Calling All Artists...

Dan's Cabin
120mm transparency, 2012

Thursday March 31st is the deadline for creatives to submit their work for consideration to the 2016 Artist in Residence Program hosted by the Friends of the Porkies in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness of Michigan.

If selected you'll spend up to three weeks nestled in a splendid cabin, just off a sparsely traveled trail through some of the most pristine wilderness that remains in the upper Midwest.

The Friends are gracious hosts. My time there in October of 2012 was among the best two weeks of my life. I did some of the finest work of my life, while there. Everything in the slide show below that's from "Ontonagon County" was captured during my stay at Dan's Cabin as a guest of the Friends. The work from the Keweenaw too, which while normally about as remote a place as one can get in the Midwest, is just a day trip from Dan's Cabin.

Both I and my art came away inestimably enriched by the Residency experience. What's better than that?

I dropped in here today to tout the program because I'm committed to it, as I intend to be so long as I and it survive. My residency was that good, in all ways.

Upon review, I've already written so much about the Porkies and my stay at Dan's Cabin that we'd best rely on that. So while I apologise for filling this post with links to previous posts, those serve our purpose here.

Follow the links below, as you will. If you've questions, I've likely supplied a few answers. If you've doubts about submitting, those should be assuaged.

If you're unfamiliar with the Porcupine Mountains, start with these so you'll know where you are:

Lake of the Clouds @ Sunrise

4x5 transparency, 2003

The Porcupine Mountains -- Part 1 & Part 2 

Then travel on to Dan's Cabin and my residency there:

120mm transparency, 2012

Home is Where the Heart Is, Creative Conversation and Resident Artifacts.

Finally, let's revisit Nonesuch, which is in the park and just down the road from where you'll stay, if selected.

Nonesuch Cornice

Digital Capture, 2012

Opportunity for creatives might seem rich these days, but most of that doesn't occur in the real world and on the occasion one comes along, just try getting someone else to defray the lodging portion of your freight for choosing to get out and work in it.

And if the images I've chosen here make the place seem resolutely gloomy, well, sometimes it is. You're just down the road from mighty Superior, which makes its own weather after all. And I typically shot only transparency film besides. Consequently, high contrast scenes were only rarely my friend.

But rest assured, the sun shines bright on the Porcupine Mountains too:

Division

120mm transparency, 2012

I say go for it. Time's a fleetin', after all...

The First Day of Spring

Happy spring!

Pasque flower (I believe)

McHenry County Il, 2015

Nikon 800e

Some of you might think, "What's up with this guy? The vernal equinox is still twenty days away." And of course, that's true. But today is the first day of what's called meteorological spring, which is mighty official sounding just the same.

Besides, by the time we get to now on the calendar I've about had it with winter. Sure, March is an often brutal month when stubborn winter puts the hammer down just to prove it still can. Around Superior, winter's recalcitrance can last into June. But here on the prairie I'm done waiting on the good news. What with today the official first day of spring to the weathermen and all, I find that suits me just fine too.

The Great Reveal

Seasonal wetland

Gogebic County Mi, 2015

Nikon 800e

People will tell you the best time to see what's typically hidden in the woods is winter, but that discounts the snow that not only makes for hard going, it also covers the ground. I think the best time for wandering around to see what normally can't be seen occurs in late autumn after the trees have shed their leaves and then again, in early spring.

So here's a short selection of sights you'd never see, were they not briefly revealed by the lingering nakedness of winter...

Outflow from Bobcat Lake

Gogebic County MI, 2015

Nikon 800e

Grand Kankakee Marsh Bird's Nest

Lake County In, 2014

Nikon 800e

A month later on the calendar from when these images were captured and you'd never know this is there:

Abandoned Mill

McHenry County IL, 2014

Nikon 800e

Biggest tadpoles I've ever seen in the wild were found in that pothole beneath this wheel when I was a little kid...

Water Wheel

McHenry County IL, 2014

Nikon 800e

Finally, maybe my favorite hidden place ever. It's not that it's location is unknown. Or even that the creek is seasonal, it isn't. Instead this gem of a canyon is reached by travel through deep woods that cling precariously to hard terrain. Now that the resolutely crappy but only road leading back there is gated, the place might just as well be on the moon, whatever season...

Gogebic County MI, 2011

4x5 transparency film

In just a few weeks, April showers will engage their mission to bring May flowers and in the Northern Hemisphere, the world will again be seen as new. From about now until June busts out all over and again cloaks the passionate secrets of summer in abundance, this is every year's prime viewing season.

Welcome the great, annual reveal of life following death. Today is as good as any to start. Go out and look around, what you find might surprise you. In any event, by all means do your best with every splendid day spring gives you, while it lasts.

Hot times are coming soon enough.

Some Clowns...

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

In the Spirit of the Season...

There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken "Hallelujah."

One last taste of autumn...

...before winter sits down to eat:

Shining Light on the Prairie

Most years the prairie in November is a brisk, brown place beneath predictably leaden skies and sometimes even sporting first ice. Last week it was 70° and sunny, with near gale force winds roaring up hard from the south/southwest.

Climate change will make winners and losers both. This year on the prairie we've yet to receive a finally killing freeze. In our yard are unripe strawberries on the vine and a couple of hardy rosebuds still trying to bloom, we'll see. Only yesterday there arrived the first Dark-eyed Junco scout down from Superior, nearly a month later than last year. Last night up north on the Gogebic Range it snowed, so by his clock the Junko's right on time.

Anyway, this particular year during this particular November, the prairie is a winner while El Niño remains indifferent to all such petty concern as it draws down a deep breath on things.

Were I still pushing 4x5 transparency film through the Linhof I'd never have dragged my sorry ass out because the combination of brutally high contrast light and steadfast breeze would've made work a fool's errand. Instead, I'm still learning the capabilities/limitations of my new tools, so off I went...

The wind's voice through oak savanna is different after most of the leaves are fallen.  Even on a 70° day you can hear the raw nakedness of winter as opposed to the brittle fullness of autumn. Through the grass the wind sounds much the same from early autumn through winter and until the first full chords of blooming green spring.

During the course of a splendid morning I strolled maybe four miles through brilliant long light across ancient glacial moraine and took my time doing it. Sometimes, prairie seed whipped through the air like a snowstorm. Hawks glided low over their rich sea of grass, kept aloft on the wind. Mostly I walked or sat but occasionally I aimed the Nikon at sights that once could be owned only through the gift of sight and sound, as captured in memory.

One thing's sure. I'm gonna need a new working definition of perfect light...

Upon leaving there were maybe half a dozen American Kestrels staked out on individual territories along a telephone line strung at prairie's edge. The line wavered in the breeze as the birds remained alert for unwary critters working the grass. Insects and rodents and birds feast on the bounty of the prairie while other birds eat the insects and snakes eat the rodents and hawks eat the snakes while coyotes eat pretty much anything and that ain't near the half of it. 

Everybody works the grass. It'd be a madhouse, if it didn't make such perfect sense.

Each time I slowed the car near a Kestrel, the bird seemed discomfited at the notion I might somehow capture it for posterity. I didn't press the case.

Down to the Sea in Ships

First published on November 10th, 2011

Some years ago when I was sitting on the beach at Whitefish Point just north of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, a couple of old men ambled past and stood close together on the sand hard by the shore. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop but couldn’t help overhearing what passed between them, which was far more than mere words.

These men spent their lives as mariners on Superior. They spoke of the big lake as a woman, spoke of her with reverence, awe and regret. In old age these men still both loved and feared the lake. Even though the day was bright and calm, with the surface of Superior as placid and blue as ever it gets, their conversation turned mostly upon hard times spent trying to escape their love’s final embrace.

I recall those old men sometimes, when sitting beside Superior in her many moods. But I think of them always on November 10^th, which was the date in 1975 when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down with all hands.

No one knows for certain why the Fitzgerald sank, though the question continues to be asked because that’s what we do -- we try to impose a sense of certainty upon an uncertain world. We do that so we might fool ourselves into believing that our constructs provide some final measure of control over a world utterly indifferent to human concern. That’s bald conceit. What’s true is that Lake Superior is big and men are small and sometimes we can’t survive its embrace no matter how mighty our lifeboat.

Superior serves as grave to untold thousands of human souls, from native peoples plucked out of canoes to Voyageurs caught between safe harbors, from pleasure seekers run afoul of sudden weather to seasoned crews serving aboard the mightiest ships men can construct. So please take a moment out of your busy day to remember those souls lost and to consider, however briefly, that no matter the might of human industry, it’s never greater than a speck of dust in the eye of a storm…

“If they’d put fifteen more miles behind her…”

 Whitefish Bay, from a vintage 35mm transparency

Autumn Count

Yeah, an autumn count isn't regular. But these aren't regular times and now is ripe for an assessment of the forest even despite all the trees...

Iron County WI, 2015

It was September 29th, 2011 when on the Gogebic Range autumn took a hard turn just as I embarked upon this Odyssey. Because I'd once and forever soon run out of film and the intention was to spend it well, it figured that the narrative arc of the project would inevitably possess a beginning, middle and at some point no matter the potential for abrupt untidiness, an end. A year, I figured.

The film lasted fourteen months and with work yet undone, I'd figured wrong. Funny, how narratives take on lives of their own.

Then (if my always suspect math is correct), after 117 separate entries made over the span of 36 months, in September 2014 I took my first month off from delivering to you those goods I'd harvested. Not bad, considering the recalcitrant and obscure nature of the field.

This year on the prairie, autumn turned the morning of September 28th, a few days after I'd returned from Superior.

One could almost smell the big lake on the wind that flowed down hard from the north where the growing season'd ended the day before. Just the same, even now in my yard goldfinches fatten on sweet basil, catnip and the spiky skeletons of Black-eyed Susans. But the sunflowers we grow for them are about gone now and that means soon, the goldfinches will be as well.

Our newest baby girl, August 2015

Fresh to the autumn prairie are a few scattered Crows and Blue Jays, too. I hear those more than see them. Though the prairie's an important part of their ancestral home, these days the family Corvidae are loathe to live there and have become merely edge season transients passing through on their way to somewhere more hospitable. Crows (in particular) are smart. Having suffered a holocaust within generational memory, who can blame them when they avoid the place like the plague?

On the Gogebic Range, Crows and their cousin Ravens are so black, they shine beneath the bright autumn sun in clusters of hammered silver.

Any day now Sandhills will be on their flyover in squawking skeins that draw me to the yard no matter the weather. Maybe this'll be the year that I capture video of those on the wing while they purposefully avoid airplanes and mutual catastrophe in a crowded flight pattern.

There's also the fact that while I was on the Range a few weeks ago, the smarmy schmuck who once tried to cheaply peddle the very last resources of the Gogebic to his carpetbagger crony from Florida realised he wasn't Presidential material after all. The People spoke and Scott Walker slunk away to lick his wounds. That's gotta count for something, right?

Lastly -- at least god willing & the creek don't rise -- before this month is out I'll turn sixty.

Keweenaw County, 2015

That should happen just about the time oak savannahs reach their peak autumnal glory, smallmouth lose a scosche of caution prior to the rivers freezing and the first snow falls upon the wilds of the Superior basin, provided winter hasn't jumped the gun before then. There'll be ­­Slate-Colored Dark-eyed Juncos in the yard, stopped by on their way south maybe even from the woods around Dan's Cabin, to pick over what no longer sustains goldfinches.

*

Along the Penokee Hills, 2011

I've been dissatisfied with the public state of this project for quite the while now. The narrative was intended to be on point, substantive and maybe even occasionally entertaining. For a good while, it was pretty much all of that. But once the film was exhausted, the road trip framing device couldn't sustain the narrative because the story itself was changed.

And yet still with work left undone.

Among other things, it's to my shame that I didn't feature the Lake Superior Bi-National Forum before it got defunded. And I've not yet managed to wrap my brain around the conundrum that is the late, ever great John Voelker.

Lucky for me no one'll be defunding him, eh?

So starting with 2016, I'll make this a quarterly offering in the hope I can then return it to something more reliably rich and without also having to sacrifice my broader creative interests and/or opportunities, which are about as robust as they've ever been.

Thanks for being here, it's still chuggin' along only because you are. So please don't go wandering off too far, there's more to come.

In the meantime, by all means get out to revel in the wonders of autumn while there's still time to do it, as winter's just over the horizon and time's a wasting...

Ottawa National Forest, 2011