Portraits of Adventure / The Connecting Thread / Abdel
Abdel
University of Akron Field Station, Bath OH
February 2026
Abdel Halloway teaches ecology and evolution at Case Western Reserve University, where his work is theoretical. He spends most of his days at a computer, thinking about nature rather than being in it. He found his way to the University of Akron Field Station's photography and birding workshop through Instagram, after following Open Trail Collective while looking for outdoor groups to join. This was his second time out with the group.
He grew up in Chicago and moved to downtown Cleveland in July 2023 for the Case Western job, choosing not to commit to any one neighborhood right away. Outdoor activity wasn't part of his childhood. He describes it as mostly walking the neighborhood and biking, with nature more in the background than something he sought out.
Halloway has sickle cell disease, which rules out a lot of what people picture when they think of "the outdoors": hiking, camping, cold weather, mountains. What draws him to a place like Cuyahoga Valley National Park is different. He calls it a kind of solitude he didn't have access to in Chicago, where the Cook County Forest Preserves exist but nothing on the scale of what he found here. He talks about sitting on a rock, not talking, not doing anything, just taking a place in, and describes it as more healing than the constant motion of city life. He's quick to say the city hasn't lost its pull either. He likes both, and doesn't see the need to pick a side.
Photography surfaces throughout the conversation less as a hobby and more as a way of thinking. At Case, he took a black-and-white darkroom class and shot a series around Cleveland modeled on Ansel Adams: buildings standing in for cliff faces, an old rail line by Edgewater Park standing in for a mountain pass. He brings up William Cronin's idea of "second nature," the way cities like Chicago were built directly on top of the landscape they replaced, and Dudley Edmondson's writing on being a Black outdoorsman in places that don't expect to see him. He's still working out where he fits into groups like Open Trail Collective. Photography is his hobby, not his expertise, he says, and he isn't sure yet what he'd have to offer as a workshop leader. But he says he'll think about it.
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