In 1993 Jurassic Park hit the movie screens and amidst all the screaming and running and destruction there was one thing that has stayed with me. The Jeff Goldblum character makes several self-important and arrogant pronouncements but one thing he said rang especially true. “Life finds a way.” It has always fascinated me, this biological imperative to survive, to find a foothold and to cling to it with everything that it can. Why is life so persistent? Why does it want to be alive? What makes that drive to pass it’s genetic material on such a powerful thing? In the most inhospitable places on the earth we find life clinging to the barest most meagre resources so that it can… find a way.

I used to live in north-eastern BC and I loved to climb mountains. It always fascinated me that I would spend hours walking over bare rock and up there in the wind, where July blizzards where not unheard off, where there was only the merest scrapes of soil and the there would be a pine sapling clinging to the side of a rock. The picture above was taken on Vancouver Island at sea level, not high in the alpine but the way that these plants had found the crack in the rock and made a place to live there reminded me of that quest to survive that those northern alpine plants engage in. I like the way that the plants bisect the rocks, claiming a place to live that dominates the frame.

-Russell Berg