the images into a short blog post, but here goes. These aren’t necessarily the ones that performed the best on Instagram, but rather ones that meant the most to me. Which one speaks best to you? Leave a comment below and let me know!