In the fall of 1991 I casually mentioned to a few friends and fellow photographers that I was considering making a few trips around Florida to see if I could find anything interesting to photograph. I had just recently returned from my first extended trip to Southwestern Montana and while not much happened photographically, the mountains and rivers of the Missouri Headwaters did manage to work their way into my soul and created for me an impression that has not only lasted to this day, but has become stronger over the years.

My reasoning behind the Florida trips was that while the West in general and more specifically Montana does have a lot to offer the photographer working in the landscape I do not live there, and while I have returned many times it has been mostly with a fly rod to fish on the Madison, Yellowstone and numerous other rivers and streams around the state. To do something productive with a camera would require repeated visits to easily accessible, visually interesting areas; in short, I felt I needed to stay closer to home base.

The Florida that I grew up in, that is to say, South Florida in the late sixties, seventies and early eighties is, unfortunately, gone. Today's post Disney version of Florida bears little resemblance to that period of time before the floodgates were opened and the mass influx of new residents hit my part of the state. The booming population and the infrastructure needed to support it, guaranteed that the lakes and woods used by myself and my friends as our escape from the real world would soon be filled in, paved over and lost forever under a sea of concrete and asphalt, never to be seen again except in memory.

When you spend enough time in a certain place you eventually develop an affinity for and desire to protect what's important to you, "The predator husbands its prey" is a term I've felt most accurately describes this view as we who see the value in protecting wild places become the stewards who work to save these remaining remnants of natural landscapes with the understanding that the rejuvenation of the human spirit requires time spent in these wild places. As a photographer working with a landscape that now exists only as a fraction of the place you once knew, the challenge is to bring an awareness to the land through your photographs without resorting to sentiment in the hope of protecting what little we still have left, knowing that loosing this, it too is gone forever.

This collection of photographs is the result of work done over a span of fifteen years. On those first few trips around the state, the results were, to put it mildly, pretty disappointing. While much of landscape photography in the West is synonymous with expansive, majestic views, that approach didn't fit my vision of Florida, with more intimate middle distance views built around a quiet image structure being in line with how I see this state. Not seeing many of these images on those initial trips I concentrated on more abstract two dimensional close up compositions with emphasis on the relationship of line, form, texture, shape and tone. Working in this manner I gradually learned "to see" and discovered previously unnoticed images almost everywhere I looked. It was with this deeper level of awareness gained from working with these abstracts that I did begin to notice certain places throughout the state that agreed with my vision of Florida and that appealed to my sensibilities of an appropriate landscape picture.

With these photographs my hope is to engage the viewer in a way that conveys not only a love of the land but also acknowledges the presence of something spiritual. Not spiritual in a biblical meaning, but something deeper, more to do with the belief that there is this unseen force in the universe larger than ourselves we can't understand and that science and religion can't explain. More than once it has been suggested to me that my photographs of the Florida landscape have been subconsciously my attempt to bring back the Florida that was, and in doing so recapture my youth and that, which disappeared with it. I've never had an intelligent reply to that comment; however if these images succeed at all then maybe what I've been doing for the past eighteen years hasn't been a search for what I've lost of myself, but rather a search for the manifested Gods that are to be found within these lands.

Bob Hudak
Coconut Creek, Florida
July, 2009