About San Juan Islands Images
Some places let you fall in love with them and feel at home instantly. San Juan Island is one of them.
Nestled in the Salish Sea between the Washington coast and Vancouver Island, San Juan Island is a place of extraordinary, everyday beauty. Orcas pass through the kelp-lined waters off the west side. Bald eagles perch in the firs above the harbor. The light on a January morning hits the docks differently than it does in July, and both are worth stopping for. This is a place where people come for a week and stay for a lifetime.
San Juan Island Images was born out of a simple impulse: to capture what it feels like to actually live here.
Right now, that means sharing the photography of Val Curtis, a San Juan Island local whose lens has been trained on this island for decades, finding beauty in the mossy forest floors, the ferry crossings, and the quiet drama of a west side sunset. But the vision is bigger than one photographer.
This island is full of people who see it deeply. Our goal is to grow San Juan Island Images into a shared gallery, a home for local photographers who, like Val, can't help but frame the world around them. A place where the island speaks in many voices, through many eyes.
Because some beauty deserves more than one witness.
Meet Val Curtis
Val Curtis arrived on San Juan Island in the summer of 1997. She came for a few months, and her return home didn’t last long. She headed back to the place she knew would be home for years to come.
With a background in Biology, Marine Ecology, and Ornithology, Val has always been someone who pays close attention to the natural world. She has spent years studying it, teaching it, and now, photographing it. The 48,000 photos on her phone alone are proof of what happens when you give a trained observer a camera and put her in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
For Val, photography is not a hobby. It is how she processes and shares the place she calls home. A sunrise walk down the docks. The moss on a trail after rain. The moment the light shifts on the west side just before the sun drops below the horizon. She is always framing, always noticing, always finding the image inside the everyday.
San Juan Island Images is the natural extension of that impulse, a place to share not just her own work, but eventually, the work of other local photographers who see this island just as deeply. San Juan Island deserves to be seen through many eyes.
Val lives and works in Friday Harbor, WA, where she also runs Treehouse Creative Digital Solutions, helping businesses and nonprofits tell their stories in the digital world.
Contact us
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