Marc Adamus

Marc Adamus is a landscape photographer based in Corvallis, Oregon.

The visual drama and artistry of his photographs are born of a keen eye for the many moods of Nature and a life-long passion for the wilderness.

This passion shines throughout Marc’s work and has attracted a wide audience around the world.

His talent for rare captures of amazing light and fleeting atmosphere imbue his portfolio with a sense of the epic, majestic and the bold.

His success derives from patient single-minded pursuit of all the unique moments that generate the magic and energy of the wilderness, often spending months immersing himself in the landscape he shoots despite the rigors of season and weather.

Marc has been acclaimed as one of the most taented landscape artists of his generation.

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“Cold and Alone”Snowshoe-backpacking in the

Canadian Rockies, winter.

My career as a nature photographer did not start with a passion for art nor cameras.

My interest in photography arose from within the passion that would eventually shape my entire life – adventures and exploration in wilderness.

There I find a relationship with everything around me that runs deep and purposeful. The further I go, the longer I am there, the more I find and the deeper the bond.

When I explain this to people, they often do not understand. I tell them, you cannot treat the wilderness like another stop on your vacation.

You cannot treat it like a roadside attraction or playground because you miss completely the communication it offers. I say you must absorb it until you are lost, until it breaks through your defenses, until the walls you built in your daily life come down and you see the world anew, until you realize your place in it all and that is profoundly humbling.

You must venture inside to be a part of it, and it of you.

Bombarded by the every-day race to information, attention and all the social games that drive our lives in this age, I find the wilderness gives me a clean break from the schedule, the rush and even from time itself. Even in preparation for such trips – countless hundreds of hours dreaming over maps, trip planning of all kinds would keep me entertained only until the very moment I embarked on whatever and wherever the journey was, at which time all I had prepared for was invariably pushed aside in place of what was before me at that specific moment.

In the wilds and as an artist, my plans are constantly evolving, changing, disappearing completely even.

One beauty of wilderness, specifically, is that there is no plan. Wilderness is a fusion of myself and everything. It is timeless. It is freedom.

“Under the Lights” take from a two-week backpack across Yukon wilderness.

Early on in my teens my desires to explore the outdoor realm revolved around the notion of escape from the every-day life with which I struggled in many ways.

The lack of responsibilities and constraints of society made a sojourn in the woods more than a little preferable. But as I found time to make more and more travels into the wilds in my early 20’s, struggling to channel youthful ambitions, I sought to define these travels through something more.

Mountaineering became a major interest, specifically, and getting to the top of everything. Here I had come here to escape the obligations of the world and yet now I found myself creating more of them. True, climbing is preferable to challenges imposed on you by someone else, but it remains a very goal-oriented pursuit nonetheless.

Pretty soon, many of my trips in wilderness revolved around the goal, and although I took satisfaction in overcoming these obstacles before me, the pressures mounted the freedom I once felt disappeared.

When I was 24, I was fortunate enough to discover the photography of the late Galen Rowell through exposure to his well-documented and world-class climbing exploits.

The way he was able to capture many of the difficult environments climbers expose themselves to in a sensitive way appealed to me. His images told equally of its beauty as the hardships involved, which brought a deeper purpose and justification to this otherwise cold and often lonely pursuit. His images were endearing and evocative.

They conjured the essence of why we love doing what we do, or at least why we started. I was compelled, through his views, to take a more contemplative approach to my wild adventures and make this art of expression through photography a way in which I could bridge the gap for others between what I love and why I always desired to be away. I felt if I could capture the beauty and power of nature the way he did I could help define for others and myself why it was I loved the wilds so.

I was reinvigorated by the outlet the art gave to me and looked at nature once again as a fusion of myself and it - not just a goal to be conquered.

“Sound of Thunder”, taken on a two week long trek through the wilds of BC’s Pacific Range.

For my first many years I was exclusively a ‘wilderness’ photographer, who had sought to document many of my grandest adventures away from people, roads, and normally even trails.

I have always believed that for me, true freedom in the wilderness requires as much separation as possible from the ‘hands of man’ and one cannot resign themselves to do nothing more than following these things around.

Such times and places fuelled my artistic interests greatly, because I sought to connect to the rest of the world through my art, the best and sometimes only way I knew how.

To my surprise and delight, right away most whom I shared my photographs with recognized many of the emotions within them I sought to convey.

I was able to much more effectively describe the wonders, beauty and power I found in the most remote of places. I felt like a kid again, with a renewed desire to see and explore, not simply going from one point to another.

In the remainder of my life, however, I was lost.

I bounced from job to job, a perpetual dreamer with his thoughts eternally on the freedom of the wilds.

For you see, in the wilderness, even in the most harsh and unforgiving of circumstances outdoors, life is simplified purely to what is most important.

There you must feel any judgment placed upon you is fair. Life is its core essence, the way I might believe it to have been so long ago.

As Galen once said “the higher I go, the simpler life becomes”.

During my less fortunate times as another a cog in the gears of society, I have made life very difficult on myself because I have always had to experiment and interpret by doing for myself and let the consequences fall where they may.

I have always had to find my own path. The wilderness gave me that opportunity. Art gave me that opportunity as well. The two were a great match: Perhaps too good.

“Kingdom of the Wind”Hurricane-force winds and waves, a

humbling show of nature’s power

“Paradise Forest” taken on a two week long off-trail trek

through Washington’s Queets rainforest and tributaries.

In recognition of the need to do such important things as pay bills and obtain enough funding to disappear on the next adventure, I decided I would attempt to sell photography and my services in this regard, at least remotely through stock.

Turned out that after some initial effort on my part, this went quite well. Four different agencies took turns picking up my collection within the first two years and I began making my rounds online (For the first time in my life, mind you, this was not until 2004!).

As I gained the realization that I could share and distribute my photography more effectively online than in any other manner, I started doing so, thinking for the first time I might be able to make some sort of career out of this that complimented my life.

I did, a year later, quit my last ‘real’ job and just a few years further down the road had my work featured by dozens of leading publications.

In some ways, it was a full-blown success story to be recognized for something I enjoyed doing so much.

But as years wore on I realized more and more that my photographic arts had landed me exactly into the same type of goal-oriented pursuit, as I had once felt constricted by with climbing.

As my skills and portfolios grew as a photographer, I saw every trip as a very specific set of objectives designed to put me in the exact locations at the times I felt the conditions would be right.

While this was dedication to my work in a way I’d never before had in life, it was in fact work and not compatible with the freedom of wilderness.

Moreover, this mentality works to diminish the essence of the fusion between one’s self and the natural world, because wilderness, in it’s truest and purest form, is a bond that grows deeper with time and the understanding you obtain only through exploration, not going to a specific point.

Giving in to such specific objectives creates a ‘tunnel vision’, or at least a filter that every wild experience must pass through, and a superficiality that impedes interpretation and the senses.

“So long for this Moment”taken during my 5-week long solo trek

across the BC/Alaska Boundary Range.

There is a quote that says “The beginner sees endless possibilities and the master very few”, and I had begun to see as a master. I would spend weeks

at a single location and return for a very specific shot half a dozen times.

When I go online these days I see so many forums and venues for sharing of photography, and within those I see a dominant percentage of participant seeking recognition for their ‘art’.

In an effort to obtain this, they often look to emulate what is ‘popular’, as is true in so much of life.

While this is fine for a beginner intent on learning, this mentality ultimately leads to conformity, and worse it can diminish experiences in nature greatly in exchange for being in ‘that’ specific spot at that specific time eight times until ‘it’ happened. That is not art.

Going to a specific location shot by countless others you saw before you went there, and returning eight times to get the shot you want is not art, nor does it speak to any passion for wilderness or adventures therein.

Art is about personal expression, it comes from within and it is unique, above anything else.

What I saw people doing was wanting to hang merely a trophy on their wall, all else be damned, and I realized that I too could and had in some ways become entangled in this way of seeing and it was this that had once again cut the sense of freedom and passion from my life outdoors.

I was again frustrated and stopped taking my camera on many of my trips.

When I look back on my greatest successes as a photographer and artist, the images that moved me most deeply, they are almost exclusively the ones I made where I felt the greatest and deepest connection to the wild power of a place.

They are rarely photographs that were preconceived and they contain no places and/or conditions that I’d ever seen photographed before.

When I look back at those rare times where I have managed to make these images that reach my senses on a deeper, more emotional level, I realize that it was in those times that I had let the place come to me, rather than going to it.

“Rage against the Frozen”Taken during my 5-week long solo trek across the BC/Alaska Boundary Range.

You can’t find anything in nature unless you can let it find you. It finds you when your mind is open to all possibilities, when you

taste its limitlessness, its grandeur and freedom.

A few years ago, I decided to rededicate myself to the pursuit of truly wild and new places and make such explorations the core of my artistic focus.

There are a great number of these places out there and in fact, while many photographers might be lead to believe there are none at all, these places do in fact encompass the vast majority of our natural world.

But even were one to stay close to the world known to them, it is possible to find new possibilities all the time. Something as simple as a new snowfall, for example, can drastically alter depictions of a landscape.

I have often said the last thing I want to do before I go on a trip is look at other’s photographs of the same place, because I have always felt like it impedes my own intuitions, interpretations and feelings.

With a new place, whether it be new to me or new to being photographed completely, I am much more inclined to open my senses and let it come to me.

It does in the most unexpected and magical of ways, so many times.

And in the end, I am rewarded with not only an art that is personally expressive, but a fusion of me and the wilderness which I love.

Homage To The Mountains

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