“Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity, I say let your affairs be as two or three not a hundred or a thousand.” Henry David Thoreau’s words seem all but lost in today’s fast paced, high tech world. 175 Paces is an attempt to rediscover the secret of simplicity that Thoreau found on Walden Pond over 150 years ago.

Influenced by the writings of Thoreau and Emerson and the Transcendental artists of the Hudson River School, my study in simplicity was completed over a two year period at a cabin site located between two borrow ponds in an uncelebrated part of eastern North Carolina. The entire body of work was photographed within 175 paces of the front gate of the property in four trips to the cabin, one trip in each season of the year. Since all the images were made with digital cameras I decide to title the prints the exact time and date the photographs were made with information gathered from the camera’s metadata.

Many landscape photographers’ today travel great distances to exotic locations to make beautiful images of the natural world often overlooking the uncommon beauty that surrounds them daily. As one of the founding members of The North American Nature Photography Association I have been privileged to see some of the most incredible landscape photography ever made by photographers from all around the world. Inspired by these wonderful images I have undertaken this project to prove that it is possible to create a strong body of work while restricting myself to photograph in such a small-uncelebrated area. In my travels around the southeast over the last 17 years as a photographer and as a teacher the most common statement I've heard other photographers make is “there is nothing here to photograph,” I hope to be able to dispel that myth with this project.

Carl V. Galie Jr.