Thursday, May 28, 2020

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 1st 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, 2nd 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…



Sunday, May 24, 2020

Memorial Day



In 2020, the world as one can clearly see that private wealth exists primarily to buy private privilege. The less wealth you have, the fewer privileges you've earned. Up to and including your 'right' to life.

Let all Americans remember that when push came to shove, aggrieved citizens indignantly clutching their 2nd Amendment weapons of war like those'll save them, have neither the patriotism nor the guts to protect you & yours by wearing a simple cotton mask in public. Today's give me liberty or give me death crowd doesn't know jack about liberty and the death they're inviting isn't merely their own, to which they're entitled. It's yours, too.

Lest we forget…

We the people continue to transfer billions of dollars of our wealth over to multinational corporations to do with as they please. At the same time, venerated 'Main Street' – the regular folk from small businesses to family farms, minimum wage workers to first responders – must fight over scraps.

Many in Congress believe that measly $1,200 they sent you was sufficient to buy our complicity. Come November, we must disabuse them of that notion.

During this pandemic, people of color and other underprivileged citizens die of Covid-19 at a far greater per capita rate than even the most modestly privileged among us. For the same reasons as that, while fighting the worst public health crisis in 100 years, United States medical workers – those citizens currently putting their lives most at risk for rest of us - are being laid off by a healthcare racket designed to profit from perennial illness.

And if you've never wept for Native Americans, take a moment and weep today. What's happening to the Navajo Nation is a national shame that will stain these not so United States until the last.

You know, unless we tell ourselves it didn't really happen. Or that somehow the Navajo brought it on themselves, in which case they deserve it. Fake news, either way.

Lest we forget…

Adam Smith believed Capitalism would liberate a free people "...to feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections…"

John Maynard Keynes wrote: "The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of ignorance which envelope the future."

Little did those two paragons of Capitalism know about it, eh? Though to his credit, Keynes seems to have had a handle on both the ignorant future and the darkness ignorance breeds.




Never forget…

That in the coming months, when the choice facing American voters is relentlessly framed as being between a free market's too often unaffordable freedoms and the satanic evils of Socialism, those who frame it that way don't actually give a shit about you.

They're the ones who just gave away a bunch of your money to big-assed corporations, again. They're the ones who begrudge your family its access to healthcare, meager though that is for far too many.

Never forget…

That "normal" is only ever what we the people collectively decide it should be.

It's all but certain that in the not terribly distant future, a day will come for people of good will the world over to decide what 21st Century normal should be. We must stand together now, prepared to seize that opportunity when it comes.

Make no mistake: the old normal would rather we die, than see us once & for all exert the liberty that even they say is rightfully ours.




Never forget.

Friday, May 15, 2020

Other Years...

Mid to late May, 2014/2015


Hurricane River


Kingston Plains


Montreal River


Kingston Plains


Hurricane River


Cisco Branch, Ontonagon River