Can you imagine yourself an explorer whose wanderings make you the discoverer of a new world?  Naturalist photographer Greg Lawson’s California image collection conjures up just such a possibility with page after page of Golden State imagery featuring flora and fauna along with landscapes and seascapes with little visible impact by the footprint of modern man.

In height, in depth; in heat, in cold; in magnificence and even in mediocrity, this land proves to have been fashioned in extremes and in contradiction.  It can be bountifully fertile and yet strikingly barren.  Extreme disparity in altitude, which proves to be among the greatest on the continent, can dish up freezing alpine shivers at one end and a ravaging torridity at the other.  Meteorological conditions range from bone-chilling fog on the north coast to bone-dry aridity in the southeast deserts, with a full map of contradistinction between.

Includes photography by Kristina Gabrielle, an introduction by Greg Lawson and captioning by Chris Coddington.