Kelly Fricks

Kelly is the best person ever.

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Pancho Enriquez

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Charles Darwin: 1809-1882

As I set off on my own photographic voyage through the Galápagos Islands, I couldn’t help but reflect on the footsteps of another traveler—Charles Darwin. Long before he became synonymous with evolution, Darwin was, first and foremost, a geologist. His 1835 visit to the Galápagos aboard the HMS Beagle came near the end of a five-year journey that had already reshaped his understanding of the world. Though his observations of finches and tortoises would later become iconic, Darwin dedicated more pages of his journal to rocks and lava than to animals. He was fascinated by the islands’ volcanic origins, theorizing how different lava types evolved from the same molten source, much like species diverge from a common ancestor. It was here that he began to see the natural world as a dynamic system shaped by time, pressure, and adaptation—a foundational insight for his later theories.

The Beagle’s stop in the Galápagos was brief—just 35 days—but Darwin’s legacy lingers in the landscapes, in the strata of cooled lava, and even in the early maps drawn before his arrival, like the 1798 chart by James Colnett that first charted these remote volcanic outposts. In a poetic twist, Darwin’s studies of the geological evolution of the islands may have quietly planted the seed for his ideas on biological evolution. As I photograph these surreal and ancient landscapes, I’m reminded that every layer of rock, every shoreline, and every silhouette of a seabird is part of a much larger story—one that began long before me, with a young naturalist who saw not just what was, but what could become.