OLE ANDERSEN
Ole Andersen is a photographer, and writer based in Bozeman, Montana, and Jasper, Alberta. Raised north of Salt Lake City, he comes from a family that bred and raced horses. He's an only child, quiet by nature, and spent most of his childhood on a horse in Cache National Forest, later trading the saddle for a dirt bike and riding the same range of mountains instead. He skied at Powder Mountain and Solitude, and grew up hunting and fishing alongside his family.
He came to Bozeman on an academic scholarship to study cellular biology and neuroscience at Montana State University, training that shows in how closely he looks at an animal before he photographs it. He picked up a camera at eighteen, not long after moving somewhere grizzlies and wolves were part of the neighborhood rather than a rare sighting.
The wildlife was never really the whole point, by his own account. Before any of this got serious, he'd already noticed, bouncing around the American Rockies, that the people who lived closest to the wild country tended to be more interesting than the wildlife itself. That theory held the first time he began crossing borders, and it has not stopped holding since, to the point that he now spends nearly as much of his life north of the border as south of it. Most of his closest friends and colleagues are in Jasper, Alberta. Most of his trips north start there. He refers to Jasper and Bozeman, without much distinction, as his twin cities.
His work takes him into interior Alaska, the subarctic and Arctic, the high country of the Canadian and American Rockies, the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin, and the Sierra Nevada, usually alone and without a guide. He travels by truck, sleeps in the bed of it or in a tent, and carries enough food and fuel to stay self-sufficient for days at a stretch, well past where a road ends. His dog, Django, joins him for some of it.
Prints are made in editions of ten, printed in New York, and framed in New York or Milan depending on where a piece will hang.