This work is best experienced
in landscape orientation.
Twelve expeditions documented. Four more on the horizon.
Gold — completed series. Dim gold — photo essay coming. White — next expedition.
Wildlife & human spirit across both poles, seven continents, and the edges of the accessible world.
A small number of limited edition prints from each series.
Numbered, signed, and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
Join the list and you will hear first.
f/2.8 — wide open. Letting the world in as it is.
ISO — in search of light, truth, and the moments most people pass by.
I am a product of war.
My earliest memory is not of childhood — it is of survival. Bombing raids overhead. Gunpowder in the dark. And cutting through all of it, the distant smell of burning joss sticks and the sound of Buddhist chanting. That contrast — chaos and stillness, destruction and grace — has never left me. It is in every photograph I make.
I photograph the will to live. Not chasing places — chasing moments that refuse to be forgotten. I have stood at both ends of the earth, documented Myanmar during its brief opening before the curtain fell, and witnessed 750 Humpback Whales surrounding our vessel in waters where whale processing ghost towns still stand. I do not stage. I do not direct. I arrive, I wait, I disappear — and then I witness what insists on being seen.
Trained at Central Saint Martins and Ravensbourne College London in moving image, accepted to the Royal College of Art — the world's most selective postgraduate institution — I chose the world over the classroom. The body of work that followed is my answer to that choice.
The work continues. The world is still insisting.
so many whales — I can see them, hear them, smell them.
Antarctica taught me something I was not prepared for. On the same waters where whale processing plants stand as ghost towns of near-extinction — rusting machinery, the industrial remnants of what human consumption almost took from the world — nature staged its own response.
It began like a scene from an old naval film. In the distance, what looked like cannon fire landing in the water — plumes of mist rising from the surface, one after another, in every direction. Then another. Then ten. Then too many to count.
They were breaths.
750 Humpback Whales — a superpod so rare that most marine biologists will never witness one — had surrounded our Lindblad National Geographic expedition vessel. Not fleeing. Not alarmed. Curious. Almost celebratory. Fins slapping the surface. Bodies breaching. The sound of them filling the air. The smell of them. The sheer, impossible fact of them.
These were the descendants of the ones that survived. The ones that outlasted the processing plants, the harpoons, the near-total annihilation of their kind. And here they were — 750 strong, surrounding a ship built in the name of conservation.
I have never felt more humbled by the resilience of the living world. I have never been more certain of why I do what I do.
I photograph the will to live. That afternoon, it photographed itself.
← Return to Globe— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Antarctica 2025
I wanted to reach the summit on my own merit.
We arrived at the base of the mountain late in the afternoon, where pilgrims gathered before beginning the long climb toward Golden Rock. Trucks unloaded families, monks, elders, and travelers into a busy collection of food stalls, prayer items, and small resting areas before the ascent. From there, the pilgrimage began on foot.
The path wrapped around the mountain in long winding stretches. Some sections were steep enough to force you to slow your breathing while others leveled out briefly before climbing again. Along the way, porters carried people unable or unwilling to make the journey themselves, transporting them on simple seat platforms for a fee. I remember watching them pass by with a mixture of admiration and exhaustion. But for me, walking mattered. I wanted to reach the summit on my own merit.
As the climb continued and the crowds gradually thinned, the mountain air became noticeably colder. Sweat cooled quickly against my skin whenever I stopped to rest, and a damp breeze drifted through the trees lining the path. By the time darkness began settling over the mountain, I could already feel a strange chill lingering around me that seemed sharper than the evening air alone should have been.
After several hours climbing through fading light, I finally reached the mountaintop where Golden Rock stood.
The temple grounds glowed softly in the darkness. Small shrines and prayer areas surrounded the massive golden boulder while worshippers burned joss sticks and placed offerings beneath rows of flickering candles. The atmosphere felt peaceful and deeply reverent. People moved quietly. Families prayed together. Monks walked silently through the grounds collecting alms.
Golden Rock itself seemed almost impossible suspended there at the edge of the mountain. Local belief holds that the massive boulder remains balanced because it is anchored by a strand of the Buddha's hair, a sacred relic said to rest beneath the rock. Standing there at night, surrounded by mist and candlelight, it did not feel difficult to understand why generations believed the place carried something spiritual.
I spent hours respectfully photographing the pilgrims and worshippers around me. Nothing felt performative. The faces, the prayers, the stillness — all of it felt genuine.
At one point I noticed a young boy beside a low wall lined with hundreds of candles. His family stood nearby lighting joss sticks together in silence. I raised my camera and focused on the scene.
Then something shifted. A cold sensation crept across the back of my neck as if the temperature around me had suddenly dropped. The air no longer felt heavy but strangely hollow and still, as though the sounds of the temple had briefly pulled away from me. My pulse quickened before I even understood what I was reacting to.
As the boy turned slightly toward me, the wrapped head covering of the woman beside him suddenly formed what looked like an almost otherworldly face in the flickering light — something strangely familiar, though I could not explain why.
I kept taking photographs. Not because I understood what I was seeing, but because something in that moment felt suspended between coincidence, light, faith, and imagination. Even now, years later, I still think about the feeling more than the image itself.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Myanmar 2013
The heat had already settled heavily across the plains by the time we reached the riverbank.
Dust drifted through the air with every movement, sticking to our clothes and camera gear as we waited under the African sun. Across the river, thousands of wildebeests gathered along the embankment, restless and uncertain.
At first it looked completely disorganized. Small groups pushed forward, then backed away. Others paced sideways along the bank as if searching for another crossing point. Zebras moved carefully among them, and at times it honestly looked as though they were trying to organize the confusion. Every few minutes one wildebeest would step toward the edge, stare into the water below, then turn back again.
None of us knew how long it would take. The guides kept scanning the herd while we stood there waiting in the heat, fingers near our shutter buttons hoping the crossing would finally happen. Time moved strangely out there. Thirty minutes could feel like five.
Then a line began to form. Not a perfect line, but a real one. A slow gathering of bodies moving toward a single point along the riverbank. The energy shifted immediately. Even from a distance you could feel tension building through the herd.
Then the lead wildebeest finally committed. He started descending the steep riverbank alone while thousands watched behind him. My finger tightened against the shutter button as he carefully made his way down toward the water. He entered the river and began crossing.
And nobody followed.
I remember thinking: What do they see that I don't? Are there crocodiles beneath the surface? Is the current stronger than it looks? Why is nobody moving?
The lone wildebeest reached the opposite side safely. Still the herd refused. Then, unbelievably, he turned around and crossed back again. I remember silently thinking: Please don't get eaten. The river looked calm on the surface, but everyone standing there knew predators could be hidden anywhere beneath that muddy water. Somehow he made it back once more.
A few moments passed. Then he started crossing again. This time the herd followed.
The earth literally began to shake beneath us. Thousands upon thousands of hooves thundered down the embankment all at once. Dust exploded into the air as wildebeests charged into the river beside zebras and smaller groups trying desperately to keep pace. Water erupted everywhere — endless splashing, bodies colliding, animals galloping through waves driven by instinct and momentum.
The sound was overwhelming. Not just loud, but physical. You could feel it in your chest.
What struck me most was the sheer force of collective movement. Strength in numbers on a scale almost impossible to describe until you witness it yourself.
And while everyone watched the river for crocodiles, something else unfolded nearby. Further down the riverbank, partially hidden in the grass, a lioness had been waiting. Patient. Experienced. Watching. As the wildebeests began their descent, she moved closer to the edge of the crossing point. Then suddenly she exploded from the brush and pounced onto a wildebeest far larger than herself. The struggle lasted only moments before she managed to wrestle it down. Then, astonishingly, she dragged the animal into the bush and disappeared from sight.
Meanwhile the crossing continued. The rest of the herd never stopped moving. Wave after wave continued pouring into the river, driven by survival, instinct, fear, and momentum. Life and death unfolding simultaneously in every direction.
Standing there beside that river, covered in heat and dust, I realized we had witnessed something far greater than a wildlife spectacle. It was one of the oldest stories on earth still playing out exactly as it always has — movement, danger, sacrifice, survival.
And even after the dust settled and the sounds faded into the distance, the feeling of the ground shaking beneath my feet stayed with me long afterward.
The photographs tell part of the story. The video captures the thunder. Coming soon.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Maasai Mara 2015
The tide had pulled back far enough to expose the flats.
The ocean breeze moved through steadily — not cooling, just present. Persistent. There was something in it that kept urging me forward, around the next bend, toward whatever the island was still holding back. Gili Air has that quality. It doesn't announce itself. It simply opens, slowly, if you keep walking.
As the tide retreated it revealed something unexpected. The shallows stretched out in every direction, thin as glass, catching everything above them. The clouds had come down and the water had risen up to meet them and somewhere in between the two stopped being separate things. I was looking at the sky twice — once above me, once beneath my feet. The whole world had gone still and reflective, burning slow in the last light.
Then I noticed him.
A local man, moving through the shallows maybe a hundred meters away. Each step sent ripples spreading outward across the reflection — slow, widening circles that kept moving long after his foot had lifted. He wasn't fishing. He wasn't going anywhere with any urgency. He moved the way people move when they belong completely to a place.
I stopped walking and just watched.
The ripples kept spreading. The sunset burned low behind the island on the horizon. The man kept moving through that mirror world, unhurried, a silhouette against a sky that existed both above and below him. At a certain point I stopped thinking about the light or the composition and just stood there.
Some moments don't ask to be understood. They just ask you to stay.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Gili Air, Indonesia 2024
The path up was steep from the first step.
Not discouraging — inviting. The kind of steep that tells you something is waiting. I climbed through the early morning heat, pausing at each small plateau where the ridge opened briefly before rising again. Every stop revealed another layer of what was out there — turquoise bays curving below, jagged peaks dropping into the sea, islands scattered across the water in every direction as far as I could see.
This place was not made gently. Tectonic plates collided here. Volcanoes broke through the ocean floor. The earth folded and cracked and pushed itself skyward over millions of years and left behind something that looks almost too dramatic to be real. Standing on that ridge you can feel the violence underneath the beauty. The land still carries it.
The golden light arrived slowly across the hillside. The dry grass moved in the breeze — ancient, unhurried, indifferent to the fact that I was there at all.
I thought about how far from everything this place actually is. The distances out here are real. The ocean between these islands is not decorative. Getting here requires intention. And standing on that ridge at sunrise, looking out across a landscape that took millennia to build, I felt something I don't feel often enough.
Grateful to be alive. Grateful to be standing exactly there, in exactly that light, on exactly that morning.
Some places remind you that the world is still mostly untouched. That there are still edges worth finding. This was one of them.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Padar Island, Indonesia 2024
The meet time was midnight.
Not dawn. Not early morning. Midnight — when the mountain is completely dark and the only light is what you carry. We strapped torches to our heads and began the climb. From a distance, looking back down the path, you could see the whole procession — hundreds of headlamps winding slowly upward through the darkness like a long, breathing chain of light. Something between a pilgrimage and an expedition.
The climb was hard in the dark. The path doesn't care what hour it is.
Then came the descent into the crater. The air changed first — a sharpness in the throat, then a burn. Gas masks on. The sulfur vents below were already working, pushing their poison upward through the dark. And then, through the mask and the mist, something impossible appeared.
Blue fire. Not a reflection. Not a trick of the light. Actual blue flames — sulfuric gas igniting as it meets the air, burning electric blue in the darkness. Nothing I had read prepared me for the reality of it. The miners who descend into this crater every day, carrying loads of solidified sulfur on their backs, were already there. Working. In that.
Then the sun began to arrive. Slowly, the mouth of the volcano gave way. Clouds and sulfur mist pulled back and what emerged beneath them stopped me completely. An emerald lake — vast, still, that electric turquoise turning deeper in the early light. Around its edges, pale sulfur deposits had formed into shapes — dunes, islands, ridgelines — like a desert that had grown inside the crater over centuries. From above it looked like a map of somewhere that doesn't exist.
I stood at the edge and tried to make sense of what I was looking at. I couldn't. I just kept looking.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Kawah Ijen, East Java, Indonesia 2024
The hike in takes several hours. There is no shortcut.
The path climbs through distinct worlds — open meadows, glacial lakes catching the sky, narrow ledges cut into the rock face where you move carefully and don't look down for too long. The mountain air changes with every gain in elevation. Warmer in the valleys, sharp and thin higher up, cold in a way that feels deliberate by the time you reach the snow. I watched people turn back at the final ascent. Two hours of steep, exposed climbing still ahead of them and the decision written plainly on their faces. I kept going.
By the time I reached base camp I was walking on snow. The world had gone quiet in the way only altitude can make it quiet — that particular stillness where the wind drops for a moment and there is nothing between you and whatever this place is.
Then the clouds shifted. At first just an outline. Then the full thing. The granite spires of Fitzroy broke through — vertical, savage, impossibly sharp against the sky. Like the earth had driven its fist upward through the crust and left the knuckles exposed. Fitzroy doesn't ask for respect. It simply exists, completely indifferent to whether you are there or not.
This is what happens when the earth negotiates with itself over millions of years — when ice and rock and pressure and time reach some violent agreement. The result is not gentle. It is not decorative. It is a reminder that this planet was here long before us and is not particularly concerned with our presence.
Standing at the base of those spires in the snow, I felt very small. I was grateful for it.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Patagonia, Argentina 2025
They have been here for fifteen hundred years.
Carved directly into the limestone cliffs of the Yi River during the Northern Wei Dynasty, beginning around 493 AD, the figures at Longmen were not built. They were revealed — chisel by chisel, generation by generation, by hands that believed the rock already held what they were looking for. Over the span of four centuries, more than 100,000 Buddhist figures were carved into these walls. The central Vairocana Buddha stands 17 meters tall. His face is said to have been modeled after Empress Wu Zetian herself, the only woman in Chinese history to rule as emperor in her own name.
I stood in front of him and felt the weight of that. Not the weight of history, exactly. Something quieter. The figures are worn now — weathered by centuries of rain, damaged by those who came to take rather than witness. And yet the tranquility in that central face has not moved. Whatever the carvers put there — compassion, stillness, the suggestion that peace is possible — it survived everything the world threw at it.
This was not built for kings or conquest. It was built for humanity. A civilization's longest, most patient argument that compassion matters — pressed into stone so it could not be forgotten.
I walked slowly. I did not rush. Some places ask you to be still and this was one of them. Art made as remembrance. Remembrance made as devotion. Devotion made to outlast everything. It has.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Longmen Grottoes, China 2024
I was born in Vietnam. But not this Vietnam.
I came from the south — the delta region where the land flattens and the rivers spread wide before meeting the sea. Water everywhere, moving, restless. A completely different country in every sense except the name.
Sapa is the north. The land here does not flatten. It folds — ridge after ridge, terrace after terrace, rice fields carved into the mountainside by hand over generations until the entire valley looks like something the earth itself designed. Standing on one plateau and looking out across the next, then the next, then the one beyond that — each one as striking as the last. The scale of what the H'mong people have built here, quietly, over centuries, without announcement, is almost impossible to absorb.
And the H'mong people themselves. I was not prepared for the kindness. Not the performed kindness of tourism, but something genuine and unhurried — the kind that comes from people who are entirely at home in themselves and their place in the world. They carry their culture the way they carry everything else up these mountains. With strength and without complaint.
Standing there on those terraces, I understood something I hadn't before. A country is not one thing. It is many things folded into each other — the way these terraces fold into the mountain, each level distinct, each one part of the same whole. I was home. Just not the home I knew.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Sapa, Vietnam 2022
The terrain doesn't ease you in.
From the first steps the ground is volcanic rock — sharp, uneven, broken into shapes that look like they were thrown there rather than placed. Dark and ancient and indifferent. The kind of ground that demands your full attention with every step. This is not a mountain that was built for hiking. It is a volcano that tolerates it.
The wind came in unpredictable bursts, twisting volcanic gas and mist across the path, carrying the smell of something deep and sulfuric — a reminder that what you are walking on is not dead. The clouds caught the last light of the sun as it dropped behind the ridge, their edges burning orange and gold against a sky that had turned the color of something between dusk and fire. The whole landscape felt like another planet.
Then the summit opened. The edge appeared and beyond it — nothing. A sea of clouds stretching in every direction, lit from below by what remained of the sun, moving slowly, endlessly. The volcanic gases rose and disappeared into it. The wind pushed through without apology. I stood at the rim and looked out across something that had no horizon I could find.
There are places that remind you the earth is still alive. Still working. Still burning underneath everything we have built on top of it. Pacaya is one of them.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Volcán de Pacaya, Guatemala 2021
It was 1:15 in the morning and the snow was falling and the light was full.
That is the Arctic in May — a world that refuses to go dark, where time loses its meaning and the ordinary rules no longer apply. The expedition ship moved slowly through the pack ice, engines low, when the call came from the scientists on the bridge. They had found him.
I pulled on every layer I had and stepped out onto the main observation deck. The cold arrived instantly — sharp, total, the kind that finds every gap in your clothing and reminds you where you are. Snow fell in slow, soft curtains across the ice. I raised my camera and found him in the frame.
He was moving across the pack ice with a deliberate, unhurried stride — alone, crossing a vast sheet of white that stretched in every direction as far as I could see. Fragments of blue ice scattered around him. The world completely still except for his movement and the quiet sound of the ship holding its position.
There are animals you observe. And there are animals that stop you completely. He was built for exactly this — every part of him shaped by millions of years of Arctic existence. The most powerful predator in this landscape, completely at home on ice that most living things could not survive for an hour.
The ice is shrinking. Every year the pack ice retreats further, forms later, breaks earlier. The scientists on board spoke about it matter of factly, the way people speak about things they have watched happen slowly and cannot stop.
I kept watching him walk. He moved across that ice like he owned it — because he does, or did, or should. Standing on that deck in the falling snow at 1am, I found myself hoping that the world finds a way to keep this kingdom intact. He deserves his ice. He has earned it across a thousand generations.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Svalbard, Arctic Norway 2025
We had already been out for hours when the guide stopped the vehicle.
Nobody spoke.
In the shade of a tree, partially hidden in the dry grass, a lioness was feeding on a kill. Head down, focused, completely absorbed in the business of survival. A few feet away — and I mean feet, not meters — a massive crocodile lay motionless in the scrub. Not threatening. Not competing. Simply present, sated, in that particular stillness that comes after a crocodile has eaten. The kind of stillness that looks like a log until it doesn't.
And then, moving through the trees in the near distance, an elephant. Trunk stretched fully upward, reaching for something in the canopy, completely unhurried, completely unbothered by what was happening on the ground below.
Three apex creatures. One frame. One moment.
I have spent enough time in the bush to know that what I was looking at does not happen. Not like this. Not all three, not this close, not at the same time. The crocodile should have moved. The lioness should have reacted. The elephant should have scattered both of them. None of that happened. Each one was simply living — feeding, resting, reaching — in the same small patch of Zambian bush, as if some agreement had been reached that morning that none of us were told about.
There was no drama. No confrontation. Just three of the most powerful animals on earth, going about their lives in the same frame, at the same moment, while we sat there in silence and tried to understand what we were witnessing.
I'm still not sure I do.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · South Luangwa National Park, Zambia 2022
I stood at the top of the theatre and tried to do the math.
12,000 seats. Every stone quarried by hand, carried from distance, cut with precision, set in place by people who had none of what we would call tools. No machinery. No cranes. No computers running structural calculations. Just human minds, human hands, and something that must have felt very close to obsession.
The theatre at Hierapolis was built in the first century AD. What stands here today — still largely intact, still holding its form against two thousand years of earthquake and weather and time — was designed, engineered, and executed by people working with rope, lever, chisel, and mathematics scratched onto papyrus. The acoustics were calculated. The sight lines were calculated. The load-bearing geometry of every curved row of seating was calculated. All of it in someone's head first, then on paper, then in stone.
I kept thinking about the quarrying alone. The volume of rock required for a structure this size. Men cutting marble from mountainsides, moving it across terrain that had no roads worthy of the name, shaping each piece to tolerances that would make a modern engineer pause.
And then there is the imagination that preceded all of it. Someone looked at an empty hillside above the thermal pools of Pamukkale and saw this. Saw the curve of the seating, the stage facade with its columns, the view across the valley to the mountains beyond. Conceived the whole thing before a single stone was moved.
That gap — between the idea and the thing — is where I kept getting lost.
We talk about human achievement as though it belongs to this era. As though technology is what makes things possible. Standing inside Hierapolis, I'm not sure that's true. I think what makes things possible is the same thing it has always been. The will to build. The refusal to accept that something cannot be done.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Hierapolis, Pamukkale, Turkey 2022
This was not a settlement. This was a city.
Walking into Ephesus you understand that immediately. Founded around the 10th century BC, Ephesus reached its peak in 129 BC when it became the capital of the Roman province of Asia — home to 250,000 people, the fourth largest city in the entire empire after Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. The scale alone stops you.
They shopped in the agora — the great marketplace at the city's heart. They gathered in the theatre, capacity 25,000, for performances and public life. They worshipped at the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. They went home to residential neighborhoods with mosaic floors and frescoed walls, color still visible in the plasterwork after two thousand years.
Urban planning. They had urban planning. Roads laid in grids. Sewage systems running beneath the streets. Public fountains fed by aqueducts. Most of what stands here today — the Library of Celsus, the agora, the theatre, the aqueducts — was built or rebuilt during the reign of Augustus, whose reforms brought Ephesus to its most prosperous period, lasting until the third century AD.
All of it done with hands. With mathematics on parchment. With human minds that looked at a hillside above the Aegean and decided a city would stand there.
I kept thinking about what it means to call a place like this ruins. The word implies absence — what is gone, what was lost. But Ephesus doesn't feel like absence. It feels like evidence. Evidence of what people are capable of when imagination and will and collective effort move in the same direction. None of this is ghost. All of it is proof.
You could spend weeks here and still not see everything. I walked for hours and felt I had barely touched the outline of what this place was. That is what a great city does. Even in ruins. Even after two thousand years. It insists.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Ephesus, Turkey 2022
Every other place I have stood in has been shaped by human intention.
Cappadocia is shaped by something else entirely. Millions of years ago volcanic eruptions buried this landscape in deep layers of ash and tufa — soft, workable rock that hardens slowly on exposure to air. Then wind arrived. Then water. Then time. Working without blueprint, without purpose, without any concept of what they were making, the elements carved. Towers rose from the valley floors. Caps of harder basalt balanced impossibly on top of narrowing columns. Ridgelines dissolved into forests of spires.
I have walked through cities built by Roman engineers. I have stood in theatres designed on parchment and executed in marble with mathematical precision. All of it extraordinary. All of it the product of human minds insisting on their vision against the resistance of the physical world. Cappadocia is the opposite. Here, nature did not resist. Nature decided. And what it decided is more extraordinary than anything a human mind could have specified.
The people who came here understood that. Rather than imposing a different geometry on the landscape, they followed it. They carved their homes into the rock. Their churches into the cliffs. Entire underground cities — some reaching eight levels deep — cut into the tufa, using the mountain's own material and the mountain's own form. The architecture took its cues from what was already there. Doorways followed the natural curves. Rooms expanded where the rock allowed.
I walked through the valley at golden hour and tried to find the line between what nature made and what people made. I couldn't find it. That was the point. Some places are gifts. Unearned, undeserved, simply given. Cappadocia is one of them.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Cappadocia, Turkey 2022
Senmonorom is not on the way to anywhere.
You arrive here by choice, or by a road that simply keeps going long after the comfortable parts end. The town sits high in the Mondulkiri highlands of northeastern Cambodia — a few streets, a day market, a night market, the kind of place where life is lived close to the earth and nothing is assumed. The will to live here is not a phrase. It is something you can see in every face, every transaction, every small act of getting through another day with grace. The people I met were kind in the way people are kind when kindness costs something — genuine, unhurried, freely given.
I was walking one of those streets when they appeared. Four novice monks moving together in the morning light, saffron robes burning softly against the muted colors of the town. A dog walked beside them — easy, unhurried, as if it belonged to the procession as naturally as they did. The monks carried bags of food, heading somewhere with quiet purpose, speaking among themselves in low voices.
I raised my camera. And they noticed me. They didn't look away. They looked directly back — four young faces, calm and open, watching a stranger watch them. No performance in it. No self-consciousness. Just clear, steady observation. The kind of looking that sees without judging.
And something moved through me that I had not expected. I was born in Vietnam, not far from here in the larger geography of Southeast Asia. My family had always said it — that if I had remained, I would have joined the monastery. Every uncle before me had taken that path. It was not a question in their minds. It was simply what would have happened, the way a river finds its course when nothing interrupts it.
Something interrupted it. And I became someone else. Standing on that street in the Cambodian highlands, watching four young monks watch me, I felt the full weight of that for a moment. Not regret. Something quieter. A recognition of how many lives we almost lived. How close we always are to different versions of ourselves.
The monks moved on. The dog followed. The morning continued. I stayed where I was for a while. Thinking about roads taken and not taken.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Senmonorom, Cambodia 2023
Española does not ease you in.
From the moment you step ashore the island announces itself — marine iguanas stacked on volcanic rock, Nazca boobies standing their ground on the trail without moving, waved albatrosses performing their extraordinary mating ritual with a kind of earnest theatricality that makes you want to applaud. Sea lions roll in the shallows like they invented joy. Every few steps something else appears that shouldn't exist anywhere outside of imagination.
And then, on a spiny coastal shrub above the trail, I saw the hawk. A Galápagos hawk — perched in the twisted branches of one of those low, salt-hardened bushes that cling to the lava rock along the Punta Suarez trail. The island's only apex predator, endemic to this archipelago, found nowhere else on earth. It sat completely still, watching everything below it with the particular patience of a creature that has never needed to fear anything. I stopped. I waited. In a place this alive, patience is the only currency that matters.
For a while nothing happened. The island continued around us both — the albatrosses danced, the iguanas moved in their ancient slow way, the sea lions called from the water. The hawk watched. I watched the hawk.
Then something shifted. Those muscular legs contracted. The wings came out in a single motion — wide, deliberate, reaching. And the island went quiet. Not gradually. All at once. Every bird, every iguana, every creature within sight responded to that wingspan the way they have responded to it across generations of conditioning. The hawk lifted and cut through the air like something engineered for exactly this purpose. Its shadow moved across the ground below — long, purposeful, unmistakable.
I understood in that moment why everything went still. That shadow has meant the same thing for thousands of years on this island. The animals don't think about it. They simply know. A stealth fighter built by evolution. Silent, precise, absolute.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Española Island, Galápagos 2025
The trek started at 3am. No light. Just the path ahead and the sound of boots on volcanic ground.
By the time the sky began to change — that first suggestion of grey before any real light arrives — I could see shapes around me. Hundreds of other trekkers moving in the same direction, headlamps threading up the mountain in silence, each person drawn by the same thing. Nobody needed to explain it. You don't wake at 3am and climb a volcano in the dark unless you already know something is waiting.
Then the clouds appeared. Not above me — below me. An ocean of cloud filling the caldera valley, moving slowly, thick and white, wrapping itself around the base of Mt. Bromo the way water wraps around stone. The mountain rose through it like something that had always been there and always would be — a living monument forged through fire and the slow, violent negotiation of the earth with itself.
The sun arrived at the edges first. Light hitting the top of the cloud ocean, turning it gold, then white, then something that had no name I could reach for. The other trekkers around me went quiet. Hundreds of people, all at once, without discussion, understanding that this was one of those moments that doesn't need commentary.
I looked down at the crater rim. Those long, linear folds of volcanic rock — crooked, ancient, descending to the mouth of the volcano — have known the heat of molten lava. The evidence is written into every surface. And yet around the base, where the violence has had time to rest, forests have returned. Green and lush and insistent, growing right up to the edge of where the fire was. Nature healing over what fire left behind. Life returning to the places that burned.
That is what Mt. Bromo teaches you at sunrise if you're paying attention. The earth destroys. The earth heals. And it does both with complete indifference to whether anyone is watching. But that morning, hundreds of us were.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Mt. Bromo, East Java, Indonesia 2024
Local markets are where I go to disappear. No agenda. No frame yet. Just presence — watching how people move through their own world, unbothered by the witness.
Chichicastenango was organized chaos in the best sense. Textiles stacked in colors that shouldn't work together but did. Wooden pieces carved with a patience that takes generations to learn. Smoke drifting from food stalls somewhere deeper in. The noise of commerce that has been happening in this highland valley for five hundred years.
I was in that state where motion slows. Where I stop thinking about the photograph and start watching light — how it wrinkles across a surface, how it finds an edge and lets go, how it arrives and disappears before you can name it.
Then a man walked through a beam.
Golden. Vertical. Cutting through a gap in the corrugated roof like it had been waiting for him specifically. The market kept moving around him. The smoke kept drifting. The colors held. But for one fraction of a second, the light chose him — and the world honored that by slowing down.
I was there. I was ready. That is the only explanation I have.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Chichicastenango, Guatemala 2022
The Nam Hin Bun River spent an unknowable number of years doing one thing — cutting through limestone. The result is 7.5 kilometers of tunnel, passages reaching 90 meters wide and 100 meters high in places. Not a cave so much as a passage through the interior of the earth.
You enter by boat. A longtail, narrow, low to the water. The light behind you disappears fast.
What the headlamp reveals in the dark is something the eye keeps trying to name and can't — cavernous formations that nature arranged with a patience no human art can match. Folds and arches and textures that catch light and give it back differently. A large freshwater fish surfaced near the beam, drawn to the only light in its world. It held there for a moment, then was gone.
The boatmen were from Ban Kong Lo — the village that has lived at the mouth of this cave for generations. Their ancestors used this passage to move goods between settlements before any road existed. Five mountain passes by foot, or one hour through the earth by water. They chose the river. I understood why, floating through that dark and feeling the scale of what the earth had made.
They were generous guides. Unhurried. Proud of the place in the quiet way of people who have never needed to perform it for anyone.
One of the most beautiful terrains I have ever moved through.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Kong Lor Cave, Laos 2023
The walkways above Perito Moreno are built for the glacier. That is the understood hierarchy — the ice fills the frame, fills the mind, fills every conversation you overhear. You come here to witness the glacier. The glacier does not witness you back.
I was at a lookout point above Lago Argentino when I heard it before I saw it. A pressure in the air. Then the Variable Hawk came around the face of the ice — low, purposeful, moving against a wall of blue-white that goes 60 metres straight down into glacial water.
The scale is what stops you. That hawk — wingspan maybe a metre across, dark against the spires of ice — looked impossibly small. And yet it moved with complete authority. It was not dwarfed by the glacier. It was sovereign over it. This was its territory. The ice was just the backdrop.
The Variable Hawk earns its name — it can appear in nearly thirty distinct adult plumages. This one was a juvenile, warm brown, the underwing feathers fanning at the tips in the Patagonian wind. Yellow cere just visible as it banked past the lookout. It did not acknowledge the crowd below. It was hunting, or simply moving through the updrafts rising off the ice face the way it had always moved through them.
Icebergs dotted the surface of Lago Argentino below, blue and ancient, calved from the glacier's face. The sound of ice shifting carries across the water like something structural — the earth rearranging itself. The hawk flew through all of it as if the spectacle were simply home.
I raised the camera. It gave me one pass.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Perito Moreno, Patagonia 2026
Nikkō does not announce itself. The approach is what prepares you — a corridor of cedar trees so old and so tall that the light arrives as something filtered, something earned. The forest has been here longer than the shrine. The shrine understands this. It was built accordingly.
Tōshō-gū was erected in 1617 as the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu — the man who ended a century of civil war and founded the shogunate that ruled Japan for over 260 years. He chose Nikkō himself. After unifying a nation by force of will and blade, he wanted to be laid to rest in a mountain forest, watched over by cedar trees. There is something to understand about a man in that choice.
The complex holds over one hundred buildings associated with two Shintō shrines and a Buddhist temple. Eight structures are designated national treasures. But what the photographs never prepare you for is the quiet between the buildings — the moss on the stone walls, the way the forest presses in at every edge, the sense that the architecture was designed not to dominate the mountain but to belong to it.
I moved through it slowly. Through gates watched over by guardian statues placed there to turn back evil. Past a carving of three monkeys — see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil — and a sleeping cat said to keep mice from disturbing the shogun's rest. Past a stone torii so large it reorients your sense of scale. And then into corners where the tour groups hadn't reached, where the only sound was water moving somewhere beneath the stones.
That is where the feeling arrived.
In Japanese mythology, the kitsune — the fox spirit — is the great watcher. As a kitsune grows in power it gains more tails, with nine being the highest. A nine-tailed fox is said to see and hear anything happening anywhere, carrying an infinite depth of wisdom. One new tail for every hundred years it lives — nine tails means nine hundred years of experience, almost a millennium of watching civilizations rise and crumble. They are shapeshifters. They take human form. And they are drawn, in the old stories, to places where the boundary between the seen and unseen worlds grows thin.
Nikkō felt like one of those places.
The most infamous kitsune in Japanese legend is Tamamo no Mae — a nine-tailed fox who disguised herself as a courtesan in the Emperor's court during the Heian era, said to have laid waste to numerous kingdoms before she was unmasked. The legend places her final transformation not far from here, in the volcanic foothills of Tochigi — a boulder called the Sesshō-seki, the Life-Taking Stone, her last known address. She was never fully caught. She was only ever cornered.
Standing in the quieter corners of Tōshō-gū, I felt observed in a way I couldn't locate. Not threat. Not menace. More like awareness. The particular feeling of a very old intelligence deciding whether you are worth acknowledging.
I raised the camera. The cedars held their silence. Whatever was watching said nothing back.
That is the only account I have.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Nikkō, Japan 2024
I had not planned to stop.
San Salvatore in Lauro sits quietly off the Via dei Coronari, a church that does not announce itself from the street. No crowds outside. No queue. Just a door, and beyond it, the particular stillness that old Roman churches hold in the afternoon — cool stone, filtered light, the smell of centuries of candle smoke pressed into the walls.
I took a pew. I was there for the architecture, the Pietro da Cortona on the high altar, the way the Corinthian columns organize the space into something that feels both formal and intimate. The church has been on this ground since the seventh century, rebuilt after fire, rebuilt again, carrying the weight of everything Rome has survived. You feel that weight when you sit inside it.
Then he walked in.
A bishop. Black cassock, purple fascia, the amaranth zucchetto — that small, close-fitting skullcap whose color has marked episcopal rank since the 13th century, worn first to cover the tonsured crown in unheated stone churches, carried forward into this century as a mark of office and obligation. Purple in the Catholic hierarchy means shepherd. It means a diocese, a territory, a specific community of people who are your responsibility by consecration.
He did not look at anyone.
Five or six of us were in the church. None of us were acknowledged. Not dismissively — the absence of acknowledgment was something else entirely. He was already somewhere inward before he crossed the threshold. Whatever had brought him here had been building before he arrived. The magenta cap caught the afternoon light briefly as he passed a window and then he was in the pew ahead of me and the light was gone.
He sat. He bowed his head.
I watched for five minutes before I raised the camera. Not because I was uncertain — because the moment felt like something that deserved to be witnessed before it was recorded. There is a difference between those two things and I have spent enough time in the field to know it.
What was on his face was not peace. That is the word people expect from a man of the cloth at prayer. What was there was closer to the expression I have seen on the faces of people carrying something they cannot put down — a grief, a decision, a responsibility that has no clean resolution. The Church is not an abstraction. It is made of people, of parishes, of priests and families and suffering that arrives at a bishop's door with names attached. Whatever was weighing on him had a name. Possibly several.
He prayed. He rose slowly. One last moment of stillness — eyes forward, not at me, not at the altar, at something I couldn't locate. Then he walked out. The door closed. The church returned to its afternoon quiet.
I sat for a while longer. Thinking about the particular loneliness of authority. The weight that comes not from having power but from being responsible for people who need things you cannot always provide. I have photographed that weight in the faces of elders in Myanmar, in the lines of porters at Kawah Ijen, in the expression of a lone wildebeest crossing a river ahead of ten thousand others.
It is the same weight. It does not belong to any religion or rank or latitude.
It is simply what it costs to be responsible for others.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · San Salvatore in Lauro, Rome 2025
I was on the water when I saw him.
The Preaek Luong moves quietly through Aek Phnum district in Battambang province — a river that does not appear on most maps that tourists carry. I was not following a route. I was following the water, the way it pulled the light, the way the boats moved through it with a particular unhurried economy that told you something about the people who lived here.
He was seated on the bow of a wooden boat loaded with what he had collected — plastic bottles, bags, refuse pulled from the surface of the river. The checkered krama wrapped at his head. His body completely still, weight forward onto his knees, holding a plastic bottle in one hand the way a man holds something when he is calculating its value against what it cost him to find it.
I did not raise the camera immediately. I watched.
There was nothing performative in what he was doing. No awareness of being seen. He was working. He was doing what the river asked of him that day, the way he does every day, the way his father likely did — collecting what others discard, turning it into the currency that keeps his family fed.
He is Vietnamese. Born, most likely, in Cambodia. A member of one of the most invisible communities in Southeast Asia. Between 400,000 and 700,000 ethnic Vietnamese live across Cambodia today — though exact figures are impossible to verify because so many exist without legal documentation of any kind. Cambodian citizenship law requires fluency in Khmer and proof of birth registration — criteria that most people in these floating communities along the Tonlé Sap and Mekong rivers cannot meet. Which means they cannot own land. Cannot hold formal employment. Cannot register their children in public schools. Cannot access hospitals without paying fees that a day of plastic collection cannot cover.
They are regarded as legal immigrants by Cambodian authorities and illegal immigrants by politicians and the general population. Routinely subject to extortion from immigration police, economic police, water traffic police, military police, and local security forces. Fishing has always been the primary livelihood — but fish stocks are declining, and without legal documents, these communities cannot go ashore to find alternative work. So they do what the river still offers. They collect plastic. They repair boats. They fish what remains. They move when they are told to move.
In mid-2021, Phnom Penh authorities ordered the removal of floating houses on rivers surrounding the capital with little notice — affecting some 1,300 mostly Vietnamese households. Families with nowhere to go. Not welcome in Cambodia. Not recognized by Vietnam. Adrift between two nations that both claim partial ownership of their blood while offering none of the rights that blood should carry.
I am Vietnamese. My family left the south. I came from the delta, from the same rivers these communities were born beside and driven to. Looking at this man on the water — collecting plastic in a wooden boat on a river that winds through a country that does not officially recognize his existence — I felt something that went past sympathy into something harder to name. Recognition, perhaps. The particular grief of understanding exactly how close the distance is between his life and other lives. How thin the line between the documented and the invisible. How much the will to live costs when the world has decided not to see you.
He did not look up. The river moved. The boat rocked gently. He kept working.
That is the will to live. Not the dramatic version. Not the survival story with a resolution. Just a man on a boat, doing what the day requires, carrying what the river gives him, making something from what everyone else threw away.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Preaek Luong · Aek Phnum · Cambodia 2022
Nobody told them to smile.
That is the first thing. I have spent enough time watching people perform contentment for a camera, or perform devotion for a crowd, to recognise immediately when neither is happening. These young monks were not performing anything. They were working — on scaffolding, on the lower roof, at ground level sorting tiles — and they were happy in the way that people are happy when the work is real and the purpose is clear and the community around them is one they chose.
Wat Xieng Thong has stood at the tip of the Luang Prabang peninsula since 1560. Founded by King Setthathirath, one of the most influential rulers in Lao history, near the meeting point of the Mekong and Nam Khan Rivers — a site considered spiritually significant for centuries before the temple existed. It was the coronation site of Lao kings, a gathering place for the most significant annual festivities in Luang Prabang, and it remains in its original form — with ongoing repairs to the roof, gold leaf gilding, and lacquering on the walls and entrance. That last part matters. Ongoing. Always ongoing.
The religious buildings are regularly maintained. Monks teach young monks restoration techniques for their heritage. Not as a programme. Not as a curriculum. As transmission — the way a language is kept alive, or a recipe, or a way of reading the sky. The older monks know how the tiles are laid because they were taught by monks who knew. The younger monks climbing the scaffolding on this day will teach the ones who come after them. The temple survives not through preservation grants or institutional memory but through this — bodies on scaffolding, hands on tiles, a Tuesday morning that looks exactly like every Tuesday morning for the past 465 years.
I stood at the edge of the courtyard and watched for a long time before raising the camera. The line of them ascending — two near the ridge, one on the scaffolding platform, two more at the base, the youngest at ground level looking up — formed a diagonal that felt almost compositional, as if the temple itself had arranged them. The light was high and flat. The black and gold lacquer panels along the lower facade caught it differently than the grey tile above.
One of them — on the scaffolding platform, cross-legged — looked across at his colleague and laughed at something. The laugh carried across the courtyard. Not hushed. Not reverent in the formal sense. Just present, alive, completely at ease inside the sanctity of the place. As if sanctity and laughter occupy the same room, which of course they do, which is something formal religion sometimes forgets and these young monks clearly had not been taught to forget.
Kings disappeared. Governments changed. Historical eras passed. Yet the cycles continued — monks maintaining practice, artisans preserving techniques, communities returning repeatedly, reinforcing continuity through participation rather than proclamation. What I witnessed that morning was exactly that. Not a relic. Not a performance. A living thing being kept alive by people who find joy in keeping it.
The roof will need repairing again. Someone will climb up. Someone will laugh at something across a scaffolding platform. The temple will continue to hold what it was built to hold.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Wat Xieng Thong · Luang Prabang · Laos 2022
The name means horse basket.
Magome-juku sits in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture, its steep stone-paved streets winding dramatically up the hillside. Horses couldn't climb the incline, so travelers had to leave them behind — which is how the town got its name: the kanji for horse and the kanji for basket. That detail stayed with me as I walked. The road was always harder than people expected. Even the horses knew.
The Nakasendo — the Samurai Road — was one of the five great highways of the Edo period, spanning 534 kilometers between Edo and Kyoto, linking 69 post towns like beads on a thread of history. Magome-juku is the 43rd stop from Edo, a place where travelers once paused to rest before pressing on through the mountains. Samurai, merchants, pilgrims, feudal lords moving between power and ceremony. All of them stopped here. All of them looked up at these rooflines against these mountains.
I arrived in the early morning before the shops opened. The mist was still in the valley, moving through the cedar forest below, rising against the layered peaks. The town was quiet in the way that very old things are quiet — not empty, but accumulated. Four hundred years of footsteps in the stone. The cold was clean. The air had altitude in it.
Walking the Nakasendo, you feel as if you have slipped back 500 years in time. I understood that completely standing at the upper end of the street, looking down over the stacked rooflines toward the valley. The tiles, the wooden facades, the stone lanterns, the waterwheel turning slowly at the bend — none of it performed antiquity. It simply was what it had always been, maintained by people who understood that some things are worth keeping exactly as they are.
There is a particular quality to places that have outlasted the purposes they were built for. The feudal lords no longer pass through. The shogunate is gone. The system that made this road essential to the governance of Japan dissolved 150 years ago. And yet the town persists, the road persists, the mist coming off the mountains persists exactly as it did when a samurai on horseback — or on foot, past the point where horses were left — came around that corner and saw the same rooflines, the same peaks, the same sky.
The town looks like a samurai could come around the corner at any moment. Standing there alone in the morning cold, I did not find that fanciful. I found it accurate. The road remembers everyone who walked it. It does not distinguish between the centuries.
I walked slowly. I did not rush. The road did not ask me to.
— J. Stewart Jr. · Nomadic f/2.8 ISO · Magome-juku · Nakasendo · Japan 2024
A haiku — J. Stewart Jr.
Stone path, morning mist —
the horse could not climb this far.
I leave my name here.
The world is still insisting. If something in this work stopped you — a line, an image, a moment of recognition — leave a word. Your name and email stay with me, not on the page.
These images exist to be witnessed — on walls, in healing spaces, in collections that understand what it means to honour the living world. If the work speaks to you, I would like to hear from you.
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Limited edition prints coming soon to Saatchi Art.
The world is still insisting.
So is the work.
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