This website serves as a public display for Steven Higgs’ ongoing, half century of award-winning work as an environmental photographer and journalist based in Hoosier National Forest country.
His future as a nature travel photographer launched on Monroe Lake in May 1975, when a friend floated him and his Pentax Spotmatic up a flooded Saddle Creek and into the Hoosier National, some 20 miles southeast of his home in the college town of Bloomington, Ind.
Photograph by Raina Ricely
The site’s launch overlaps to the day the 50-year anniversary of his first photo shoot on Indiana’s only national forest. And the first project he will share here is from a soon-to-be-published coffee table book called Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves.
Steven has won dozens of professional awards for his words and photographs, which have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and online publications since 1985. His piece in the Limestone Post titled On Saving the Deam Wilderness and the Hoosier National Forest was awarded second place for Best Photo Essay in 2023 by the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists.
The site also features Steven’s travel work, including his Retirement Travel Trifecta, which he initiated in 2023 after retiring from 27 years teaching journalism at Indiana University.
In the past two years, his photographic journey has carried him through four European countries – Austria, Slovenia, Italy, Spain; and three Upper Amazonian countries – Colombia, Brazil, and Peru.
In the works: a trip to the Scandinavian Arctic next spring.
The site will eventually feature images from Steven’s five-year exploration of nearly 250 public preserves, forests, lakes, rivers, and parks in his home state that produced two Indiana University Press travel books: A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana in 2016 and A Guide to Natural Areas of Northern Indiana in 2019.
