When my wife, Aimee Bartee, was a little girl, her parents called her the “feral child.” The daughter of an East Coast blue-collar family, her dad raced stock cars and welded pipes in the union, and her mom was a nature illustrator and jewelry maker. She grew up shooting guns, tapping maple trees and building makeshift sleds to race her brother through the hardwood forests of rural Vermont where her grandfather, a master hammer and chisel gun engraver, had built his home and workshop. When she was 12 years old her boundless curiosity led her to pick up an old Minolta and start developing photos in her closet. Two decades later, she’d make a career of it.

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