Chris Migliaccio's Photo Gallery Home Page

My earliest recollections of photography go back to when I was ten years old and a frequent visitor to the Bronx Zoo in New York City. I begged my parents to let me take some pictures of my favorite animals: an Andean Condor, a Lowland Gorilla and others. They showed me how to use a twin-lens Rolleiflex with its dark and grainy reversed image viewfinder. Considering the circumstances, my photos weren't too bad. I still have them - and the Rolleiflex.

I pretty much ignored photography through most of my elementary and high school years except for those summer vacation Instamatic snapshots taken on our yearly expeditions to Florida. Once in college, however, my desire to document the wild places in Florida grew as a result of the fieldwork that my ecology classes at the University of Miami required. My father loaned me his Minolta SR-1 slr along with a few lenses and I was off and running.

Settling down in Miami after graduation, my desire to learn more about the ecology of South Florida led me to begin a project of photographic documentation of the native plants of the region and took me into the Everglades, Big Cypress Swamp and Florida Keys several weekends each month. I learned to be a keen observer of light, texture, pattern and form and began to develop an artist's eye.

With the desire to broaden my ecological and photographic horizons, I organized a Galapagos Islands natural history workshop for teachers in the summer of 1984 and spent almost three weeks traveling and shooting in the Ecuadorian Andes, Amazon basin and Galapagos Islands. This trip was so well received that for the next twelve years, I continued to organize annual summer teacher workshops to Ecuador, then later to Kenya and Costa Rica.

I'm particularly fortunate to have been able to travel and photograph extensively in the wonderful country of Costa Rica and now consider it my second home - returning at least once each year.

While spending time in Nature here in South Florida and abroad, I've often had experiences that took me beyond my own limited senses - standing on a prairie in the Big Cypress Swamp miles from the nearest road or sitting quietly in a Costa Rican cloud forest with eyes closed, feeling a deep connection to all life and to the physical environment as well. Being "in the zone" with camera in hand has been some of the happiest, most ecstatic times of my life.

Through my own experiences, I'm just now beginning to understand the fundamental unity that underlies all things. And as I put my eye to the viewfinder, I'm trying to capture that elusive feeling of oneness with Nature that can't be truly be understood by anything but the heart.

"I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found was really going in." - John Muir, Naturalist