Hundreds of dark miles distant, Superior rolls on. There it awaits the raging
winter storm that as I write throws a sharp blanket of ice over everything 'round
these parts, concrete and remnant prairie both. It's a good night to make like
a cricket and hold close to the hearth.
Up north, most creatures not already fled south for the winter lay low
with the dark season's apex. Down here even during an ice storm, what remains of the
prairie provides sustainable sustenance and shelter to a riotously diverse and fiercely
competitive population. When still a sea of grass upon which white folk hadn't
sailed, the prairie supplied everything for some of us too. We outgrew the
space.
Once the fieldwork that made this project ended, I returned to the landscape
that raised me and as regards the great Northwoods am again just another transient.
The lush wilds of Superior brim with those during spring summer and fall but
not so much otherwise because who in North America wants to fly north for the winter? In some ways I'm yet to fully regain my bearings from such prolonged and
intimate exposure to so formidable and complex a landscape as the Superior
Basin, though I understand better than ever that wherever I might be, for me
Superior is true north.
Things
Growing from Other Things #4
Ontonagon
County, MI, 2012
120mm
transparency film
A reintroduction is in order, as our menu has recently changed.
I was until recently a shooter of large format film, even then an
archaic craft. I made a longtime specialty of heritage architecture being steadily
reclaimed by wildness around the Superior Basin. Now I'm a multidisciplinary
creative (freelance division) just like damned near everybody else.
Individuals always have had their own unique way of looking at things,
their personal vision. By and large they
kept that to themselves, as barriers to entry beyond casual creative expression
ran high. These days anyone with half an inclination expresses their personal
vision then distributes it at will to the same rollicking ether where all
individual uniqueness gets uploaded to market on roughly equal footing and
making a decent living from one's creative wits is too often just a happy
accident.
Things
Growing from Other Things #7
Iron
County WI, 2015
Nikon
800e
When I took up my last large format journey around Lake Superior, regional
galleries offered fine art prints struck from film and at a good price. Fourteen
months later, where those galleries displayed any photographic prints at all they
were digital capture, tucked away from high traffic patterns and peddled cheap.
Now that's what you call turnover.
Likewise when I set out, shooters specializing in wrecked architecture
were relatively rare. Fewer still worked in medium or especially large format transparency.
That club was naturally self- limiting.
Dickson
County MI, 2012
120mm
transparency film
Except about the same time my personal/professional Odyssey around
Superior was over, buses guided groups of tourists through ruined Detroit.
Today for a fee people gather at the edges of generational despair to compile
on their whiz-bang devices virtually undifferentiated catalogues of what some now
refer to as ruin porn.
Suddenly, the field I'd enjoyed working in relative solitude grew if
not exactly crowded then no longer a rare pursuit, either. Two pair of casual Sunday
shooters came and went during the couple hours last September that I worked this
ruin up on the Keweenaw. A fifth digital imagist arrived as I left.
Center
Cut
Houghton
County MI, 2015
Nikon 800e
Guess I'll just have to wander farther afield.
Creative narrative often develops an organic life of its own. With the film and me too
exhausted, it seemed the right time for this one to close as planned. Then an opportunity
unexpectedly arose to acquire the Nikon and lo & behold, I wasn't a retired
imagist after all. Story is stubborn, even willful. So it is with the ether
life of this one, no less than the analytics support that.
Natural, historical, cultural and personal stories are what our narrative
is made of. What our narrative amounts to, we are.
Look to Longfellow,
Hemingway and even the curious history
of the Ontonagon Boulder for
examples of how creative liberty when taken with cultural narrative generationally
alters what's commonly accepted for fact. Wholesale invention worms its way into our collective
narrative and we act upon its compounding infelicities as if they were true. Then consider
the sublime coexistence of geologic truth with Ojibwa cultural imperative, in
which approximate harmony one can choose to believe they each confirm the other, or not. Small wonder so
many folk these days don't seem to know whether we're coming or going.
Some
Clowns Just Want to Watch the Circus Burn (Detail)
Houghton
County MI, 2015
Nikon
800e
Ours is a radical era during a revolutionary age. The loudest, most persistent voices among us shout out the danger of our times, often for reasons
in mutual opposition. Fear is a contaminant. It permeates the air and has the predator in us
edgy. But what time since the beginning of time hasn't been dangerous?
If our age is more threatening than others of recent vintage, it's only
that we choose to make it so. The maddeningly complex and frequently absurd
dichotomies that propel living human narrative forward are on us, there's no
one else. While our ancient cousin the wolf watches warily
from those narrow margins of the real world left it as we unfold...
Vintage
35mm chrome of a captive Grey Wolf
The Superior Basin overflows with narrative sprung organically from the
earth over the length of worldly time. The first humans to see the place were
likely immigrants skirting desert plateaus of ice heaped upon a region where
well outside collective memory volcanoes once raged.
By the time we arrived, mountains that rose over the place after the
volcanoes subsided were worn down to nubs. Wolf, bear, eagle and a host others had long since earned relative prosperity from a naturally hard terrain.
The ice receded. Some people stayed to work copper scraped from veins left exposed to human invention by the
ravages of age.
The superior nature of the basin later drew a succession of predatory
characters who writ their stories large upon the culture. The fur trappers of legend
& lore. Followed by miners, lumbermen and other takers who took much from the place for to craft civilization
as we've grown accustomed to it in the blink of an old growth forest's eye.
That was a particularly robust chapter, widely celebrated in story and song. Being only so recent it still clings to us as we do to it and damn the pesky torpedoes
anyway, full speed ahead.
The
Kingston Plains
Alger
County MI, 2012
120mm
transparency film
That predatory thread bleeds uncorrected right through into today's
radicalized chapter of the story. Our own takers insist the mere existence of critical
natural resources no matter how permanently dwindled or damaging the extraction
requires we surrender those to
unsustainable ends or face certain doom sooner, rather than later. Far as that
goes they're about right, of course. But their way, our way of life still
requires us killing all of it simply to survive until the day it's our turn.
And what the hell kind of a plan is that?
Worse, the takers use punitive politics to press their unsustainable case even while grabbing everything
they can for themselves from the rest of us. At their prerogative that includes
the viable economic lives of good people who answered the call and joined them at cold, hard Superior to over the course
of generations help bring the varied blessings of our modern world to America and
in the name of everyone, not just some few.
The wolf, bear, eagle and Indian. The miner, logger and every other immigrant
who for whatever reason first were drawn to this wild place rightly called
Superior, they struggle individually and all against each other to maintain an ancestral
hold on its ever changing landscape of immemorial magnificence.
Roughly that
same tale is told across the rest of the world today. What's true is that there's
only one earthly story and here we are, in it all together. Everything under
the sun has its part to play, separate but equally besieged during a revolutionary
age.
When I finished the fieldwork that made this project, I returned both
injured and ill to the landscape that raised me. Recovery proved difficult. In
the interim I turned 60, realized recovery was forever after a strictly relative term and that altered my perspective.
Hanging
Man
Wolverine/Mohawk
Keweenaw County MI, 2015
Nikon
800e
At any rate, it strikes me as no good time to be retiring because how our
chapter of the ongoing story plays out is on me, as it is on you. Ours is a radicalized
era during a revolutionary age, when a multitude of fear whipped by
self-interest competes for anything like fresh air and the predator in us is
sore restless, what with the raging fire and all.
We ought better consider that to the prairie and forest both,
fire is a friend.
Ladder
Crew
Wolverine/Mohawk
Keweenaw County MI, 2015
Nikon
800e
*
I've updated the masthead to better reflect the times and punted on a fresh
Artist's Statement. Rehab of the Resource List and Bibliography remains ongoing.
Travel Resources for the Superior Basin along with links to websites, webcams,
blogs and other such that feature news & views from around the region are
added and will be updated as needed. Those're for infotainment purposes only, no other endorsement implied. There's
also a short list with links to blogs by writer friends of mine.
I'll do my best to keep my little slice of ether better occupied than
it's lately been. Times change and so must we, to survive them. The plan is to
work on fewer things in order to work better on those I do best. We'll see how
that goes.
The generosity of spirit gifted me by those I've met through this
project goes a long way to sustaining both it and me.
Thank-you for being here.
Solarius
Fayette
MI, 2003
4x5
transparency film
