The purpose of Chased by the Light was to recapture for Brandenburg “an intimate and long-lasting relationship with land. Not land in distant and exotic countries that were exhilarating to photograph, but land on which I could get old and die” (2003, p. 10).

After decades of traveling the world with National Geographic magazine as a contract photographer, Brandenburg became burnt out and needed to shift from the hectic life with the magazine to one more grounded in the geography of his home in the North Woods (Shepard & Foucault, 2003). “In a way, I was bored of my craft, tired of churning out endless rolls of photographs in exotic locations, only to have the best cherry-picked and the rest banished to a dark corner. I needed to get back to my art, back to my home…” (Brandenburg, 2003, p. 9). From the autumnal equinox to the winter solstice, the 90 days spent shooting photographs was a journey deeply grounded in a particular place: the North Woods.

The project that became Chased by the Light was especially noteworthy because he “intended to capture the elusive spirit of the land and a changing season while challenging himself by taking only one photograph a day” (Shepard & Foucault, 2003). For National Geographic photographers who often take a thousand rolls of film in a single project of which perhaps twenty are selected for publication, Brandenburg’s method was revolutionary. “If Japanese haiku is the bare bones of poetry,” he wrote, “then that exercise would be haiku on film” (Brandenburg, 2003, p. 9).

The Cover of Looking for the Summer (2003) on amazon.com

In contrast, Looking for the Summer (2003) is not a journey spent by Brandenburg searching for himself as in Chased by the Light so much as one looking for “the joy and beauty that nature gives us all” (2003, p. 10). This installment of the seasonal series “explores light and nature in the height of the exploding but brief growing season here in the north” and takes place after the windstorm that ravaged the forested landscapes depicted in Chased by the Light (Brandenburg, 2003, p. 10). After seeing the places he loved flattened, Brandenburg wrote that he not only wanted but “needed to search out the beauty” (2003, p. 10).

In Looking for the Summer, Brandenburg allowed himself a few more images: “Within this book,” he writes in the introduction, “I wanted to explore a different level of expression – not a process-driven forced march designed to wring the poison from my spirit – but instead, a simple and joyful celebration of nature photography” (2003, p. 10).

But, after the Big Blowdown of 1999, all around Brandenburg were spaces once filled with trees but now empty due to the storm’s relentless winds. After feeling robbed, Brandenburg found the words “barn’s burnt down... now i can see the moon” and included the following in the introduction of Looking for the Summer:

“…when faced with forces beyond our control we are sometimes reward with pleasant events, though equally unexpected. I have cleared away thousands of downed trees near my home so that it is safer from the inevitable dry-year fires. Now the earth is open to the sun, and vistas I never imagined greet me from my door. A young forest is already sprouting, trees that perhaps will grow even larger and more magnificent than those they replace, trees that might not have even succeeded at all had not the canopy been opened so that they could be nourished by the light” (2003, p. 12).

Jim Brandenburg's Thunderstorm, taken on Day 67 of Looking for the Summer - National Geographic Wallpaper download