Stephen Trimble has been a free-lance writer and photographer since the 1970s, when he worked as a naturalist at national parks in Colorado and Utah, including seasons at Arches and Capitol Reef. The breadth of his awards mirrors the wide embrace of his work: The Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation; The National Cowboy Museum’s Western Heritage “Wrangler” Award for outstanding photography book; and a Doctor of Humane Letters from his alma mater, Colorado College, honoring his efforts to increase our understanding of Western landscapes and peoples. The Capitol Reef Reader (2019) is his 25th book.
Steve says, “I pass through the world, reminding myself to pay attention. When I am photographing, I look for color and texture and light. I watch for stories—the evocation of lives behind half-open doors, the fringe of trees at the transition between ecological communities. As people move through the scene, I lie in wait, a hunter. What Henri Cartier-Bresson called the ‘decisive moment’ reveals a successful catch, when light and context and gesture come together—exquisitely, unequivocally.”
He speaks and writes frequently as a conservation advocate and has taught writing at the University of Utah, where he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at the U’s Tanner Humanities Center during the centennial of Stegner’s birth. He also has a family home outside of Torrey, Utah, where he is proud steward of a Nature Conservancy conservation easement—a story he tells in Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America. For more about his work, see www.stephentrimble.net.
