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Archie Frink
@archiefrink
Naturalist and landscape photographer based in the US
What is it to live passionately? Is it being present, mindful, aware, the practice of seeing deeply and anew? As a lifelong romantic — for better or worse — who quests for balance but also often paradoxically finds value in pushing boundaries, this question guides me in my life, from picking up On the Road for the first time at seventeen to today, sitting on a hidden boulder on a stormy afternoon on the shores of Lake Tahoe.
I began photography when I graduated from college and was starting the first phase of my career. I had had some small successes as a writer by the end of school publishing pieces about my time in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest while doing research and about my experience in a Sri Lankan fishing village after the 26-year Civil War. When I began writing forty hours a week for a paycheck, I needed another medium to express and deepen creativity. That is how I found photography. I did not go to school for visual arts and for the first several years, I was not good at it at all. As I wanted to learn how a camera worked, I picked up a Hasselblad 501cm and Ansel Adams’ The Camera, and shot notebooks full of 120 film. In my early twenties, it was Ansel’s photographs of Half Dome in Yosemite that illuminated in me the immensity of emotion and wonder that could be evoked through art, and how that evocation could be a vehicle for moving one’s perception.
"Within a year, I moved my life West and fell passionately in love with its wildernesses."
Growing up, my grandfather had introduced me to nature in my ancestral Blue Ridge backyard in the Appalachian Mountains. When I came to the West, and especially the Northwest, this deeply rooted emotional connector became a necessity in my life, and an expression of identity and purpose. Photography had become my primary creative outlet and having a deep introverted personality, I always turned to my camera whenever I had a problem or significant life setback. It helped me to re-find, reimagine, and re-create the beauty of life, convert setback into self-improvement, and listen to my inner voice. Up until the start of dedicating myself to photography professionally two years ago, it has been in these most difficult times that I advanced the most in aesthetics and technical proficiency.
"My goal in my work is to create compelling, wondrous perspectives of natural processes in motion within our wild world."
I work with companies and institutions that share my passions for travel, art, adventure lifestyle, climate and sustainability, and responsible recreation. In essence, a lifestyle that begins in our natural world and leads to new ideas and deeper living. A year and a half ago, I took the direction of embracing a creativity-driven professional life, and took to the road. Living on the road and in our wildernesses presents its challenges, as well as incredible rewards. As I grow creatively and professionally, I seek to expand my network and client base for freelance gigs with companies I trust, but also to cultivate deeper projects focusing on climate issues alongside allying institutions.
I dream a lot. When I see something beautiful, I open myself up to it, experience it consciously and take notice of the relationship between the moment and myself. I ask questions. At each moment I may ask myself “What led me to be here?” When I woke up on Mount Rainier yesterday. When I watch the sunset over Tahoe right now. When I plan my stay in the High Sierra… I ask myself “How can this location advance me? What am I searching for? What can I learn?” If it is a piece of work I admire, I might ask “How did she/he create this? What is the intended emotional evocation? How does it make me feel? Is it sharp and edgy, deep and moody, soft and transcendent, realistic or impressionistic? Why am I distant from it, or why does it touch me? And how can I bring some of the aspects I like into my own work authentically?”
"I believe the greatest ideas, especially in art, are inherently multidisciplinary."
While so many of the people who inspire me are photographers like James Balog and fellow contemporaries, perhaps those who more fundamentally shape my work are authors like Barry Lopez (whose books I always keep with me) and other-medium artists. My greatest inner allies are asking questions, remaining vulnerable to identify weaknesses and seek improvement, and engaging in learning to push myself forward creatively, technically, and entrepreneurially with self authenticity and perspective.
"Expression is learning. It is a living process, always deepening, always unfolding, always metamorphosing into new forms. It is both a utility of passion, and an output."
When creativity became my core focus in my life to advance both in making the absolute most of this short, precious gift of life and in career, learning how to hone my craft and improve my work came to center. It is something I strive to work toward every day. Shaking up what I know in practice and attempting something new can be daunting at times or exhilarating, but I must keep going deeper. Photography is a tough business. It is highly competitive among highly competent, amazing people and entirely self-made. And like any business, if I want a share in it among other creatives who have hundreds of thousands of people in their outreach, I have to work harder, prove my value, and stick to it. Go out of your comfort zone. Make that cold call. Send that pitch.
"Be respectful but firm on the value of your work. Follow up. Follow up again. Remember, the worst anyone can say is no."
Photography as a business came to me not through formal education but through some force between serendipity and predisposition. In 2016-18, I helped launch a tech startup company with wonderful colleagues that failed. Devastated, I took a hard look at my life. Although I was not in fault for its outcome, shaken by great loss and confronted with financial uncertainty, I asked myself what I wanted out of life. I try to do this often. The answer that arose was, I wanted to celebrate life in my work, evoke emotion, and create something that feels meaningful. I took a massive pay cut and changed my lifestyle, embracing uncertainty as an enabler for living passionately, and began to design a roadmap to make it sustainable.
"Now in my second year of this venture, I make less than I did living in an office forty hours a week, but I am the happiest I have ever been in my life, and here’s the thing: the actual monetary quality of life, all things being equal, is about the same."
Do I have a long way to go? Absolutely. Am I signed with Canon, Adobe, Patagonia, and Eddie Bauer? Nope, not yet. Have I been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to pursue my long term creative goals? Not on my wildest days. But do I have goals and a point-by-point roadmap, always being revised, to achieve those goals? You’d better believe it. In the meantime, I celebrate successes as they arise, improve my craft, put in my best, work my competitive advantage, strive to network, and keep moving forward.
Life lived truly, fully, and authentically begins with questioning the fundamental aspects of your life that perhaps never went through needed preliminary and intermittent scrutiny until either it stopped working, or never made you happy in the first place. Somewhere around thirty, it became apparent to me that the life I had been leading was if not denying the celebration of life and making it better, certainly stifling my ability to live within that spiritually fulfilling space. Living in a city, earning an urban professional salary, giving my earnings away to a landlord, and dreaming about maximizing my paid time off was suffocating me.
"Nearly two years into freelance life, I may not be making as much today as I have in the past, but my life has never been more fulfilling, more passionate, more creativity-demanding, and more self-actualizing, and never before have I known true value more intrinsically."
Every day presents new fears and challenges, and new efforts and experiences to overcome them. This is what photography has given me so far. Every day is an opportunity to see in new ways, to express and evoke emotion, to become a better version of myself, to connect with people in meaningful, either tangible or abstract ways, and to create a future driven by passion. This is my compass magnetic North. Where the path leads is always unknown.
Put simply to the best of my ability, passion is being truly alive. For me, to live passionately is to confront the true frontier within oneself: to live in the wild.
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