Tucker Finerty
@tuckerfinerty
Landscape photographer based in the US
The hotter the fire in the forge, the stronger the steel. The reason travel and photography has become such an integral part of my life, and the reason I do it in the way I choose to, is freedom in learning. That is why I have oriented my life to be able to be away for such longer periods of time. I love the freedom to chase down even the craziest whispers of something unique. But I had to fight to re-learn this love, and now that I have it I am going to enjoy every single second I can.
For a long time I was trapped in my own body. I got extremely sick when I was around 12 years old with Lyme disease. It is a disease that affects many Americans, and when not treated properly can become outright debilitating. In just a few months I went from a very normal, active kid to losing almost 30 pounds and slowly developing severe joint pain and cognitive disconnect between my limbs and brain.
"I was becoming trapped, trapped within myself."
After almost a year and numerous surgeries and procedures we could not get a diagnosis on what was going wrong. I became extremely clumsy, my body hurt constantly, and my mind always felt like it was in a thick fog. We couldn’t figure out why. It was not until we saw a specialist and had an MRI that exposed multiple brain lesions that we were able to start treatment. I had a tube put into the artery in my left arm where nightly injections of intense antibiotics were administered for five months by my mom. But critical damage had already been done.
"Once I had technically recovered, it took years for me to figure out how my body and brain now worked."
My learning style completely changed, things that were once easy had become extremely difficult. I felt stupid and useless. Athletics were massively disappointing as well. I’d watched ski videos incessantly the entire time I was sick, I’d grown up skiing, that sense of going fast on a mountain was the total opposite side of life than the one I had found myself in so abruptly. But my return to skiing could not have been more disappointing. There was a constant delay between my brain and body. I had lost all muscle mass, and my balance had basically vanished.
"It became my personal mountain to climb, I decided I was not going to feel this physically useless anymore."
I started working out, I started learning to eat healthy. I was determined to not feel so uncomfortable in my body anymore. And bit by bit, as I challenged my body, my mind started to follow. I stayed this course until my second year at college, where it was finally becoming clear that mentally it just wasn’t for me. I hated learning in the traditional way, and college in the U.S. is extremely expensive to pay for if you hate it. So, against a whole lot of warnings otherwise, I decided I was going to finish the semester in May, and work until travel became a reality. I had no idea how I was going to do it, I’d never even left the U.S. before. It was never something our family could do. But there was a massive urge from a place I could never identify that told me I had to go. I worked any job I could get my hands on until January of the following year saving every single penny I could, and then I left. No real itinerary, no timeline, I just knew I was going to go until I couldn’t anymore.
"I was gone for 8 months, and my life has never been the same."
This first trip was only documented with my phone and a gopro, but what I saw and learned had such a profound impact on me that it really is almost impossible to quantify. I had found my thing, the thing that all the previous terrible experiences had built me for. The legs that once betrayed me, that left me feeling useless, now carried me into the Himalaya. My mind that had felt cloudy for so long seemed to work perfectly in learning new countries, new cultures and new customs. I had felt like an outsider for so long at home, watching people do things effortlessly that had become so difficult for me. But I quickly learned that I’d developed a critical tool: observation. I was curious about how and why other people did things, down to the littlest details, and now I had come across a limitless supply of things to study. Learning the “why” is still my favorite reason to travel.
"There is always a “why” for the reason people do things, and finding that out can illuminate an entire side of a culture that seemed so odd just moments before."
"I went through New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Nepal, Greece, Netherlands, Italy, Croatia and Bosnia before returning home on that first trip."
Learning to chase the advice of other travelers and locals into adventures I never could have imagined for myself. Meanwhile, photography slowly came to be an element of my life. At first I brought along the camera to document these places and adventures so close friends and family would understand why I’d become so obsessed. But as I shot pictures and sent them home I became determined to learn to tell the story. The story is my favorite part of travel and photography, the why, the how, the who. But I am extremely self critical and always had the feeling that these stories deserved much better justice than what I was giving them. I had to become better.
For me, better pictures come from knowing the subject, but that can’t happen in a day. That is why I try to take my time. If I walk into a place and snap a picture of the first thing I see, what is the story? It’s cool to look at, but only for a moment. I am curious, and I want to know why things work the way they do. Those are the parts I want to share in my pictures. Travel is like stepping out into the direct sun. Everything is bright, exciting and pulling for your attention. If you’ve travelled a fair bit, you realize that the brightest things – the ones you see first – aren’t usually the real ones. They are the things everybody will see.
"I want to know what happens down the dark alleyways and in the shadows, which means I have to let my eyes adjust to the light. And that takes time."
My favorite photo I have ever taken took 8 days and nights on a cargo barge in the Amazon to find. The barge caught fire on night 5 and we all were moments away from jumping into the river, swimming to the banks of the Amazon 40 miles from the closest semblance of a village.
To be stranded for an unforeseeable amount of time. A horror show. But if I had to pick one photo to sum up the entire trip, I have the one. The man’s worn out suit, the newspaper he is reading for what had to be the sixth time, the old hammocks we all slept in, laundry drying on the ceiling, and the rusting exposed metal of the barge all tell the true story. It was not the chaos of the fire that was the hardship of that trip, but the slow grind of time having nowhere else to go but onward.
The moments that leave the biggest impact on me are the ones where I feel the biggest sense of gratitude. Even if things are miserable, they are oftentimes miserable in places I never imagined my life could take me. For so long in my life I felt so trapped by circumstance that any new adventure, any new horizon has the ability to leave me beaming. No story sums this up better than skiing Cerro Blanco, Peru’s largest sand dune.
Cerro Blanco sums it up because of the fact that it is not only the one day, but how things had slowly come together through my entire life to make that day possible. The work I’d put in physically to build my body to be able to do the hike and ski. Learning how to travel and ask the good questions, because good questions get good answers. And the final piece – learning how to tell a story with photos, how to capture the feeling.
The entire day was unplanned. I simply went for a walk. A walk that led into three non-stop days of madness in Peru’s desert, camera in hand. That third morning had me standing on top of a mountain of a sand dune with skis on my back, sharing my wonder in broken Spanish with legendary Juan Carlos. The lone rider of the desert mountain. In total awe that my life had somehow turned into one where I get to do this.
I now live my life in three month patterns. For three months at a time I will be at home in the States editing and organizing pictures to send out. During these months I usually work 6-7 days a week helping manage an espresso catering service that operates throughout New England, with small shoots scattered throughout. An unlimited amount of espresso is a critical element in this lifestyle. I will do this up until the day I leave again. Work hard, play harder.
The duration of the time away lets me learn in a way that I love. It lets me ask around, sometimes for weeks at the beginning, gathering data and writing down the rumors of the regions. By the time I really start to move throughout the area, I have the map that doesn’t exist on the computer at home.
I know I will continue to take pictures forever. The situations I end up in and the people I end up with are more than enough to warrant the time and effort. Everything that comes after is a bonus for me. And the bonuses have become immense. As someone who is curious, nothing is better than getting to skip to the farthest extreme of a sport, activity, culture. The people who need a photographer are often the ones who themselves have dedicated their lives to something. In being around them I get to share in the little details that may have taken them decades to achieve.
A truth remains constant across all environments; hype is contagious. When people are excited about what they do, when they love what they do, you have no choice but to get swept up in the tide.
"I am determined to keep finding new subjects to get swept up in."
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