MOPD Reviews: Tracy Burke: Thresholds

MOPD Reviews: Tracy Burke: Thresholds by Aline SmithsonJuly 3, 2025

©Tracy Burke, Dunes 2

I was so pleased to meet with Tracy Burke at the Month of Photography Denver Portfolio Reviews. The project she brought, Thresholds, was stunning–expansive landscapes of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in southern Colorado. Her work captures the human presence in these spaces as figures are dwarfed by the scale of the dunes. Burke considers our diminishing relationship with the natural world and sees these offerings of the planet as restorative and inspirational.

Tracy Burke is a visual artist whose practice examines nature as humanity’s salvation. Working primarily through photography, she explores places that remain essentially untamed despite their public accessibility, investigating human engagement with the natural world and its profoundly positive psychological, emotional, and physical effects.

Burke received her BA in History from Yale University, where she served as editor and publisher of Black and White: The Yale Undergraduate Photography Review. She later earned a master’s degree in clinical social work from Smith College.

After a transformative three-month wilderness experience at age 22 that fundamentally shifted her understanding of what gives life meaning, Burke initially set aside photography, feeling unable to capture the profound impact of the natural world through her lens. She returned to the medium years later while documenting family outings to national parks, recognizing that these images transcended family snapshots to become powerful artistic statements about human connection to the natural world.

Burke’s work has been exhibited at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver and the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder, Colorado. Her photographs have been included in online exhibitions with the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado, and PhotoPlace Gallery in Vermont. Her work is held in numerous private collections.

She lives and works in Boulder, Colorado.

Instagram: @tracyburkephotography

©Tracy Burke, Dunes 3

Thresholds

“Thresholds” is an invitation. A reminder. A celebration. A plea. It is about salvation.

This body of work explores the relationship between humans and the natural world at a critical moment when both individual and planetary health hang in the balance.

While these images appear to be about the dunes, they are not, at least, not solely. After photographing mountains, deserts, and lakes, I found that only the dunes dissolve place into abstraction. They become unmoored from specificity and allow for something more essential: a meditation on the human condition in relationship with the natural world.

I make these pictures to honor what it has meant to me to spend time in wild, liminal places—spaces that evoke humility, reverence, and wonder. These are not backdrops; they are thresholds. In these places, we are made aware of our minuteness and our impermanence. We are reminded that forces far greater than us shape the world. There is something sublime, even otherworldly that arises in that recognition. I truly believe spending time in nature is our salvation.

In a post-pandemic world, where we’ve swung from isolation to overdrive, I see a growing disconnect from one another, from community, from meaning, and especially from the natural world. This portfolio responds to that disconnection. It asks: What does it mean to have access to the kind of space that humbles us, that restores us? What happens when we lose that access or take it for granted?

I am deeply concerned about rising anxiety, depression, and alienation, and equally concerned about our disregard for protecting these sacred natural environments. Our psychological and ecological crises are inseparable. We cannot heal ourselves without healing our relationship to the wild places that restore us.

I return again and again to nature because that is where I find joy, meaning, and a kind of healing. In these photographs, I hope to provoke questions, stir emotion, and offer a visual space where others might feel the same.