Show & Tell - A Baker's Dozen

I'd considered ignoring the 200^th post mile marker, much like I ignore milestone birthdays. After a while, it's all of a piece. But with my 65^th birthday fast approaching as well, significant numbers suddenly loom large.

"Memory is a stranger, history is for fools…" Or, so I've heard.

Don't take this as a 'best of' list. Rather, it's a necessarily non-inclusive selection of images that proved important to me. For instance, the repurposed gas station at the top taught me I really could be a proper, large format architectural photographer.

You know, had I wanted to.

*

Headed from someplace to someplace else, I booked one night in Houghton.

Prior to check-in, I planned on working S-63, a dirt/gravel road also known as 'Covered Drive' because a great arch of forest blots out the sky along stretches of it. That done, I'd head west and maybe finagle my way down to the lakeside ruins at remote, mysterious Freda.

The afternoon came and rolling thunderstorms with it.

In danger of being rained out, I ventured back and forth between Houghton and the sodden forest at least twice. That means I passed the scene below three times before at the very last I thought Ah, screw it.

Plainly put, it wasn't part of the plan so I didn't 'see' it. Nor was the place abandoned, in which case I'd have reflexively jumped all over it. Now the image is among three fine art prints of my work that'll hang on any wall of mine.

Likewise the pair of dead geese I dared shoot backlit, as they wavered in a slight breeze.

I once witnessed a woman enter a packed gallery, scan the room, then cut through the crowd to stand directly in front of this and stare.

She didn't buy it, which is why dead geese hang in my office today. First print I hung. Glad to have it, expertly framed. Thanks, lady.

During my initial trip with the Linhof, I exposed six sheets of film. It was vacation and I was uncertain about the new format, so went at it cautiously. Four days after returning home, I'd three keepers. My career large format shooting ratio of roughly 2:1 was set right from the start.

I thought, Okay, maybe I can make this work…

As with the Houghton trip, rain played a serendipitous role with this next. Heather and I were hunkered down at a waterfront restaurant in Bayfield, hoping storms would soon pass. Had it not rained, we'd have been on our way back to Bessemer by then.

In the middle of a fine whitefish lunch, I looked out the window and bolted. There was just time to set up and rip off three quick exposures. This one's the best:

There's a spot on the Presque Isle River along US-2 where the river feeds a wetland. One spring morning found the spot bathed in glittering light. I knew it'd be a challange, for transparency film.

Nonetheless, I stowed the car off the road and mindful of traffic periodically flying past @ 70 mph, walked out and captured this:

Returning to the car, a State Trooper idled beside it. He posed the single most inexplicable question that I've been asked multiple times, while hauling around 50# of large format photographic gear.

"What're you doing?"

To which I could only point to my burden and shrug.

"Well, be careful" the Trooper helpfully added as yet another speeder sped by.

"Always," I said. "Thanks."

Perhaps the most confounding thing a fellow shooter's ever said to me came in the parking lot of Hunter's Point at Copper Harbor. While gearing up the Mamiya, a woman lugging a high end digital outfit came off the trail.

The only digital I'd shot by then was with the Toy Canon. I was sore impressed by her gear.

"Light's awful out there," she said. "Good luck."

"Thanks," I answered. "Guess we'll see, eh?"

No farther in than at the trailhead, I captured what'd become the third fine art print of mine that'll always hang on my walls.

When I happen see it there, I still sometimes wonder What was she seeing?

Occasionally I shot what I knew needed to be writ large, so it could truly seen. This one is called Rebar Roots:

No single image of mine exposes the mad juxtaposition of the real world eating our failures than that. Had I ever gotten around to striking a fine art print of it – say 30" long dimension at the very least – it'd hang on my wall too.

But, alas.

Streams big and small replenish most all the northwoods lakes. Much of that flow is seasonally gifted and during those times, in some places wood sprites might live.

Visible from the road through the woods only at select times of year, a little stream helps feed my beloved Bobcat Lake. This creek and others give the best they have, at the far end beavers pile the water high for safekeeping and voilà, a relatively stable little gem of a lake.

Some say the U.P.'s state bird is the mosquito. Generally, marsh marigold's and mosquitoes hang together. The first year I lugged the Linhof in here I fled back to the car like I'd been bit, as pretty much every square inch of me was.

The second year I again took my chances and failed.

Third year, I prepped as if for war. Donned chest waders and boots. Protected my upper body with impenatrable layers. Wore fingerless gloves. And on my head, mosquito netting covered by a canvas cap pulled down tight.

I slogged in, stood firm against the marauders and came away victorious.

Now, I'm not telling you wood sprites definitely live there. But should you insist on insisting they don't, then you'd best come prepared to impossibly prove the negative.

Yes, we live in that sort of time.

We must welcome possibility, even when remote. When we refuse to embrace opportunities amid hard places and times, then they're only hard. Dreaming big is better.

Even when I do get the shot, returning to certain sites has been particularly rewarding. Different seasons make fresh light and in a sense, that remakes the subject. Not to mention the passing years inevitably alters all things.

I worked the well-hidden gem below for nearly a decade before the Mamiya finally liberated me to simply throw film at it. So this one grey and nondescript day I didn't care that the world wasn't still to infinity, and the scene came alive.

Our best days together were yet to come, as the old Ford lasted well into the digital age. But that day I knew I was right about it all along.

Now, it's gone. The record I've made remains.

When time came to spend my last 4x5 transparency ever, I chose a nondescript portion of the Presque Isle River near Bobcat Lake to spend it on. Honestly, the day ran short and that's where it caught me.

Then I was done.

Months later, Heather suggested I transition over to digital capture. I traded the Mamiya and two lenses to defer the cost of a spiffy new Nikon.

And here we are.

Digital capture prompted in me a creative growth spurt not entirely dissimilar to what the Linhof did, in its time. That evolution and this revolution alike required that I learn to see the world more fully, on the fly. In the process, opportunity flowed forth.

Now I shoot botanicals. Like I did with my 1^st six sheets of 4x5 back when, then didn't much again after the dark mysteries of abandonment caught and held my eye.

The nimble Nikon paired to great glass also drew me to what at a glance seems small, but on close inspection is foundational life thriving all around us, no matter our many grievous sins against it:

Bereft of majestic Superior and the northwoods during this year of the plague, rather than mourn my sight has refocused to what's in arm's reach. I see the ground better now than ever. My goodness, it's alive.

Spun of numerical magic, digitally translated light is at inception divorced from light itself and thus is in no way shape or form necessarily beholden to any truth. We must never again expect it is.

Remember that when evildoers flood the ether with credibly faked fake news.

But that same deceitful dexterity also readily translates and portrays ecstatic truth. More readily and often better than large format film ever did. That's no mean feat.

Like the sparkling day - directly opposite that dark place where a few marigolds swarmed by mosquitoes are maybe visited by wood sprites - I dove in chasing light and mere minutes later, emerged with this:

I could almost sorta kinda have held my breath for so long as that took to capture. Probably, for some of the time I was in there, I did just that.

It never occurred to me when I started this project that it'd reach 200 posts. Things change.

We change with them, or are eaten. Onward toward 200,000 total hits.

Hope to see you all there.

Lake Superior Day, 2020 - A Circle Tour

Text and Images by Philip J. Kucera, except as noted.

The First People named the lake Kitchi-gummi, or Great Water. In 1620 - the same year pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock - when arriving at what's today called Sault Ste. Marie, the Jesuit missionary Etienne Brûlé dubbed the inland sea beyond the Soo rapids Supérieur. The Upper Lake.

Later, English landlords as they're wont to do, simplified that to Superior. And so it is.

We northerners pay homage to Lake Superior on the third Sunday of July each year. Personally, I carry a large garbage bag when visiting a beach or two. Superior's shores stay amazingly clean year 'round, thanks to efforts made by hoards of locals and visitors...out of respect.

This year Frank and I, along with some guidance provided by time travelers, invite you on a tour of favorite stops around the big lake. We'll start our trip going clockwise from Sault Ste. Marie. From there in 1659-60, the two French explorers Radisson and Groseilliers were the first to skirt the entire south shore. Along the way they traded with Native inhabitants, European goods for furs.

Translated from Radisson's manuscript: "It was to us like a terrestrial paradise. We went along the coasts, which are most delightful and wondrous, for its Nature that made it so pleasant to the eye, the spirit, and the belly".

In 1721 Pierre Charlevoix cautioned: "when a storm is about to rise, you are advertized of it... two days before, you perceive a gentle murmuring on the surface of the water...the day after, the lake is covered with large waves. But on the third day...the lake becomes all on fire; the ocean in its greatest rage is not more tossed....

A south shore fisherman working out of Black River Harbor once told me, "When you look out there at the lakes' end and you see pimples all across that long line, it's time to head for shore fast, cause a big blow is coming pretty quick."

An English gentleman, Frederick Marryat traveled the south shore in a birchbark canoe in 1837, along with two hunting companions and five crewmen. All were amazed at the wonders of nature.

"We landed at dusk, much fatigued; but the aurora borealis flashed in the heavens, spreading out like a vast plume of ostrich feathers across the sky, every minute changing its beautiful and fanciful forms...we watched it for hours....

From Father Dablon, in the 'Jesuit Relations, 1610-1791': "...extensive fishing is carried on...of a kind of fish found usually only in Lake Superior and Huron...called in the native language Atticameg, and in ours 'whitefish,' because in truth it is very white: and it is most excellent...

Did I mention there are incredible restaurants along the entire lake shore, many of them off the beaten path? Some still serve fresh fish.

Colonel Camille Pisani, journaling Prince Napoleon's tour of Superior, wintered over in 1861-62. "The inhabitants of the region are...as the crew of a ship caught in the ice of the polar seas and forced to hibernate. Their winter is terrible. The temperature often lowers to the freezing point of mercury. The lake is covered with a very thick layer of ice, increased by heavy snowfalls...terrifying storms break the ice crust; the stormy lake piles up the ruins of its prison on the shores...

The Minnesota shore is a nearly unbroken rock wall from Duluth all the way to the Canadian border. Between rising stone and big water, in many places there's just sufficient room for the famous Highway 61 to weave it's way north.  With enough trees to give the surroundings at least a half wild look the entire 150 miles, it's one of the most scenic shoreline drives in the country.

Count two dozen state parks and scenic waysides, with a like number of fishing hamlets along the way. Among those is tiny Hovland, located about a dozen miles short of the Canadian Border, on Chicago (Horseshoe) Bay.

The day before Thanksgiving 1958, young Carl Hammer headed out in his 16' open skiff to pull nets before a major nor'wester struck. The storm arrived early. Worried  his fishing partner hadn't returned, Norwegian born 63-year-old Helmer Aakvik set out in his old wooden skiff to find Carl, but he and his boat were gone. Helmer worked the lake for over 28 hours in gale force winds, 20-24 foot seas and temperatures all the while well below freezing, searching for his friend.

You can listen to the story here.

F. Hutton

There's something to be said about the tenacity of the inhabitants of the Lake Superior Basin.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017, a buoy set in eastern Lake Superior by Northern Michigan University, recorded a storm wave of 28.8 feet in height and hurricane force winds clocking just under 80mph.

Both the day prior and the day after the storm, seas were near calm. What we call a White Squall.

On the Canadian shore, Rossport once supported a large commercial fishery and was a prime source for whitefish. A former Canadian Pacific rail stop, today the scenic town attracts tourists arriving by boat or auto.

Fish tugs still head out from the port, in calm weather and not. Boats working Canadian waters are generally larger than their counterparts in the U.S. Northwest gales have a tremendous reach across the northern half of the lake as they batter the east shore.

Now we're almost back to the Soo, with just one more stop to make.

F. Hutton

On the face of Agawa Rock in Lake Superior Provincial Park, amid dozens of red ocher pictographs, is an image of Mishipeshu, the Great Underwater Panther, the ancient Spirit of Lake Superior. Mishipeshu is Lake Superior. Angered, it will upset a 40 foot birch bark Montreal Canoe in a moment. A proper offering—Kinnikinick (tobacco) perhaps, or a treasured trinket, might smooth 30 foot seas in like time.

And now we've reached the end of the road…

Every day, a visit to Lake Superior is a celebration. This was fun. See you on the lake.

*

Philip Kucera's been my dear friend and mentor for longer than either of us should like to think on. From Phil I've learned more about the Superior Basin and fine art than anyone else, by far. It's my distinct pleasure to have turned over this space to him, for Lake Superior's namesake day.

#lakesuperiorday2020 #lakesuperiorcircletour #lakesuperior

Interdependent Days

Go with a loved one this 4^th of July to a Lake Superior beach and Covid-19 won't find you. This dread virus isn't so novel that it lurks there waiting to kill.

For that you'll need neighbors. Fellow citizens, mostly.

Specifically, you'll need neighbors whose terminal self-regard demands they endanger your life for their convenience. They're also blind to how liberty works. That's a deadly combination.

Certainly, individuals have every right to risk their own lives or even waste them, as they choose. More critical to liberty's cause, no one has any right to risk your life for you. Otherwise, thus do demagogues rise to dictators and democratic republics fall.

The hard case is that politics and plague notwithstanding, the personal liberty angrily claimed by the most recalcitrant among us isn't theirs alone. It belongs to us.

Together we empower and sustain American style liberty. You simply can't hold that ground on your own. Today, anyone still in possession of even half the good sense they were born with knows that in their bones.

The word for acting in total disregard for your neighbors isn't liberty, it's license. Of the fabled Deadly Sins, that's an operative in six of seven and even sloth is basically a libertine's choice.

Ants don't know from license. Intuitively, each ant at its core understands and accepts that continued ant success requires they each pursue collective purpose.

Of course ants aren't an ideal metaphor for humans. Their slavish devotion to royalty alone ruins the notion, as the Declaration of Independence reminds us.

Except humans believe themselves exponentially better in all ways than ants. Right?

If you claim the liberty that's yours as a human being, prove it by being better at living together than ants. Exercise your individual will to pull with the rest of us in the only viable direction left.

Remember - it's life then liberty as recorded in freedom's Holy Writ, after which comes everything else. Only with the first can the second exist, much less we get to chase after happiness in our spare time.

So wear a damned mask. Then maybe you'll still be around to help when we the people once again make something necessarily new out of the old, outdated us.

Choose instead to place your neighbors at risk through your moral vanity and - provided you don't first die of stupidity - in the future you'll be on your own. Because those free people who survive as witness to such aggressively ignorant folly as yours, they'll remember.

Expect a run on sackcloth. There'll be no shortage of ash.

#wearthemask #independenceday #liberty

Summer Solstice 2020

Honeysuckle

Perched between two fierce wind storms, on an early morning the air laid low and soft wet light burst with color. If this spring's taught me anything, it's to take no opportunity for granted. Indeed, grab each one as it comes whizzing by however you might, whenever you can.

No moment ever comes again. As tropical storm Cristobal roared north across the continent, tracking farther west than any storm on record before it, I took the sublime light for everything it offered.

Veronica (Speedwell)

In some parts of the ancient world, on summer solstice folk built bonfires intending to hurl fire toward the sky. They thought that'd encourage the invariably slipping sun to keep burning bright. Of course, what those people believed was hooey.

Summer's tipping point arrives around here this Saturday at 4:43 PM. We call summer solstice "the first day of summer" when in fact, as the world spins the season's all downhill from here. Go figure.

Flox, maybe. Dunno, it grew on its own

Spring 2020 was cool overall and notably wet. Record setting May rains, third year in a row. Sounds like a trend. As midsummer 2020 approaches, in many respects it still doesn't look much like summer.

As yet, honeybees have only the salvia.

Salvia

Bumblebees feasted on all the lupine they could get while the getting' was good. The hyssop that'll sustain them lags behind.

This…

Honeysuckle

…turned into this:

Honeysuckle

But no hummingbirds come. Or if they do they're here then gone, unseen.

On the other hand, our annual crop of fireflies has emerged. They float and crawl all the day around everywhere, awaiting only some magic signal sent on exactly the right warm evening for to dance.

Firefly on Black-eyed Susan

Last night, a few lit for the first time this season. By Saturday, the firefly bacchanal should be in full swing. Neither will these fires persuade the sun not to fade, but I'll be out there watching just the same.

A week ago during Cristobal, even a last lupine held firm. Now, those're all gone to seed.

Lupine

Maybe solstice will bestow abundant riches and after that - for a while at least - everybody eats. We'll see.

From this vantage it seems we reached our tipping point some months ago during the dark of winter, not that anyone noticed. Despite the sun's high point strength, it's still pretty damned dark. Now here we are, on the cusp of yet another appropriated Pagan high holy day.

Many of us alone, working individually together with what we've got, as best we're able. Hoping like hell to get fat before another long, cruel winter sets in.

Hover Fly (or Sweat Bee) on Spiderwort

#summersolstice #midsummer

Show & Tell – A Vintage Photo Album

Photo by H. Hutton

Autumn 1975, Heather & I took our first trip together to the Superior wilderness. Earlier that summer she'd returned from Europe with a 35mm Topcon camera. In the Ottawa national Forest that fall, I snatched it.

Below are my 1^st ever images of architectural/cultural abandonment, taken in 1975 as Heather and I wandered around the forest. The Ottawa's boundaries might be legally distinct, but on the ground they're richly unknowable.

Turns out, the specific interests that later informed my life's photographic work were in play at the start.

Who knew?  Not me. I'd forgotten.

Until determining, even prior to pestilence, that purging and scanning what'd then be left from my once vast catalog of vintage 35mm film was an essential task, way overdue. I mean if you're never gonna use it and don't really care about it, why the hell is stuff still hanging around?

The savage culling was unexpectedly easy, the scanning went as expected and the process of discovery proved occasionally joyous. Now it's done.

I'm almost completely indifferent to family snapshots and probably, our vacation pictures aren't exactly standard issue. Except I've always been exceptionally keen on Heather and sometimes the feeling's mutual, so there's that.

Forty-five years ago, I appropriated Heather's camera in order "to keep my hand in." That's what I said, even to myself.

Already shooting 16mm film with my trusty Bolex, the pedestrian tourist camera with the crappy glass felt like creative surrender. I was ashamed.

Technology being what it is, in hindsight the excuse seems silly. My youthful filmmaking dreams were about to get mortally wounded, when video tape killed the 16mm film industry.

Soon after that, I bought an equally trusty Nikon F, returned the Topcon to Heather and never much looked back. Winter 2020, my digital archive of vintage 35mm film has returned that antique medium to existential value.

For instance, this sore neglected catalog reminds me that sometimes, Lake of the Clouds actually is…

And of the time I raced an electrical storm up that same overlook so to shoot the beast as it roared through the valley and broke upon the precipice, about the highest ground anywhere around. Since we arrived more or less together, all I came away with is this:

A massive fail, considering. On the other hand, I escaped alive. Let's call it a win then, crappy image notwithstanding.

I remember that hauling my sorry ass out in the dark after too little sleep on the first morning in a new place just to see what might be seen can be vastly rewarding. Watching light incrementally throw night off a magnificent world is exactly where one needs to be. The rest of the day can take care of itself.

Our first morning in Copper Harbor:

My dimming perspective on our trek into the roadless McCormick Wilderness is also altered…

…by visual proof that car camping at modest Bobcat Lake just two easy miles in from Marenisco's theoretical civilization could be and frequently was a whole lot tougher than overnighting among the remnants of Cyrus McCormick's camp.

Of course, no man's memory is all peaches and cream.

Now it's fresh in my mind that when wandering off into the woods at what we thought just might be/could be the way to semi-mythical Nonesuch, we'd no earthly clue where we actually were.

Then on a steep hill cloaked in deep wet woods, at the blindingly obscure ruins of a definitely lost civilization, I nicked this souvenir:

Which I've been trying and failing to capture on far better terms nearly every visit since. At this point, 35mm will just have to do.

And it hurts being reminded that Bobcat's byzantine spider kingdom - what I worked at so hard during my final 35mm visit – will just have to wait (hopefully only) another year. Perhaps next spring I'll at last capture and forever hold that wonder in numeric amber. Then I'll not have to try more.

In any event, never let anyone tell you working a gossamer subject that appears and disappears with the light on any soft breeze while you try to keep a canoe steady is easy.

On the brighter side, I've recovered stone cold proof that once when along Superior's northern shore I encountered the incredibly rare Canadian Octopus, red variant. And when I did, it smiled at me.

I've not breathed deep Superior's northwoods wilderness maybe three calendar years of the last forty-five. I didn't consider those good years.

During the Odyssey, I embraced the place better than before and likely, more frequently than ever again. In ways big and small, definable and not, Superior embraced me right back.

What others call vacation, I called opportunity. Through my efforts year after year after year I built both a creative avocation and found the great love affair of my life, 2^nd only to beautiful and effervescent Heather.

It never occurred to me that I'd been making a 'memory book'. As it happens, I was. And it's of inestimable value to me, in part because on the occasion the Presque Isle River hurtling toward Superior is in my mind's eye, the image below is what I see.

Alone among the hundreds of shots I've taken there, this little piece of antique film - blown highlights, murky color tone and indecipherable shadows included - best captures what I feel, when on those slippery rocks. It's like returning home.

I can almost hear the river spirits sing. As ever, they call for me…