Where Are All the People: A Confession

I'm mainly a nature and landscape photographer. If you look at my Google+ profile you will only see several photos with people in them. I shoot almost exclusively the natural world, due to preference and skill. I've been happy lately, albeit still critical, about the development of my style. Until I read this quote:

That is why there are no more people in these scenes of future farms than in the landscape photographs in conservation magazines; neither the agriculture specialist nor the conservation specialist has any idea where people belong in the order of things. Neither can conceive of a domesticated or a humane landscape. People are complex, contradictory, unpredictable; they are perceived by the specialist as a kind of litter, pollutants of pure nature on the one hand and pure technology, total control, on the other.
—Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

This really struck me, and probed me to rethink my photography. I certainly don't regard humans as litter in a natural landscape, or as polluting nature. But my artistic preference hasn't been honest to my personal philosophy.

I told my sister, a fellow photographer, I'd rather take a portrait of a tree than a person. While this may remain true to some degree as long as I'm taking picture, I hope to shift the tide some. Yes, people are contrary, complex, unpredictable, and they usually don't sit as still as trees do. Yet they are beautiful, meaningful, and created to glorify their creator.

Photography is a personal recreation, but I also practice it to communicate. I believe this crazy world was made to sing the glory of its creator. He is pleased most especially when men and women worship him. Communicating the splendor of his creation merely or mainly through the natural world, sans humans, doesn't cut it anymore for me. This is a confession and a commitment--a resolution if you will--to apply myself to the discipline of taking pictures of people, hard as it may be. His glory shines in the face of man, and I need to see it, and to speak about it with my camera.