A Talented landscape photographer, Andrew Jackson captures the rawest elements of some of our planet’s most wild and untamed areas; whether that be rugged coastlines, snowy cliff tops or glimpses of the untamed and rarely sighted animals that live there. Yet aspects of his works also epitomise newly emerging definitions as to what a wilderness is. It has long been thought, for instance, that a wilderness is somewhere mountainous, windy, wet, or super-hot; devoid of human life but subsequently teeming with the lives of other species. Such ideas were encapsulated in the paintings of C.M. Russell, who depicted the vast herds of buffalo that once roamed the Great Plains of North America before the arrival of white settlers. What such artists moreover were pointing out through their works, with names like When The Land Belonged To God, was that this was a lost wilderness.
Indeed, a wilderness in the twentieth and in our twenty-first century has almost become something of an idyll; a lost past that we humans, particularly during the last two centuries through industrialisation, have destroyed. Such nostalgia has gradually transformed into guilt, an emotion which now weighs heavily on the minds of many Westerners, resulting in some areas striving to introduce re-wilding programmes, such as the reintroduction of wolves in Scotland and the buffalo in the U.S. What many of us seemingly forget, however, is that we humans and our structures, since our very inception as a species, have also been a part of Earth’s wildest regions.
‘I would define a wilderness as a place where the impact of humanity is low, and where nature still makes the rules’ replied Simon Reeve when asked to definehis version of a wilderness in a recent BBC interview about his latest series, Wilderness. ‘Humans have always lived in wild places, but often they have been ignored and their role in protecting and shaping the wilderness forgotten. It was really important we incorporated them and their stories into the programmes’ he added. In this regard, Andrew, like many of the artists within this issue, also documents humanity’s existence within our wild areas – whether it be rural homes, medieval castles, or journeying hikers. As he says:
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