Photographer Andy Austin Discovers Significant Layers of Montana

Andy Austin has revealed a espresso desk ebook referred to as, “MONTANA: Photographs from the Last Best Place.” (Image courtesy of Andy Austin)

Andy Austin’s journey started with a stressed Montana childhood however embraced the chance to search out magnificence and creativity within the areas most individuals go by.

The freeway east of Billings, Montana, runs straight lengthy sufficient to check your consideration. No curves. No drama. Just sky and distance and the quiet strain of shifting ahead. As a child, Andy Austin watched that street and assumed it led someplace higher. Somewhere greater. Somewhere else.

Montana, to him, felt small then. A spot to depart.

He didn’t know but that area has layers. That quiet can widen. That a panorama can open slowly, like a ebook you don’t perceive till you cease skimming.

Austin grew up cut up between the plains close to Billings and the Beartooth Mountains, a childhood bracketed by wheat fields and switchbacks. He beloved the mountains, however he was stressed. Like many youngsters raised in rural America, he wished out. He wished movement. He wished noise. He wished proof that the world was bigger than what he may see from his yard.

That proof got here two hours west, in Bozeman, Montana.

At Montana State University, Austin performed soccer. His days ran on whistles and schedules: Eat right here. Stand there. Sleep now. The construction was complete. Photography crept in as an escape. So did lengthy drives into the mountains, the trailheads, the again roads, the unmarked turnoffs. Those hours exterior this system felt like oxygen.

The Crazy Mountains in Montana. (Image by Andy Austin)

“Getting out into the mountains, back roads, and trailheads around Bozeman felt like the first real space where I could think for myself,” Austin stated.

That freedom modified the best way Montana regarded. The state stopped feeling like a boundary and began feeling like an invite.

Building to a Profession

After faculty, Austin moved again to Billings for a job with Visit Southeast Montana. The work took him east, into elements of the state most vacationers by no means see. Long highways. Towns spaced by hours. Horizons that flattened time. It was there, within the quiet of japanese Montana, that the dimensions lastly clicked.

“Long stretches of empty highway, small towns hours apart, wide open horizons that make you feel both insignificant and completely at ease,” Austin stated.

Montana cracked open. What as soon as felt small grew to become countless. The ignored locations began calling louder than the well-known ones.

That intuition now defines Austin’s work. Today, his images spans greater than 50 international locations and 7 continents.

Austin is a field-first photographer — measuring a day by mild misplaced and boots ruined. At 6-foot-4, he’s tall sufficient to register earlier than he speaks (even taller in cowboy boots). And when he does communicate, it’s with the low, regular resonance of somebody who as soon as relied on his physique as a lot as his instincts.

He talks along with his palms, laughs simply, and leans ahead when he’s engaged, which is more often than not. He’s approachable within the truest sense. He’s the form of one that will drop to his knees within the mud for a shot, then get up grinning, digicam nonetheless heat, as if this have been precisely the place he was meant to be all alongside.

With a fast scroll on Austin’s Instagram page, you’ll see icicles on his beard whereas he shoots canine sledding in Quebec, Canada. You’ll see northern lights. Horses galloping with ski riders flying within the air behind them throughout a Montana skijoring shoot.

There are additionally waterfalls, rodeos, a 14-foot anaconda in Columbia and a video collection Austin calls Campfire Cocktails.

He’s shot in Namibia, Jordan, Tokyo and elsewhere.

In Namibia, the world widens till it virtually disappears. One {photograph} holds a salt pan cracked open like porcelain, the bottom bleached pale beneath a sky so blue it feels intentional. Dunes rise within the distance, crimson and affected person, their edges clear in opposition to the horizon.

One of Andy Austin’s images from Namibia. (Image by Andy Austin)

A distinct body brings you nearer to life. A person stands along with his palms pressed collectively, head bowed barely, his physique marked by mud and solar. Children collect behind him, watching. Waiting.

Another exhibits a boy grinning beside a bicycle in a cluttered yard, palms greasy, happy with the small restore he’s simply completed. The images don’t rush. They let scale, endurance and human presence communicate for themselves. Namibia, in Austin’s work, is just not empty.

It is spacious. And there’s a distinction.

In the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan the body slows down and sinks inward. Stone replaces metal. Time stretches.

One {photograph} opens inside a canyon the place partitions rise so shut they appear to press the air flat. Light slips in from above in skinny ribbons, warming the sandstone to honey and rust. A lone determine strikes by way of the hall, small in opposition to the rock, footsteps softened by sand.

Then the work turns human. A discipline underneath open sky. Green rows lower clear in opposition to dry earth. Hands attain into crates. Beans pile up. Sun hats tilt low. Scarves catch the sunshine. The rhythm is quiet and collective. No one poses. No one rushes.

Austin doesn’t middle himself in these photos. He lets the locations maintain their very own gravity. They don’t clarify. They invite. You perceive the place you might be as a result of the photographs provide you with sufficient to really feel it.

The Missouri Breaks (Image by Andy Austin)

Across continents, the sample holds. Austin doesn’t chase landmarks. He waits for intersections of sunshine and life. For the seconds when a spot reveals itself with out performing. Cities give him anonymity. They let him observe with out rationalization. Let him vanish into crowds dense sufficient to hold him alongside, unnoticed.

He loves that disappearance. It offers him room to see.

“I genuinely love the chaos of big cities,” stated Austin. “There is something freeing about being just another face in the crowd.”

But residence nonetheless resets him.

When Austin lands again in Montana after a world task, the very first thing he notices is the tempo. Everything slows. The air quiets. Space returns. Once, after photographing a Tokyo crossing late at night time, surrounded by 1000’s of individuals shifting in excellent sync, he flew residence and stopped at a small city gasoline station on the drive from the airport. Fifteen minutes handed in dialog with a stranger about fishing, climate and the place he had been.

“That contrast summed it up perfectly for me,” he stated.

Andy Austin has spent his life embracing the outside. (Image by Sam Rouda)

Montana follows him all over the place. It exhibits up in how he talks to folks. How he waits. How he listens. When strangers overseas study he’s from Montana, they pause. Then nod.

“Ah, that makes sense,” they are saying.

The West educated him that manner.

Football did too.

Austin doesn’t separate his athletic previous from his inventive life. Discipline with out motivation nonetheless guides him. So does situational consciousness. Reading mild like a protection. Anticipating moments earlier than they break. Being comfy with discomfort.

“Some of my best work exists because I treated it like training instead of waiting around for inspiration to strike,” he stated.

What he needed to unlearn was linear pondering. Creative lives don’t transfer in straight traces. Photography was by no means the plan.

An elephant in Namibia. (Image by Andy Austin)

He carried a digicam as a child. Documented associates on bikes and skateboards. Backpacking journeys within the Beartooths. Family travels. It felt pure, however not intentional. He went to school for nursing. Switched to psychology when placement fell by way of. Football saved him in Bozeman. Photography stayed on the aspect.

Then folks began asking to purchase his work.

Even then, he resisted calling it a profession. It took years to see that the factor he had at all times finished quietly was shaping every little thing.

Creating the Book

Austin’s profession displays a mixture of grit and generosity. His work has appeared in nationwide and regional publications, in addition to in campaigns for manufacturers corresponding to Travel + Leisure and The North Face. He’s shot for corporations and tourism places of work that rely on authenticity greater than polish. He strikes comfortably between editorial assignments and large-scale business storytelling, collaborating with corporations like RAM, Tourism Ireland Benchmade, and Garmin, in addition to locations from Wisconsin to Southeast Montana to Patagonia.

He isn’t chasing gallery partitions or restricted editions. His images are supposed to work, to promote a spot truthfully, to inform a narrative clearly and to make you’re feeling such as you have been there … or like you’ll want to go.

In a discipline that generally rewards distance, Austin thrives on proximity. He goes the place the story is, stays longer than deliberate and lets the work get messy if that’s what the second requires.

The lengthy view shapes his most private undertaking. His espresso desk ebook, MONTANA: Photographs from the Last Best Place, is constructed round detours and conversations as a lot as landscapes. He hosted signings at breweries, not bookstores. It felt more true. Many of the images began that manner anyway, sitting at a bar and speaking to locals.

“One photo in particular stands out,” Austin stated.

It is just not dramatic. No mountains. No wildlife. Just an previous signal perched on a constructing in central Montana. Tall white letters spelling “Hi Line.” He had seen it as soon as, years earlier, on a postcard. He didn’t know the place it was, however drove Highway 2 from West Glacier to Havre scanning cities. He requested Instagram for assist — he acquired guesses, not instructions.

He then stopped on the Havre Chamber of Commerce. The first particular person had by no means seen it. Yet as he turned to depart …

“I know where it is,” a girl referred to as out.

An previous bowling alley. Minutes away. Perfect mild. The picture occurred.

Andy Austin along with his espresso desk ebook. (Image courtesy of Andy Austin)

“That day taught me exactly the kind of stories I want to tell about Montana,” he stated.

Not the grand moments. The affected person ones.

That endurance carries into how he shares locations on-line. Austin is vocal about accountability. He doesn’t geotag fragile places. He avoids selling locations already overwhelmed. Glacier doesn’t want extra consideration. Alternatives do.

Makoshika State Park can deal with guests. The close by city of Glendive can use them too.

“Sharing a place is never neutral,” stated Austin.

Neither is the work he does for manufacturers. Honesty is non-negotiable. If one thing feels staged, he pushes again. His viewers is aware of when one thing is off. Trust, as soon as misplaced, doesn’t come again simply.

Feeling at Home

In an age of social media and generative AI, Austin nonetheless believes in gradual storytelling. In permanence. That perception is why he self-published his ebook. A bodily object asks one thing totally different of a viewer. Time. Attention. Return visits.

“Social media disappears,” he stated. “A physical book lasts.”

Paradise Valley in Montana (Image by Andy Austin)

Montana taught him that too.

The street east of Billings remains to be there — nonetheless straight, nonetheless quiet. But it now not factors away. Now it holds layers. Stories. Space price staying with. Austin discovered that the great distance, by leaving, and by coming again. By slowing down sufficient to see what had been there all alongside.

The freeway did lead someplace higher in any case.

It led residence.

Suzanne Downing is an out of doors author and photographer in Montana with an environmental science journalism background. Her work could be present in Outdoors Unlimited, Bugle Magazine, Missoulian, Byline Magazine, Communique, MTPR on-line, UM Native News, National Wildlife Federation campaigns and extra.