©Abe Aronoff

My passion is the natural world and I use photography, writing, and teaching as my tools to express myself.

The photography I am showing on this site focuses on several bodies of work. "Wilderness Moments", "Gentle Edges", and the Sense of Place "Photogravures" celebrate found moments of beauty. "Forest Abstracts" distill the elements of form, light and color into my interpretation of numerous forests. And "On The Road" grew out of the unfortunate reality that I am often traveling to art shows. With an energy completely opposite of that for the other bodies of work, where contemplation and moving slow are a virtue, this series has one rule: Everything must be created while moving, on the road. In all of my photography shown here, I use only natural light, without the use of filters or digital manipulation.

My writing, which started in the form of essays that hung next to each photographic print at art shows, continues and has taken shape in a series of books showing both images and essays. Future updates to this site will announce the release date of these books as well as a pre-publication offer to be sent to our mailing list.

My love for teaching, which started during college at the National Audubon Society teacher education camps and blossomed with the Institute for Earth Education, was rekindled in 1995 when Sam Abell of National Geographic and Reid Callanan of The Santa Fe Photographic Workshops opened a door for me to present a new workshop in Santa Fe titled "A Natural Eye". The premise for the workshop follows my own path in photography. After years of taking rather boring records of outdoor places and things, I accidentally dropped my camera into a saltwater estuary in the Everglades. Freed from the burden of always feeling the need to carry a camera I spent the ensuing years simply and purely seeing. When I picked up a camera many years later my images were entirely different. Its seems that in those years, without knowing it, but having spent countless months living in and close to the natural world, I had honed my natural eye. And my images showed it. Something fundamental had changed. I like to think that I let go of photographing objects and things in favor of capturing the essence of places and the magic of moments. It is that spirit of developing a natural eye first, and then bringing a camera and its technical skills up to that eye that organizes the week in the Natural Eye workshops. In January of 1998 I was honored to be the first recipient of The Santa Fe Center for Visual Arts' Excellence in Photographic Teaching Award.