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 career was unknowingly 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 overlapped to the day the 50-year anniversary of his first photo shoot on Indiana’s only national forest. The first project he shared here was his recently published coffee table book called Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves, which details his 40-year relationship with the book’s subject, who passed just before its publication.
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 three years, the Trifecta has carried him through four European countries – Austria, Slovenia, Italy, Spain; and three Upper Amazonian countries – Colombia, Brazil, and Peru.
Last Trifecta Photo Stop in May: Finland, Sweden, and Norway — Lapland — home to the Sami, the Arctic Ocean, snow-capped mountains, waterfalls, finger lakes, rivers, fjords, boreal forest, tundra, and 22 hours of sunlight to work with.
Steven has multiple ongoing Projects, most recently a yearlong return to his Hoosier National roots called Back to the Charles C. Deam Wilderness: A Half Century Later. The Deam is where he shot that first Hoosier National photo in 1975, seven years before it became Indiana’s only protected federal wilderness.
Part of that project is a monthly column in the Limestone Post magazine called Revisiting the Deam.
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.
Indiana University is acquiring his 50-year archive of photographs, writings, and research for permanent protection in the IU Artchives.
