America’s Best Idea examines the infrastructure through which visitors encounter nature in the U.S. national parks. Begun in 2011 while I was still photographing the parks’ landscapes for Treasured Lands, the project shifts attention from scenery to the systems of access, interpretation, and representation that shape how that scenery is experienced.

The project is grounded in the National Park Service’s dual mandate: to conserve park resources while providing for public enjoyment. The parks protect landscapes often imagined as wilderness, yet experiencing them requires roads, visitor centers, and other facilities. These structures are not merely intrusions into protected landscapes; they are part of how the parks make nature accessible and meaningful. They direct movement, establish viewpoints, provide interpretation, and organize the visitor experience.

Photography has long participated in this process. Iconic images have helped establish expectations of what national parks look like, generally leaving their supporting infrastructure outside the frame. The “national park” designation itself has drawn me to places I might otherwise have ignored, and I rarely arrive without some of those familiar images already in mind. Once there, visitors encounter further representations through signs, exhibitions, and photographs, then take pictures of their own. Physical landscape, cultural image, and institutional interpretation continually act upon one another.

Close to 300 photographs are organized into six typologies: Window, Sign, Lodge, Theater, Road, and Visitor. Within each series, every photograph is made in a different national park, applying a recurring photographic strategy across the system. Repetition shifts attention from individual places to shared structures and conventions while also revealing how those forms vary across dramatically different geographies. The six series examine different forms of mediation. Windows combine reflected landscapes with the architecture and interiors of visitor centers. Signs place institutional representations directly beside the landscapes they interpret. Lodge interiors turn park scenery into pictures embedded in spaces of hospitality. Outdoor theaters stage nature as the subject of explanation. Roads organize movement, sequence views, and make remote scenery widely accessible. In Visitor, a recurring self-portrait places the human participant within the landscape, turning the observer into part of the system being observed.

The photographs retain the vivid color palette associated with transparency film and nature photography, a deliberate continuity with the visual tradition that has shaped expectations of national parks. Yet that same visual language is redirected toward subjects conventional landscape photography generally excludes, combining the systematic structure of a typological project with an aesthetic appreciation of nature. Having spent decades contributing to the visual representation of the national parks, I am not outside the process I now examine. My new photographs are themselves acts of selection: they establish viewpoints, frames, and relationships just as the park’s infrastructure does. The project asks how nature is not only seen but presented, interpreted, and culturally constructed.