About The Photographer
Loretta Valdez is a Santa Cruz based photographer. She became interested in photography after spending time living in Southeast Alaska.
"In 2003 and 2004, I had the opportunity to live just outside the small roadless community of Pelican, AK. Pelican is on Chichagof Island in Southeast Alaska. The population is less than 100. The town's main industry was the cold storage plant for commercial fisherman. It had two bars, one restaurant, a general store, a church, and city hall. It also had a some bed and breakfast/fishing charter businesses, but that was it! Surrounded by all this nature, I decided to take up photography. I lived in a small cabin with two out buildings on 30 acres. The cabin was situated on a 22-mile fjord called Lisianski Inlet in the middle of the Tongass National Forest. We lived off the grid. We generated our own electricity, caught rain water off our roof to store in tanks and we had to fly or ferry in any supplies.
I went from urban lifestyle to extreme wilderness. Grizzlies and bald eagles were outside my front door, as well as humpback whales, otters and seals. My life took on the rhythm of nature. A rhythm ruled by the weather and the unrelenting sea. I came to love the slower pace of life. I learned to fish, to drive a skiff and I became friends with many of locals. I'd been vacationing there for several years, but it's another thing to actually live there. Besides the obvious difference in lifestyle, I experienced a sense of community I'd never felt living in Silicon Valley. You may not always like or agree with your neighbor, but when you needed help they were always there. There were so many things that could go wrong in this sparsely populated and very rugged environment.
Living here was a profound experience for me. It forever changed my view of nature and my relationship with it. It also made me more keenly aware of the commonalities that bind us all as human beings.
It is my greatest hope that the beauty I try to capture in my images will help others to appreciate the natural world as much as I do and to serve as a reminder of just how fragile that world is.”