Gallery

The full system runs 2.7 kilometres across. You cannot see it all from any single point. These four frames try to hold the scale from different distances: through the foliage, from the high lookout, and from the Brazilian side where the panorama opens up completely.

The river upstream is calm and ochre-brown. Then it breaks over the rocks, picks up speed, and goes over the edge. Below the falls it's mist and chaos. The boats that take you under get you completely soaked, which is entirely the point. These six frames follow the water from the quiet stretch to the boats far below.

The Argentine circuits (upper, lower, and the walkway to Garganta del Diablo) put you within metres of individual falls. At this distance the scale disappears and only the detail remains: the colour of the basalt, the shape of the water, the brightness of the vegetation. These four frames come from the walkways and the forest around them.

You spend more time in the jungle than at the falls. It's warm and wet from the mist, and the birds are loud in a way that doesn't stop. These three frames are from the paths between viewpoints, the parts most people walk through without stopping.

The first encounter. You're walking through lenga trees and then it's just there: a wall of blue-white ice rising from the water, taller than anything you expected. These five frames were made on the rocky shore at the base of the northern face, before stepping onto the walkways.

The northern face rises 60 to 70 metres from the water, roughly a 20-storey building standing in a lake. These three photographs are about the wall itself: the scale of it, the blue, and what it actually means that the ice you're looking at is two and a half million years old.

On the Big Ice trek you walk on the glacier surface with crampons. The meltwater carves channels and crevasses from within and the ice exposed inside is thousands of years old. That blue comes from the density: so compressed it absorbs everything except blue light. Four frames of pure abstraction.

The Big Ice excursion takes you onto the glacier with crampons. The scale only becomes real when you can compare it to a human figure. These three frames document that relationship.

Walking between the seracs on the Big Ice feels like moving through a city that's never been inhabited. Some towers rise six or seven metres above the surface, carved by sun and melt into shapes that look almost deliberate.

From the lake walkways below the glacier, the seracs appear as a jagged skyline: a frozen mountain range sitting on water. These three frames capture that perspective: looking up at the ice from below.

When a section breaks off it hits the water with a sound like a cannon shot. You feel it through the walkway. The ice then drifts across the lake for days, sometimes weeks. Six frames at every scale, from the autumn lenga looking down to the calving face at water level.

April in Patagonia. The lenga beeches turn red and orange before winter, creating an extraordinary colour contrast with the blue-white of the glacier. The light is lower, softer, and the foreground transforms completely.

From the elevated walkways on the south shore, you can look directly down onto the glacier surface. The texture is relentless: every square metre is different, every crevasse unique.

Two frames that place the glacier in its full context: the Andes behind, the lake below, the lenga on the hillsides. The thing about Perito Moreno is that every layer of the landscape is working at once.

The boat puts you directly in front of the face, the only position where the 5-kilometre width starts to make sense. Even then, no single frame can hold it. These three frames try from different angles of the same crossing.

El Chaltén is where the road ends. Beyond it there's nothing but the mountains and the trails into them. The town is small: a few blocks, a gas station, restaurants that close early. Most of the people who live there came for a season and didn't quite leave. These two frames were made from the hillsides above town.

Most people come for Fitz Roy and walk straight past the valley. The Río de las Vueltas runs turquoise through wide gravel beds. Above it, ancient rock walls rise from the steppe. If you slow down and stop at the right moment, the wildlife finds you.

The trail to Laguna de los Tres climbs 1,000 metres over about 10 kilometres: lenga forest first, then open alpine terrain, then the glacial lake at the foot of the mountain. In April the forest is in full autumn colour and Fitz Roy appears and disappears through the trees the whole way up.

Monte Fitz Roy at close range. The rock is granite and the faces are mostly vertical, which is part of why it took until 1952 for anyone to reach the top, and years after that for a second ascent. From the moraine above the treeline these four frames look at nothing else.

The canyon announces itself before you see it: the shuttle bus, the dust, the ravens. These two frames were made before reaching the rim, at the entry zone where the scale has not yet registered. The raven in the second frame already knows the void behind it.

Grand Canyon West sits on the Hualapai Reservation, in the western part of the canyon, and here the rim is not one long trail but a chain of viewpoints you move between by shuttle. These three frames document the approach: the stratified walls beginning to appear, the flat dry plateau before the drop, and the red sandstone ledges at the edge of a viewpoint.

The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, a mile deep, and impossible to hold in a single frame. These four photographs were made from the viewpoints at Grand Canyon West as the afternoon light moved west across the buttes. Each frame is the same canyon from a different angle of the same hour.

From the rim the Colorado looks like a brown ribbon. It takes a moment to register that it's more than a kilometre below you and moving fast. These three frames move downward through the geometry of the canyon: the gap between boulders at the edge, the dark inner walls, the river at the bottom.

Bariloche from above, in autumn. The rooftops through the autumn forest, the lake behind, the Andes behind that. The city is denser than it looks from the trailheads. You only notice it from the hillsides.

The lenga turns red and orange in April and May while the coihue pines stay green. On the same hillside you get every shade at once. These three frames hold that moment before the cold takes the colour out.

The trail to Refugio Frey climbs through coihue forest and open rock terrain above the Villa Catedral ski resort. As the trees thin, the granite takes over. These three frames document the transition from forest to exposed ridgeline, where the first views of the high cirque begin to open.

The granite towers above Refugio Frey are among the best rock in Patagonia. Climbers come from around the world for the routes on these spires. In autumn the rock takes warm golden light in the mornings and holds it long into the afternoon. Four frames focused entirely on the granite.

Laguna Frey sits in a granite cirque at 1,700 metres, at the foot of the pinnacles. In autumn the water reflects the towers above. In early winter the first snow reaches the boulders on the shore. Three frames from the same cirque.

Yosemite Valley does not reveal itself gradually. The Wawona Tunnel cuts through solid granite for a kilometre, and then the valley opens all at once. These two frames hold the moment of transition: from inside the tunnel, the orange glow of the lamps against absolute darkness, and from outside, the stone arch framing the road as it bends into the canyon.

The valley floor gets the crowds. The forest on the way up gets the silence. Three frames from that zone: a cut log in black and white, the canyon walls receding into mist, and the valley seen through autumn oak in full yellow.

El Capitan is 900 metres of sheer granite. Cook's Meadow is the one place in the valley where you can see the whole face at once. These three frames were made from that meadow in different seasons: frost in January, bare branches in winter, autumn cottonwood in October. Same spot, same wall, different light.

In winter the falls slow to almost nothing. In spring they come back with the snowmelt and you can hear them from across the valley. Four frames at different scales: a thin fall on a dark granite wall, a ribbon of water on pale rock, the upper falls close up on warm granite, and a smaller fall in a shadowed gorge with pines lit at the base.

From Glacier Point you're at 2,199 metres looking at Half Dome at 2,693, with the valley almost 1,000 metres below you. The northwest face is sheer but from this angle it reads as a dome. The afternoon light on it is very good. Two frames as the light drops: the dome itself, and a canyon wall already in shadow.