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Friday, March 17, 2023

Weekly Post, "The Daze of My Life: Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography"

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography


Biographies are studies of someone's life based on cumulative research. Good ones may reveal something, but probably barely scratch the surface of what actually went on. The internet is allowing me to do something VERY different. 
~Robert Glenn Ketchum




Friday, March 17, 2023

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #348
Daze, #348:  
Brilliantly, Joel / NRDC run more “ads” in the New York Times, and the London Financial Times, THANKING Rio Tinto for withdrawing their investment in the proposed Pebble project. “Chasing Ice,” the film about iLCP** photographer, Jim Balog’s documentation of climate change, airs on the National Geographic channel, is seen by millions of people worldwide, and wins an Emmy. President Obama uses Executive Action to permanently protect the fishery of Bristol Bay from oil and gas development.


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2023,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, March 10, 2023

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #347
Daze, #347:  
Following a contentious board meeting, and my image/NRDC text running full-page in the London Financial Times, Rio Tinto withdraws as an investor in the Pebble mine project. Coalition efforts have now driven ALL the investors out of the proposed development. To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, my work is featured in a large exhibit, “Wilderness at 50: Photographic Reflections on the Legacy of Tionesta Visionary Howard Zahniser.” Also in celebration the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, Dave Foreman, and I, are asked to be “inspirational,” closing keynote speakers at the National Wilderness Conference in New Mexico, hosted by all the related agencies of the federal government that manage wilderness lands. Secretary Jewell gives the opening keynote speech. G2 Gallery in Venice, CA hosts the exhibit, “Ansel Adams, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Eliot Porter: Shifting Landscapes, Shifting Visions.”


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2023,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, March 3, 2023

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #346
Daze, #346:  
To start 2014 off, I send President Obama, both daughters, and numerous other politicians, the same CD-Powerpoint that I sent to Secretary of the Interior, Jewell, EPA Director, McCarthy, and the investment executives, asking them all to reject the development of the Pebble mine. With the launch of their new fall line, and online magazine, Tommy Hilfiger features my NO PEBBLE MINE campaign work AOL features an online gallery of my NO PEBBLE MINE images.


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2023,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, February 24, 2023

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #345
Daze, #345:  
In 2013, on behalf of iLCP, I deliver a keynote speech about the proposed Pebble mine at the World Wilderness Conference in Salamanca, Spain. In the fall, Secretary of the Interior, Jewell, and EPA Administrator, McCarthy, travel to southwest Alaska at President Obama’s request, and McCarthy visits the actual proposed Pebble mine site. When they return from their trip, a CD-Powerpoint show that I created, housed in a jewel-case that features an original Ketchum print-cover, awaits them, and asks them to oppose the mine development. Joel Reynolds of NRDC also gets one of my CD’s, and after viewing it, he asks if I would send several more of them to specific executives at Rio Tinto and Anglo American, which I do. Then Joel/NRDC runs another of our campaign “ads” as a full-page in the Washington Post. Shortly thereafter, Anglo American withdraws as an investor in the proposed mine development. Joel Reynolds, and I, do a series of well attended lectures on the NO PEBBLE MINE campaign in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. My work is included in the comprehensive exhibit, and publication, assembled by the Amon Carter Museum (TX) entitled, “Color! American Photography TRANSFORMED.”My work is included in the survey exhibit, and catalog, “California: Landscape into Abstraction”, produced by the Orange County Museum of Art. iLCP Fellow, James Balog’s documentary, “Chasing Ice,” receives the Sundance Film Festival’s Best Documentary Film Award, and is later nominated for two Academy Awards.


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2023,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, February 17, 2023

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #344
Daze, #344:  
Also in 2012, friend and Fellow iLCP photographer, James Balog, becomes the subject of a documentary movie, “Chasing Ice,” which follows his research and photography, as his Extreme Ice Survey project records the effects of climate change on glaciers worldwide. Be sure to look up his “Chasing Ice” website and view his various films.


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2023,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, February 10, 2023

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #343
Daze, #343:  
In 2012, my work is included in the huge city wide exhibit coordinated by The Getty Museum entitled, Pacific Standard Time. The exhibits intended to recognize artists since 1945 that contributed to LA becoming a major art scene. As a Christmas present I send my two book set about southwest Alaska and Bristol Bay to President Obama and his family, along with a note asking him to protect the fishery, and SAY NO TO THE PEBBLE MINE.


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2023,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, February 3, 2023

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #342
Daze, #342:  
Since running the full-page ads previously in major newspapers caused Mitsubishi to withdraw their shareholders from the proposed Pebble mine project, Joel Reynolds, the western Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) turned his attention to the remaining partners, and in 2012 ran this “ad” in the New York Times. Needless to say, neither Rio Tinto, nor Anglo-American were amused. that the media was evermore turning a public spotlight on them.


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2023,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, January 27, 2023

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #341
Daze, #341:  
At the large dinner following the reception of my exhibit at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre, I was given the Photo Mentor Award. I was also asked to give another award and $2,000 to an “emerging” photographer of my choice. Miguel Angel De la Cueva was hoping to become an Associate in the International League of Conservation Photographers, and I thought giving him the award would help his nomination, so here we stand with our two prizes of the night.


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2023,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, January 20, 2023

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #340
Daze, #340:  
I was in West Palm Beach for 10-days to open my retrospective exhibit at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre, and give several lectures. After the exhibit opened, I was invited to a large dinner where I was given their Photo Mentor Award. The director of the center, Fatima NeJame, also knew that had recently been part of the creation of the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP), many of whom never had taught workshops for the center, and she hoped I might introduce her to some of them. Those I invited also had recent projects or books about which they could lecture, so they were Amy Gulick, who was working on a book about the Tongass, Carlton Ward, who had just published a book about Florida ranchlands, and Miguel Angel De la Cueva, who also just published a book about the mountains of the Baja peninsula.Above, I brought a copy of Miguels book to Fatjma.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2023,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, January 13, 2023

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #339
Daze, #339:  
The gallery space at the Palm Beach Photographic Center consisted of a large hall surround by numerous bays, so the way I designed my retrospective exhibit was to put different bodies of my traditional landscape prints on the walls in the bays, each bay dedicated to a different body work. Then, in the larger central hall, we hung the large, new digital prints, and built various pedestals for the textiles, as can you see here. By doing this it allowed for people to walk around the textiles and view them from all sides because many of the were double-sided. While the exhibit was up I lectured several times about the work, and I led walk-through tours every other day. Being in West Palm Beach, and just across the bridge from Palm beach, offered me a huge audience of very wealthy people, and every magazine and newspaper in the area published reviews or interviews with me, which reached just about everybody.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2023,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, January 6, 2023

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #338
Daze, #338:  
Over many years I have taught workshops at the Palm Beach Photographic Center, and in 2011 they moved into a new building that had a huge space that could serve as a gallery, so to initiate the space, they turned the entire hall over to me and I put up a 60+ piece retrospective that also included my embroideries and my new digital work, such as “Choose Joy” (above).

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2023,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, December 30, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #337
Daze, #337:  
In 2011, Joel Reynolds, the lead attorney for the west coast offices of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) decides to rum anther “attack” ad in the New York Times, this one calling out two of the principal investors in Northern Dynasty Minerals, who are proposing to develop the Pebble mine in the Bristol Bay headwaters. Rio Tinto, and Anglo-American, are huge international mining companies themselves, and they have become shareholders in the proposed Pebble development. Once this full page features with some very “in-your-face” text and fan endorsement from Robert Redford as a spokesperson ran, it began to change things. This campaign style was developed in the fight to prevent Mitsubishi from building an industrial salt complex in the whale nursery of San Ignacio Lagoon, and as they are also involved in the Pebble project, they see the writing on the wall, and pulled their investment out. One down, two to go!

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, December 23, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #336
Daze, #336:  
In 2011, the New Mexico Museum of Art published Earth Now:  American Photographers and the Environment. Most of the photographers included in the book were young contemporaries, but Robert Adams, and I, were included because the author considered us “forefathers” of image-makers that used their work for political and environmental advocacy.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, December 16, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #335
Daze, #335:  
At the time the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP) was established, we were all Americans, but we wanted to be truly international, so we took on projects to get the word out about our group. During a huge conference of photographers in Washington, DC, many people had gallery shows, but at night iLCP projected images and the names of their photographers on numerous buildings in the heart of DC where thousands saw the display. A large number of us also presented at WILDSCREEN in London, where a huge and very international audience attended. These venues put our group on a world stage, and brought an exponential increase in members, from more than 20 countries. One iLCP Fellow in Mexico succeeded in getting three very large areas recognized as Mexico’s first designated wilderness areas.


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, December 9, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #334
Daze, #334:  
Also in 2010, American Photo magazine featured me in a lengthy article as an American Master. There previously had been five similar features, but no landscape photographer was among them. The author of the article, Russell Hart, stated in the article, “his conservation photography and environmental activism have made him one of the most influential photographers of our time”. 2010 also marked 5yrs. of growth for the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP) of which I was a Founding Fellow.


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, December 2, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #333
Daze, #333:  
While NRDC’s Earth Day ads ran in the London Financial Times, simultaneously they ran ads two days in row in the New York Times. Needless to say they created quite a buzz among the mining community and the shareholders of the companies named in the ads, Anglo American, and Rio Tinto. This was just the beginning of this campaign. In 2006 I also started blogging about the NO PEBBLE MINE campaign with a new posting every week, and now I could do it in concert with NRDC. NRDC’s west coast director, Joel Reynolds, also began blogging in the Huffington Post, so these companies were under attack from many directions.


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, November 25, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #332
Daze, #332:  
My colleague, Joel Reynolds, the lead attorney and western director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), finally began a campaign against the development of the Pebble mine, by using a technique that proved effective in preventing Mitsubishi's industrial development of the whale birthing San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja. One of the Pebble investor groups was another huge mining company, Anglo American, and they were holding their stockholders meeting in London during the week of Earth Day, 2010. So NRDC took out a full-page ad in The London Financial Times, calling them out for investing in the project. The next day they followed with a different full-page featuring some very “in your face” text.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, November 18, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #331
Daze, #331:  
Shortly after giving me the Partners In Conservation Award (last post), Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, retired. As a retirement gift, the Pew Charitable Trust and a group of regional Native corporations bought one of my most notable images from Wood-Tikchik State Park, and gave it to Salazar, presenting it to him in his office. They also kindly took a picture of the presentation and sent it to me as a momento.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, November 11, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #330
Daze, #330:  
In 2010, for my contributions to broadening the base of resistance to the development of the Pebble mine, then Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, gave me the Partnerships In Conservation Award (above). Working with Joel Reynolds, and NRDC, Joel decided that we could use a ploy which proved successful when we kept Mitsubishi from developing a salt extraction mine in Baja’s San Ignacio Lagoon where gray whales had a birthing nursery, and so we set about designing that.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, November 4, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #329
Daze, #329:  
Since 2006, I worked with a coalition of Alaskan groups and tribes to protect Bristol Bay from the development of the Pebble mine. It was clear to me, however, our outreach in the lower 48 was limited, and I was convinced that we needed to engage bigger national groups if we were going to stop the mine. Naturally, because my close friend, Joel Reynolds, was Director of the west coast offices of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and because NRDC has some 6-million followers, I was hoping to get them to step up. After pondering how they might participate, in 2009, Joel convinced NRDC to join the coalition. I added some other companies as well including Orvis, Tommy Hilfiger, and Tiffanys, who pledged not to buy any gold if the mine were built.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, October 28, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #328
Daze, #328:  
Besides premiering my new digital printwork in 2008, I also founded Viz.U Lee.Organik, a digital design business for printing on fabric. To date we have produced a half-dozen luxurious silk scarves, an Aloha shirt, and we are working on some boars shorts designs. The above is a 23” x 57” silk scarf entitled, “In The Garden.” The spectacular vibrant colors are made possible by a company I work with in Shanghai that compliment my digital work spot on.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, October 21, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #327
Daze, #327:  
Zhang Meifang, the director of the textile guild I was working with in China, took exceptional interest in working upon this embroidery. It is double-sided, and for the first time in all our years of working together, she employed the "Suzhou fine style” stitching, an extremely laborious technique. The results are spectacular. The largest embroidery panel ever created by any guild, its size and weight precluded putting it in a stand on the ground, so my framing services constructed a welded, chrome steel frame that hangs from the ceiling on rope wire cables.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, October 14, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #326
Daze, #326:  
“Choose Joy” (last post) was an additive creation. Each alteration of color was an additional “layer” in Adobe Photoshop. Hundreds of layers were involved in the completed image. So, the next experiment was to move in the opposite direction and remove parts of the image by “erasing” them. We created this as a large, single panel, 72” high and 30” wide, entitled “Turn, Turn, Turn”. When I took these images to show the Chinese guild where I was working in Suzhou, the director, Zhang Meifang, was very excited to see this new direction in my work. She looked at “Choose Joy” and told me that it was too much to embroider, but when she saw “Turn, Turn, Turn”, she did something she had never done before. We always debated for days over which images to embroider, and what techniques to apply, but without any hesitation this time, Zhang simply announced that the guild would embroider “Turn, Turn, Turn” as a huge, double-sided, single panel.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, October 7, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #325
Daze, #325:  
In 2008, the new digital work that I began in 2006, came to fruition. After the huge exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum in 2006, I decided to move away from my traditional imagery, and I stopped printing on Cibachrome. Instead, I used my huge library of images to explore new directions in the emerging digital darkroom of Adobe Photoshop. This also coincided with my longtime working association in the Suzhou textile guild, who wanted me to move in a new direction. After I arranged for their work to be exhibited at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, all their competitive guilds in Suzhou, began copying from photographs as we were, having seen our success. My guild encouraged me to do something REALLY different, that could not be so easily copied, so my master printer, and tech advisor, Michael Jones, and I, began to experiment. Simultaneously, the ability to print at a much larger scale then 30”x 40” also occurred, so we embraced that. As a result, our first finished image was a 6-panel, 6ft. high piece, entitled “Choose Joy", which the Wach Gallery, and I, premiered at Basel Miami in 2008.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, September 30, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #324
Daze, #324:  
In 2007, the Natural World Museum, and Earth Awards Editions includes my work in a book they published entitled, “Art In Action” featuring artists worldwide whose work is environmentally political and making a difference. I also stop printing my traditional images and begin to use my huge library of photographs to create new digital compositions while I explore the complexities of the Adobe darkroom.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, September 23, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #323
Daze, #323:  
As we crossed the Labrador Sea from Greenland, we encountered some huge icebergs that had been calved by the glaciers melting down in Greenland. On this particular night, the sun has already set, but there is still a lot of color in the late night sky, and the glassy surface of this berg is reflecting some of it.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, September 16, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #322
Daze, #322:  
After visiting a number of Inuit villages in Greenland, and touring several fjords, we turned our boat to head for Labrador, across the Labrador Sea. Greenland is melting down, and almost all of the glaciers are having massive calvings. As a consequence, we encounter some huge icebergs while crossing the sea. We are also in the high Arctic, and it is summer, so the sun sets around midnight. There was some very dramatic color in the sky this night.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, September 9, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #321
Daze, #321:  
On the research trip to Greenland, Labrador, and Baffin Island in 2006, the shore excursions offer my cabin-mate, Harvard professor, Jim McCarthy, and I, some great photographic opportunities to work in landscapes few people have ever seen. We explored numerous fjords, several islands, and we encountered some big icebergs being calved off of the glaciers in Greenland. But, being onboard a vessel that was constantly changing locations, also afforded some incredible views in the open ocean, especially the late night sunsets that came with being in the Arctic at this time of year. Massive colorful skyshows glorified many evenings, and sometimes their colors were reflected off of the passing icebergs.


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, September 2, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #320
Daze, #320:  
In the late summer of 2006, I am invited to lecture, and do climate change research in Greenland, Labrador, and Baffin Island on a trip organized by the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the World Wildlife Fund, and The Nature Conservancy. Our group will interview Inuit elders, and collect glacial data. I also get lucky as my cabin-mate is James McCarthy, the Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography, Environmental Science, and Public Policy at Harvard. We hit it off right away, and we shared the mutual enjoyment of leaving the other guests behind when we go ashore, and hike a much wider portion of whatever location we are in. He also carries a rifle and serves as my bear guard while I take pictures. The villages are VERY colorful, our interviews quite informative, and the hikes take us through spectacular untouched landscapes.


photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, August 26, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #319
Daze, #319:  
In 2006, I worked with other Fellows in the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP) to create pictures for a book to be published by the Laguna Wilderness Press, entitled, “Wind River Wilderness”. The publication was not so much about the Wind River range, as it was about the badly regulated oil and gas leasing being done in the Pinedale basin at the foot of the range. Widely circulated and reviewed, thanks to the many iLCP photographers, the book brought a lot of attention to the negative impacts of the leasing, and greatly slowed down the progress of them. Also, again working with many iLCP photographers, we were published in a huge book funded by CEMEX, and Agrupacion Sierra Madre-Wildlife Conservation Society of Mexico entitled, "The Human Footprint: Challenges for Wilderness and Biodiversity”, 5,000 copies of which were distributed to politicians, and major corporations, worldwide.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, August 19, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #318
Daze, #318:  
At the 2005 WILD8 conference in Alaska, I deliver a keynote speech to about 200 photographers that want to dedicate their work to conservation. The speech is based on a previous book I had written, “American Photographers and the National Park”, and it detailed how photographers had a significant influence on the creation of the National Park System, and the developing conservation conscience of the greater public. Starting with Carlton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge in Yosemite, their large format camera pictures of Yosemite valley drew so much attention to the area, that in the middle of the Civil War, President Lincoln declared Yosemite to be a national treasure, designating it as a “public pleasuring ground.” Yosemite would ultimately be renamed as a National Park, but the first park to be created was Yellowstone, due in great part to the paintings of Thomas Moran, and the photographs of William Henry Jackson (above). My keynote presentation was a huge hit, so much so that I was asked by Vance Martin, one of the WILD conference board members, if I would give the speech again in the evening to ALL the WILD8 conference attendees. Six of us also had another plan for that evening. After my speech, I said to the audience that those with me had an announcement to make, and we all stood to say that we had created the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP), and we wanted the endorsement of the conference participants, which came immediately amidst much cheering and clapping.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,
@RbtGlennKetchum @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd

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Friday, August 12, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #317
Daze, #317:  
The photographers to whom I give my keynote address at WILD8, the world wilderness conference, held this year in Alaska, are ones that want to use their work on behalf of conservation. Many of us met through the North American Nature Photographers Association (NANPA), where we wanted to form a conservation photographers committee, but NANPA management informed us that such a committee would be “too political” and they would not allow it to be formed. So, we all came to WILD8 in Alaska with a new proposal. The basis for my keynote is a book that I wrote on behalf of the National Park Foundation in the late 1970’s entitled “American Photographers and the National Parks.” The premise of the book was that photographers had a significant influence on the creation of the National Park System, and the developing conservation conscience of the greater public. Starting with Carlton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge in Yosemite (above), their large format camera pictures of Yosemite valley drew so much attention to the area, that in the middle of the Civil War, President Lincoln declared Yosemite to be a national treasure, designating it as a “public pleasuring ground.” Yosemite would ultimately be renamed as a National Park, but the first park to be created was Yellowstone.

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Friday, August 5, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #316
Daze, #316:  
In 2005, besides the work I have been doing at Piedra Blanca Rancho, I have been offered a career encompassing retrospective of my work by the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, TX. It is to be a huge show involving more than 70 photographs, and some 20 of my Chinese textiles, so I spend a good deal of the year framing and crating the images in preparation. The exhibit will be documented by a catalog/book entitled, "Regarding The Land: Robert Glenn Ketchum and the Legacy of Eliot Porter.” So I also travel to Hong Kong with the book’s designer to oversee the printing of it. Addtionally, in 2005 I am nominated to the board of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance. Lastly, I am asked to deliver a keynote speech to some 200 people, mostly well known photographers, at WILD8, the world wilderness conference held every four years in different countries around the world. This year, the conference will be staged in Anchorage, AK, and several thousand people are expected to attend, representing over 40 countries.

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Friday, July 29, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #315
Daze, #315:  
Besides the American Land Conservancy’s mind-boggling success at purchasing a conservation easement for the 89,000-acres of Rancho Piedra Blanca, that acquisition also included 14-miles of beaches that paralleled Hwy #1 / Cabrillo Highway. Previously part of the Hearsts' family private ownership, and closed to public access, these 14-miles were now open to the public, and soon to be one of California's newest state parks. They were also home to recently growing sea lion rookery that had established itself on one of the largest beaches.

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Friday, July 22, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #314
Daze, #314:  
Harriet Burgess, the Director of the American Land Conservancy, on whose board I sat, had a much more encompassing plane than to just block the housing development proposed by the Hearsts. She wanted to place the entire 89,000-acres of Rancho Piedra Blanca into the protection of a conservation easement purchase, helped by significant financial input from Governor Schwarzenegger, and the state. This was an astounding proposal that included a huge coastal-to-alpine habitat, and six headwaters-to-the-sea rivers, as well as an extraordinary amount of California coastline. Because the ranch was also a fully blown cattle operation, the proposed protection easements also included land that had been actively grazed for over 100yrs. Cattle grazing keeps invasive native vegetation at a minimum, so it does not grow to overshadow wildflower blooms. As a consequence, the ranch hosted some of the most extensive bloom fields in all of California. To complete the easement deal, however, the varied habitats of the ranch had to be documented by photograph, and the Hearsts had never allowed pictures to be taken of the property for security reasons. Luckily for me, Harriet convinced Steve that I could be trusted to never release the pictures publicly without permission, and he allowed me to be the only photographer to ever be given full access to the rancho. When the easement deal was finally completed, the above image was made as a signed, limited edition print, and given to all involved in the ceremony, including the governor.

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Friday, July 15, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #313
Daze, #313:  
2005 brought about a remarkable moment for myself, and the American Land Conservancy (ALC), on whose board I sat. Various non-profit groups had been negotiating with the Hearst family for over 7yrs., trying to prevent them from building a sizable housing development where the tiny San Simeon village sat, west of Hwy #1/Cabrillo Highway, and the lower ranch lands of Rancho Piedra Blanca on the east side of the highway. One by one they all dropped out of the negotiations, but ALC chose to stick it out and keep pushing. Our Director, Harriet Burgess, had a convivial relationship with Steven Hearst, and she was confident she could finally propose a deal that he would accept. She even took the negotiations up a notch, and got California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, involved in the process.

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Friday, July 8, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #312
Daze, #312:  
Throughout my career, I had a lot of success using museum exhibits to drive conservation projects, so to further the NO PEBBLE MINE campaign, I assembled a traveling exhibit entitled, “Southwest Alaska: A World of Parks and Refuges at the Crossroads”, and Fuji underwrote my printing of it on their newly introduced Crystal Archive printing paper. The exhibit circulated widely in North America, and was displayed at every major museum in Alaska. It also traveled to different venues in Washington, DC, three times, and helped to place the dangerous proposal to develop the Pebble mine in front of a huge audience, including a considerable number of politicians.

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Friday, July 1, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #311
Daze, #311:  
Also in 2004, Cibachrome is taken off the market, and my master printer, Michael Wilder, and I, stop working together. Cibachrome involved a lot of toxic chemistry, and Fuji had developed a new print material, Crystal Archive, that had Cibachrome color qualities, and similar archival permanence, but processed in distilled water. As I was already sponsored by them as a user of their Velvia film, they agreed to underwrite the printing of an exhibit I was designing to be used in the emerging NO PEBBLE MINE campaign.

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Friday, June 24, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #310
Daze, #310:  
I wrapped up my work in Wood-Tikchik State Park ), and in 2004 Aperture published, “Wood-Tikchik: Alaska’s Largest State Park". The Alaska Conservation Foundation purchased 200-copies of it, and together with a second purchase of my previous book, “Rivers of Life: Southwest Alaska, The Last Great Salmon Fishery”, did a direct mail campaign to major foundations, and interested media, of this 2-book set. It did, indeed, attract significant media attention, and drew foundation funding from many sources, but most significantly, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation of San Francisco gave $10,000,000 over 3-years to purchase conservation easements of inholdings within the park, protecting critical rivers and fisheries.

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Friday, June 17, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #309
Daze, #309:  
Additionally in 2003, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, who held some of my work in their collection, organized five different traveling exhibitions, and published this catalog to go with them, entitled, The Land Through A Lens: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in which several of my prints were included.

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Friday, June 10, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #308
Daze, #308:  
The proposed construction of the Pebble mine, also was incentive to take my work in Wood-Tikchik State Park, and create a second Aperture book about southwest Alaska, the numerous parks, and the Bristol Bay fishery, as Wood-Tikchik represented 1/3 of the rivers that fed into Bristol Bay. Bud Hodson, the owner of Tikchik Narrows Lodge, also opposed the development of the mine, and he was happy to support my effort, so I was invited to stay at the lodge several times, and his pilots flew me about on a daily basis.

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Friday, June 3, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #307
Daze, #307:  
In 2003, the state of Alaska issued exploratory permits to the Canadian company, Northern Dynasty, who proposed to build the Pebble mine in the headwaters of the Bristol Bay fishery. If completed, it would be the largest open-pit, cyanide gold-leach mine in the world. I immediately began working with the Alaska Conservation Foundation, several tribal coalitions, Trout Unlimited, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and others, to oppose its construction.

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Friday, May 27, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #306
Daze, #306:  
After our day of exploring Severny, and flying over the icefields of Yuzhny, the copters returned us to the Sovetskiy Soyuz, and we began to navigate our way back to Mermansk, a journey that would take a couple of days. On one of those days, a copter was going up in the late afternoon to scout for any ice that might be coming into our path, and so I asked if I could join the fly around. It was later that evening as we were returning that a pale glow of sunlight colored the surface of the semi-frozen sea below, and left me with this amazing final shot.

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Friday, May 20, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #305
Daze, #305:  
Novaya Zemlya is actually two islands only barely divided. The northernmost is Severny, and the southern end is Yuzhny We went ashore on Severny, and here we are coptering above Yuzhny. Severny hosts an Arctic tern nesting area on the rock-strewn shoreline, and the terns don’t build nest, they just lay their eggs in the open amongst the rocks. Because the eggs are SO exposed, the terns protect them fiercely. On this visit, the guards that normally watched for polar bears, stood on a small bluff above the shore, to prevent guests from going down there. One of the terns, however, didn’t appreciate a particular guard, and attacked him, splitting open his forehead with a beak stab that required stitches to close up.

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Friday, May 13, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #304
Daze, #304:  
Enroute to the island of Novaya Zemlya, sometimes we broke ice, and sometimes we found very open water. Most mornings we had fog. Often it was down above the water, but as here, it surrounded us with a hazy veil, thin enough for the sun to glow through.

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Friday, May 6, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #303
Daze, #303:  
Our journey to the island of Novaya Zemlya involved several days of travel with nowhere to stop and get any off-boat exercise, so when we came upon this huge iceberg the captain decided to amuse the guest with a little adventure. They broke out the helicopters and flew them over to have a walk around. The scale of this berg is impressive. Look to the far distant right, where someone is standing. To appear that small, they are a long way away.

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Friday, April 29, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #302
Daze, #302:  
The Hearst’s 83,000-acre Piedra Blanca Rancho that surrounds the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, was named for the white rocks found all over the property. These rocks are part of Franciscan geology, a unique character of rock formations, and their particular mineral structure attracts blooms of specific California wildflowers. In this case, clusters of California poppies.

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Friday, April 22, 2022

An Alaskan Summer with Russell Daggatt, Kayaking, and Camping Adventures in Glacier Bay, and Hiking on Kruzof Island #12
Glacier Bay #12:  
Deeper into Glacier Bay where the mountains rise to thousands of feet, the weather not only streams over and through them, but it causes some very dramatic now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t views. Here a wind driven fog swirls around a granite dome, and backs up against the mountain behind. Within minutes the mountain could longer be seen.

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Friday, April 15, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #300
Daze, #300:  
The Piedra Blanca Rancho is the working cattle ranch that surrounds the Hearst Castle in San Simeon. The presence of the grazing cattle that are constantly moved around has allowed for a spectacular habitat of California wildflowers. Initially wildflowers establish themselves on open ground, and put out profuse fields of blooms. Over time, however, sage and other species move in grow taller, and more dense, crowding the wildflowers out. At the rancho, moving the cattle from one grazing location to another, keeps vast portions of the 83,000-acres with short grass, and no shrubby species, so every spring the wildflowers bloom back out. This is an alpine meadow at the top of one of the mountains on the property.

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Friday, April 8, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #299
Daze, #299:  
In 2002, Aperture Foundation gives me a Lifetime Achievement Award for Photography and Conservation. I also spend another summer in Wood-Tikchik State Park working to produce a second book about southwest Alaska and Bristol Bay, and in the early spring, I once again journey to the North Pole. Besides the work I am doing for the American Land Conservancy (ALC) on the Mississippi River, they engage me on another project in California. ALC has been negotiating with the Hearst family over the idea of purchasing the conservation easements to 89,000 acres of the Piedras Blancas Ranch which surrounds San Simeon castle. The family has never allowed the property to be photographed before, and I am given exclusive permission to do so. The ranch is a working cattle ranch with an expansive backcountry, and numerous rivers, but it also contains miles of coastline that are paralleled by Route #1 from San Simeon, all the way to Big Sur.

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Friday, April 1, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #298
Daze, #298:  
The part of tWood-Tikchik State Park that defines it is the lake section which hosts many large, and deep, glacially carved lakes. Closest to the town of Dillingham is Lake Nunavaugaluk, next, to the north, Lake Aleknagik, then Lake Nerka, followed by Beverly, Kulik, Nuyakuk and Tikchik, Chauekuktuli, Chikuminuk, Upnuk, Slate, and finally, Nishlik. The above is Chikuminuk, which has an especially convoluted shoreline, a number of islands, and is a kayak camper's dream.

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Friday, March 25, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #297
Daze, #297:  
Wood-Tikchik State Park is over 1,600,000 acres, and there is a considerable variation of habitats within its borders. There is a good deal of tundra, speckled with ponds and laced by streams and rivers. At the lower, wetter elevations there are some trees, but the more extensive treeline begins a little higher up. In this image, we are above the foothills of the Wood Mountains. There is extensive forest coverage on the hillsides that encircle a small lake and an expansive wetland. The wetland connects from one shallow pond to another through a myriad of streams, and will eventually consolidate into a small river. This is a headwater.

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Friday, March 18, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #296
Daze, #296:  
Further, in 2001, I was given a Supervisorial Commedation by the County of Santa Clara, then the Santa Barbara Community Environmental Council gave me the Robert O. Easton Award for Environmental Stewardship, and lastly I received the Josephine and Frank Duveneck Humanitarian Award. I also was well into a multi-year love affair with southwest Alaska, and had spent a good deal of time flying above the 1,600,000-acre Wood-Tikchik State Park, of which very few people had much knowledge, so I thought I might do a second Aperture book about the park. Thus in the summer of 2021, I returned to Dillingham, to begin that project, connecting with a number of pilots, and the only fishing lodge inside the park, Tikchik Narrows Lodge.

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Friday, March 11, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #295
Daze, #295:  
I began my work in southwest Alaska in 1998, concentrating on the vast parklands, and the fishery of Bristol Bay. I spent two 6-month summers in Southwest, and then went into production of that work in 2001, creating the Aperture book, “Rivers of Life: Southwest Alaska, The Last Great Salmon Fishery.” The proposed Pebble mine had not yet been announced, and the concerns expressed in the book were about proper management of the fishery, the most commercially productive in the world. Above is the Kvichak River, the most productive of all the rivers involved. Nearly 9,000,000 sockeye were harvested from this river alone in 2021. The release of the book attracted a lot of media attention, and as a result I received a number of awards and acknowledgments. I was named Outstanding Photographer of the Year by the North American Nature Photography Association. I was named Outstanding Person of the Year by Photo Media magazine. I was also given a Certificate of Recognition by the California State Assembly "..for 30yrs. of helping to shape the environmental movement."

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Friday, March 4, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #294
Daze, #294:  
In some of the purchases made by the American Land Conservancy (ALC) in the Mississippi River Valley, farmers had built dikes to protect their fields from flooding. Unfortunately that channeled river water at flood stage, causing greater damage downstream. When ALC acquired these properties, they worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to tear the dikes down, allowing the river at flood stage to broaden out and run “wild.” As a result of this, new backwaters and wetlands were created all along the river corridor, multiplying the habitat for fish and birds considerably.

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Friday, February 25, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #293
Daze, #293:  
I spent a good deal of time between 2000 and 2010 visiting sites being considered for purchase by the American Land Conservancy (ALC), up, and down, the Mississippi River corridor. After the properties were acquired, and altered, they were transferred to the federally protected lands that were designated for the Mid-Atlantic Flyway. In this fashion, ALC added 26,000+ acres to the flyway, making it the ONLY federal properties that were actually enlarged during the George W. Bush presidency, which was notably lacking in environmental stewardship.

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Friday, February 18, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #292
Daze, #292:  
The Mississippi River corridor is part of the Mid-Atlantic Flyway, which is used by millions of birds migrating north, and south, during the change of seasons. The combination of wetlands, and farmlands that had edible crop remains, made the river an irresistible stop over on their long flights. Many of the farm fields had been created by building levees for their protection, but the levees channeled the flooding river, and made the flooding more destructive. Working with the Army Corp of Engineers, ALC negotiated with interested farmers to purchase the conservation easement to their fields. The levees would then be torn down, allowing the river to “go wild” during flood stage, but by creating more meanders, and backwaters, these newly flooded areas absorbed the more dangerous conditions of the flood being channeled, and greatly reduced the amount of down stream damage.

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Friday, February 11, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #291
Daze, #291:  
I had been a Board of Trustee member of the American Land Conservancy (ALC) and working with them on a number of successful projects including the creation of Limekiln Creek State Park in Big Sur, and the purchase of the entire Topanga Canyon watershed, and coastal shore, in Los Angeles, but in 2000 I became a photographer to their new campaign in the midwest. Based out of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, I traveled up and down the Mississippi River taking pictures of locations ALC was considering for either an outright purchase, or purchase of a conservation easement. There was a lot of manipulation of government funds by many riverside landowners, who would plant fields immediately adjacent the river, wait until the spring floods wiped their crops away, and then seek federal assistance. This had gone on for many years, and farmers were making a lot of money for “losing” their crops. ALC targeted purchase of these sites specifically.
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Friday, February 4, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #290
Daze, #290:  
In the summer of 1999, I headed for southwest Alaska with Rhett Turner, Ted Turner’s son, as my assistant. We first flew into Anchorage where we hung out for a few days, and on one of those days, we hired a plane for a flightsee. I thought it would be a good way for Rhett to take in the greater landscape, and I wanted him to understand that when we flew, and I was shooting, I needed him to load film into the camera backs, so I would not loose time, doing that myself. I also wanted him to shoot with his film camera, so that we would feel comfortable using it from the air during our summer in Southwest. It was a clear, beautiful day we chose, so we flew up over the top of the Chugach Mountains, allowing us spectacular views of the glaciers and the icefields. Then we crossed over Prince William Sound. I was explaining to Rhett that the wilderness surrounding the Copper River was being threatened by Alaskan Congressman, Don Young, who was trying to build a multi-million dollar "road-to-nowhere" (literally), not because it went some place, but because it would declassify the wilderness area designation. I wanted to take some shots of the area, but Rhett had a better idea. There was no road construction as yet, but some equipment had been moved to where the road would start, and the direction of the road had been survey marked. Rhett got out his movie camera, and asked the pilot to fly low, and follow the survey markers while he filmed. When he returned home at the end of the summer, he edited that footage into a 3-minute news spot that aired on CNN hundreds of times, and was also picked up by other major media. It created a firestorm of unwanted attention for Young, and he withdrew the proposal to build the road.

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Friday, January 28, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #289
Daze, #289:  
In trying to find funding to begin work in southwest Alaska/Bristol Bay, I had turned to the McIntosh Foundation, who previously supported my work in the Tongass. Unfortunately, they wanted to keep their financial focus on the Tongass, so they turned me down, but Winsome McIntosh offered up what proved to be a terrific suggestion. One year previously, I delivered a lecture at the Rhode Island School of Design that apparently left quite an impression on one of the audience members. As the McIntoshes were friends with that student's family, she heard about the lecture during a dinner together. That student was Rhett Turner, Ted Turner’s son, and Winsome suggested that I should ask him to be my assistant for the summer, so I did. Rhett was graduating, and planned on forming his own film company, so he was happy to help me, if I would let him bring his film cameras along as well. Better yet, he was also happy to help my funding needs by offering me a grant from the Turner Foundation.

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Friday, January 21, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #288
Daze, #288:  
For 9yrs., I sat on the Board of Trustees for the Alaska Conservation Foundation. When I left the board, Jan Konigsburg, their former Director, took me out to dinner, and asked if I knew much about southwest Alaska. I knew the town of Dillingham was out there, and I knew Katmai National Park, and Lake Clark National Park were part of it as well, but other than that, I was pretty uninformed. Jan proceeded to tell me that there were other large parks, and the watersheds for them all fed into Bristol Bay, the most productive salmon fishery in the world. He was concerned about the long-term management of the fishery, and suggested I fly out to the area with he and a friend to have a look at it first hand, as he was hoping that I might take interest in it as a project. I was happy to accompany them, and for four days we flew above, and drove around the territory, so that I might get a feel for what was at stake. When I returned to Anchorage, I told Jan that I thought I would go to work out there, and then I headed back to the Lower ’48 to look for funding. The McIntosh Foundation had underwritten my work in the Tongass, so I went to them first. However, they wanted to keep their financial focus on the Tongass, so they turned me down, but Winsome McIntosh offered me some valuable advice.

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Friday, January 14, 2022

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #287
Daze, #287:  
Also in 1999, the work I created during my commission to photograph the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden was published as “Nature’s Kaleidoscope”. I had been specifically asked to concentrate a good bit of my work on native species, a feature of the garden, but that covered a lot of variety from oak trees, to poppies, numerous succulents, and aloes. Because I visited many times, and shot a large portfolio of images, my pictures constituted a substantial portion of the publication, including the cover, and the frontispiece.

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Friday, January 7, 2022


The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #286
Daze, #286:  
After the embroidery exhibit at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, I continued working with the Suzhou guild, constantly pressing to do more experimental, and challenging pieces. In 2006, I was given a huge retrospective by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, TX, and for the first time, my embroideries were included with over 75 of my photographs. After that show, I determined I would break from the traditional landscape worked that had defined my career, and I would begin to explore the world of the Adobe darkroom. In 2007, on a visit to China, Zhang Meifang, director of the guild with whom I had been working, told me that because of our success, all the other guilds in Suzhou had begun to work from photographs, and we needed to move in a new direction. When I returned to my studio with that thought in mind, I decided to create some images to propose as embroideries embracing the Chinese partiality for tall, thin panels, and scrolls. The result, “Graceful Branch Movement” (above) was completed in 2010, and is the largest single panel ever embroidered, measuring a little over 2ft. wide, and standing 6-1/4ft. high. It is diaphanous, and double-sided, featuring highly detailed “Suzhou Fine Style” stitching, and over 500 shades of dyed thread, with often as many as 20 different shades of one color. The panel took 2yrs. to complete.

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Friday, December 24, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #284
Daze, #284: 
The Suzhou Fine Style stitch (last post) is beautiful, but VERY labor intensive. Generally, the embroiderers do not combine it with other stitches because they do not want to distract from the Fine Style stitchwork. Occasionally, however, they design a piece to specifically contrast that stitch style with another, and this detail (above) is a stunning example of that. This embroidery is working with many layers, all meant to show each other off. The base layer consists a silver-black leaves, over which red peonies sewn with the Fine Style stitch have been placed. Lastly, silver-white peacock feathers have been overlain, and stitched in a way to give the appearance of transparency, another masterful display of design and sewing techniques.

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Friday, December 17, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #283
Daze, #283: 
Accompanied by a researcher, and archivist, from the Fowler Museum, I traveled back to Suzhou to work with the guild to select pieces of theirs the museum would display. Within any of the Suzhou guilds, there were hundreds of embroideries, some created for sale to commercial tourism, and some created as masterpieces to show off the ultimate skills of a given guild. Generally these latter works were hugely expensive, so sales of them were infrequent. My guild had many such pieces, and I made it clear that the Fowler Museum was only interested in those, and not the more commercial work. Hesitant at first to ship away such valuable pieces, the archivist with the museum assured the guild of care and handling, in fact, pointing out to the guild that many of their methodologies were not suitably archival. The archivist's diligence, and detailed explanations of ways to do things to enhance protection of the textiles, led to the guild trusting us enough to release the works we were asking to place in our exhibit. The most tedious, and detailed stitching is called the Suzhou Fine Style, and the image above is an example of that. What you see is a small section of a VERY large embroidery called “100 Butterflies.” This embroidery was a tour de force, so it became the entrance display when the Fowler opened the show.

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Friday, December 10, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #282
Daze, #282: 
By 1999, I had been collaborating with a textile guild in Suzhou, China, for nearly 15yrs. to translate my images into embroideries and tapestries. I began that project through the UCLA-China Exchange Program, and in those 15yrs. we had created numerous pieces. So it came to be that the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History decided to exhibit those pieces we had completed. They also felt they wanted to show those creations in the context of what the various Suzhou guilds did traditionally, because I was the first one to ask them to work directly from photographs. The proposed exhibit took on a greatly enhanced status in determining to do this, because high-end Chinese embroideries, and tapestries, had never been exhibited in the U.S. before, and this would be the first time a Suzhou guild was invited into an American museum. The uniqueness of this proposed exhibit attracted prestigious funders. The Getty Grant Program underwrote an in-depth research of the textile-making history, including how dyes were created, and styles of stitches, all published in a large catalog (above) to accompany the show. The exhibit, itself, was funded by the Times-Mirror Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, and the Disney Foundation. The finished display also took up the two largest galleries in the museum. It was a huge show, that attracted a record audience, and it was well reviewed in numerous newspapers, and magazines.

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Friday, December 3, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #281
Daze, #281: 
The CHINA: Fifty Years Inside the People’s Republic concept book, and traveling exhibition, blew up in the museum world, attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers, and, literally, traveled completely around the world. Taking advantage of the international interest, Aperture created an entire second exhibit, and sent it abroad. In the fall of 2001, it opened at the Manchester City Art Galleries, then on to Asia House in London, eventually working its way across the continent to Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes di Napoli, in Naples, Italy. The next stop was to be the Hong Kong Art Center, but before that, something VERY unexpected happened. Aperture was contacted by the Chinese government, because they wanted to hang the exhibit at the National Museum of Chinese History in Beijing, and at the brand new Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art. They also made it clear that some images would be removed from the exhibit, but no photographer would be completely taken out. The pictures deleted were relatively predictable, such as those from Tiananmen Square. My images in the show were pictures from the mid-80’s of old Suzhou, showing the beauty of the canals, and neighborhoods. However, when the show went up, ALL of my images had been removed. Startled, I wrote the Minister of Culture asking why this had been done, and his response was that those were “unhappy” times, when people were very poor, and living conditions were as well, so nobody should be reminded of those days. The Chinese are quite good at erasing history.

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Friday, November 26, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #280
Daze, #280: 
Besides releasing SUMMIT (post #276) in 1998, Aperture also published, CHINA: Fifty Years Inside the People’s Republic. There was a lot of buzz in the early 90’s about the “new” China that was arising, and so Michael Hoffman, Aperture's CEO, and the editors, developed a concept book and exhibition. Many artists that Aperture published, such as myself, Sebastiao Salgado, and Lois Conner, had spent a lot of time in China since the mid-80’s, and Aperture also had the resources to connect with some significant Chinese photographers as well, so it was determined that 32 photographers would be chosen, 1/2 visitors, 1/2 Chinese, and they would each contribute 10 images. 320 prints makes for a big book, and a VERY big exhibition. As expected, Aperture produced a masterful book, well printed, and designed, and the huge show was carefully framed, crated, and very well booked, including the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur Sackler Gallery, the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, and the University of California Berkley Art Museum. Canada took interest as well, so the exhibit traveled to the Chinese Cultural Center Museum in Vancouver, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Those prestigious venues, and the subsequent reviews of the show, attracted the attention of equally prestigious European institutions, so Aperture created an entire second framed, and crated, exhibit for the European venues that were lining up.

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Friday, November 19, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #279
Daze, #279: 
Hall Island is part of the Franz Josef archipelago. Most of the island is covered by an ice dome, but the southern tip, Cape Tegetthoff, is ice-free, so it was a chance for all the guest to go ashore and explore what appeared to be a stark, rocky terrain. To everyone’s surprise, however, once we landed and crossed over the gravel stone beach, the tundra was quite verdant. Clusters of wildflowers were blooming everywhere, and where the meltwater was flowing, extravagant, lush mosses of red and green, covered all the rocks. The Arctic breeze of the afternoon was quite chill, but most of us were tired of being stuck on the ship, so we lingered into the day, until the light started to fade. I covered several miles in my circular walk around, and in combination with the breeze, I was toast by the end of the day. It was good to get back to the warmth of the ship, and a drink in the bar.

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Friday, November 12, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #278
Daze, #278: 
When we arrived at the North Pole, there is no land mass, so all of us disembarked onto the ice and walked around taking pictures. Eventually we were hustled back on board by our Soviet crew, as one of them discovered a polar bear sneaking up on our group from behind an ice ridge. With still some days left in our trip, expedition leaders consulted with captain of our vessel, and it was decided that we would explore some of the high Arctic islands. One of those was an archipelago called Franz Joseph Land, that consisted of 192 islands, covering 6,230-square-miles. 85% of the islands are glaciated, as you can see here, and except for a very few military outposts, they have been a nature sanctuary since 1994, and in 2012, they became the Russian Arctic National Park.

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Friday, November 5, 2021
The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #277
Daze, #277: 
In the spring of 1998, I was asked by my alma mater, UCLA to serve as a guest lecturer for a UCLA alumni travel expedition to the North Pole. The group of over 100 alums would meet in the very northern Russian city of Murmansk, where we would board the huge nuclear ice-breaker, Sovetskiy Soyuz, and head north. Of course, I was very excited to be invited as this would broaden my view of the Arctic and climate change, which began on my previous trip across the Northwest Passage with Bill Simon and his friends. I would soon learn, however, how VERY different this trip to the North Pole would be. In navigating the Northwest Passage, we did encounter some ice blockages, but we were able to navigate through them, and we were always surrounded by islands and land. On this trip to the north pole there was little land in site, and the surface of the ocean was frozen solid. Our passage was created by literally ramming our way through the ice covered surface of the ocean.

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Friday, October 29, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #276
Daze, #276: 
In post #243, I recounted that on a trip to Italy, I was introduced to the work of Vittorio Sella, a pioneering mountaineer, and photographer, of the late 1800’s. Sella dragged massive cameras up into many of the great mountain ranges of the world, and his photographs are not only remarkable in, and of themselves, but helped mapmakers to create some of the first good maps of those ranges. I thought the work important enough to publish, and so I brought the project to Aperture where CEO, Michael Hoffman, accepted it. Thus, in early 1998, Aperture released SUMMIT: Vittorio Sella/Mountaineer and Photographer - the years 1879-1909. Aperture did a spectacular job on the book’s design, and the cover shot of K2 remains one of the most impressive images of a commanding summit ever made.
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Friday, October 22, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #275
Daze, #275: 
As Aperture believed there was no “sales” market for David Hanson’s, Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape, Advocacy Arts Foundation (Aarf!) bought all 5,000 copies, using donors money. We then worked with a consortium of groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), to mail out, and hand out, those copies. Some of the groups purchased their copies at cost, and we gave books to others. In particular. Aarf! wanted to do a hand-out on capitol hill, coordinated by several groups that wished to see a reform of mining regulations. With an entourage of Aarf! board members, David, and I, joined the hand-out in DC with the specific intention of meeting with the Senators and Representatives from our home states, California in my case, Montana in David’s. We were both successful, and the picture above shows our meeting with Senator Barbara Boxer, in the office of then Vice-President, Al Gore. David is to the left, my assistant at the time, Cory Walsh, sits between us, and Barbara is talking to us about several mining reform bills that have been proposed.

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Friday, October 15, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #274
Daze, #274: 
My career to this point has been blessed by well funded commissions, collectors, and generous donors, all of whom supported the conservation advocacy of my work. There were many photographers I knew, however, whose efforts were equally important, and they could not find an audience. In the early 90’s, I created Advocacy Arts Foundation (Aarf!) to help some of those photographers get published and exhibited. I was especially appreciative of David T. Hanson’s vision, someone I befriended when I lectured at the Rhode Island School of Design where he taught. David worked with a view camera, taking aerials of mining and toxic sights, and his images were at one time completely descriptive, but also marvelously abstract. You could tell what you were looking at, but simultaneously the picture had a strange, unsettling, lyrical, beauty. I encouraged David to assemble his portfolio as a book with differing chapters/subjects, and to let me take it to Aperture. The CEO of Aperture, my friend, Michael Hoffman, looked at the collected images, and thought we were crazy, because he did not feel there would be any market for such a confrontational assemblage of photographs. Nonetheless, because Aarf! was willing to fund the publishing costs, Aperture had nothing to loose, and so he agreed. In 1997, Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape, was released, and Aarf! took all 5,000 copies to distribute.

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Friday, October 8, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #273
Daze, #273: 
After four days in our mountain “chalet” in the Caucasus mountains, we retreated to the valley floor, but by the time we arrived it was late in the day, and there were no accommodations immediately available. To our surprise, however, our host, the president, had arranged to open, and staff, a nearby spa resort (above), and he sent an entourage of cars and cabinet members we had come to know, to greet us, and take us there. The resort was closed because it was out of season, but the staff that had been arranged, came in the day before, got everything up and running, and prepared a ton of food. Besides our group, there were numerous others that had come out to dine with us. First things first, however. After several rounds of vodka shooters, we all entered a gigantic sauna/steam room. Just outside was also an Olympic-sized pool, filled with ice cold water. It was then explained to us that it was a tradition to endure the sauna as long as you could, then go out and dive in the pool, swimming the length. Then, back into the sauna. This was to be done seven times. Having completed this ritual, the feast began, and there is no Russian banquet without a ridiculous amount of alcohol, after which we retired to an outdoor patio, where musicians, and girls, showed up, to play some regional dance music, and to teach us those dances. Party on Garth! A bit hungover, the next morning we rose early to be driven four hours to the airport for a flight back to Moscow. On the plane, my traveling companion, Margaret Williams, was assigned a seat that only had 1/2 of the seat belt. Speaking fluent Russian, she told the flight attendant, who responded in perfect English, “Well, you had better hang on!” Ah, the luxuries of Aeroflot! After an overnight in Moscow, our troupe returned to the United States,..NOT by Aeroflot!

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Friday, October 1, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #272
Daze, #272: 
The rangers who are hosting us, have regular “rounds” they perform, when we are not around. Their daily tasks involve patrolling various parts of the range for poachers, and they have a support system of several more remote cabins, similar to the one in which we are all staying. With the intent of having us see more of this terrain, on one of the days they decide to take us to one of the other cabins. We are told that we would not stay there overnight, so it would be a long, and arduous day, that would get started very early, and return late.When the rangers travel to this cabin on horseback, the ride is so rugged, it takes all day, so to do what we are going to do without horses, we will take a shortcut, which they promise will be difficult but doable. The forest was dense, and a very tricky navigation, everybody was drenched in sweat, so when we got to this point, and we were told we would walk some distance IN the river, people were actually glad to jump in.

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Friday, September 24, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #271
Daze, #271: 
This is our evening gathering, under the eave of our mountain “chalet.” While dinner is being prepared, there is a lot of drinking of warm beer, and various other imbibements that were slipped into the horse saddlebags. During the course of the day, the other photographer in our group, and I, would wander in the nearby forests and summit meadows, the rangers would browse for food, and the rest generally sit right here drinking, and trying to stay out of the blazing sun. It is helpful to us all that there are few insects.

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Friday, September 17, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #270
Daze, #270: 
In the Caucasus Mountains, this is the kitchen of our hideaway “chalet.” Hot water in the kettle, dinner in the pot (right). As I noted in previous posts, with no refrigeration, and daily temperatures in the 90’s, there is no “fresh” food to be had, so the evening meal is always a potato soup with some variations from the forest, collected by the rangers. It is a daily task for them to wander in the woods collecting a variety of herbs and mushrooms, and for the few days we stayed with them, they managed to change the flavor every night.

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Friday, September 10, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #269
Daze, #269: 
The landscape surrounding our cabin hosts two distinctly different environments. The open meadows, as you saw in the last post, and the deep, old growth forest. Undisturbed for hundreds of years, these forests are home to some gigantic trees, many of which are now decorated by layers of lichen and moss. In the understory there are wildflowers, but these are very different from the ones in the open meadows. Those grow close to the ground. Here, in the shade of the canopy, the flowers stretch to the light, and many of the species are over my head, becoming a forest of their own. This is truly untouched wilderness, and wandering anywhere beneath the trees is rugged, and takes a lot of work.

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Friday, September 3, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #268
Daze, #268: 
The meadows around our cabin in the Caucasus, were vast, and spread in all directions for miles. There were concentrations of wildflowers sprawling across them, and varied fields of similar flowers would appear depending on waterflow, and sun exposure. This particular array is dense, and the view is looking into the southern part of the range. Pertaining to our mission here, we had come to ask the newly established government, not to invade this zapovednik for logging or mining resources, and in our four days of talks in Maycop, prior to coming here, the president and his new cabinet agreed they would not.

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Friday, August 27, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #267
Daze, #267: 
Home, sweet home, for the next four days. The cabin is small, and there are a lot of us, so we are packed sleeping bag to sleeping bag, but it is manageable. The heat, however, is unrelenting until the cool of evening, so most of our time is spent under the shed roof, at the bench and table where we eat (and drink-hey, it’s Russia). In this shot, our merry crew has gathered for evening cocktails, and the fire pit has been ignited in the “kitchen" (foreground, right). Every evening meal was some variation of potato soup, as there was no cold storage of anything.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2021
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Friday, August 20, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #266
Daze, #266: 
When Margaret Williams, and I, departed the Bryansky Les Zapovednik, we returned to Moscow by train for a brief stay, and regrouped for our next location, the Caucasus Mountains. To get into the Caucasus zapovednik, we would again be assigned guides, which were being provided for us through connections with the local government in a region known as the Republic of Adygea. Adygea was a 3hr. plane flight from Moscow to its capital city, Maykop, which has a population of around 140,000 people. The republic had been recently created by the breakup of the former Soviet Union, and we were the first “foreign dignitaries” to visit, so we were met at the airport by the new President. We spent three days in Maykop, being shown about, and getting our paperwork in order, and then we traveled by car some 8hrs. to reach a tiny village at the foot of the Caucasus Range, where our ranger guides lived. As with Igor, these guides were game wardens, and the only people allowed into the reserve without special permission, and, like Igor, they were fully armed with “shoot-to-kill” orders if they encountered poachers. We overnighted in the tiny village, and early the next morning, departed on horseback to enter the range. After several hours of riding, much of it uphill, we came out of the forest onto a lesser summit covered by a vast meadow of wildflowers, and incredible views in every direction (above). Several hundred yards below us, at the edge of the meadow was a small wood cabin that would become home to us for the next several days. What a setting.

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Friday, August 13, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #265
Daze, #265: 
This is our Russian guide, and game warden of the Bryansky Les Zapovednik, Igor Shpilenok. Igor was a great person to hang with during our visit, and a great photographer in his own right. He does a lot of great work with animals, and his book, Kamchatka, Wilderness at the Edge, features stunning landscapes. I was very happy to be one of those that voted Igor into membership of the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP), of which I was a Founding Fellow. As you will read, if you click the link I have provided, he and Laura, now work as a team, traveling all around Russia and Siberia. Google his work, it is well worth a look.

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Friday, August 6, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #264
Daze, #264: 
On one of our final days with Igor in the Bryansky Les Zapovednik, he took Margaret Williams, myself, and his partner, Laura Williams, through a labyrinth of channels in the reserve to reach the sizable open waters of the Desna River. The bigger river generated cooler air around us, and there were no insects to deal with at all. The trip took several hours, and we finally went ashore at a small historic town, on top of a hill, that had a beautiful church. We ate some food, and lingered for awhile by the water’s edge. Some people were fishing, and this gentleman (above) was working his field. As Margaret spoke fluent Russian, she engaged him about what he was doing, and he was curious to know what we were doing as well, because we had so many cameras.

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Friday, July 30, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #263
Daze, #263: 
Because of the heat, and the plaque of insects, the best place to be on any given day in the Bryansky Les Nature Reserve, was in a moving boat, out on the rivers. The motion provided a cooling breeze, and motoring about left the insects behind. We went out to explore by water nearly every day, and spent most of the day afloat. Sometimes we would stay until dark, so it was nice to be led by Igor, our game warden host, because he never got lost in the confusion of channels.

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Friday, July 23, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #262
Daze, #262: 
The Bryansky Les Nature Reserve hosted vast stands of dense forest, surrounded by a great deal of loamy soil, and swampland. For the Soviet Partisan fighters that were attacking the Nazi supply chain which supported the German front laying siege to Moscow, this was the perfect hideout, as navigating around in it was extremely difficult for armored cars and tanks, many of which bogged down, and had to be abandoned. The partisans also built “hides” that were so cleverly camouflaged, they were difficult to find.

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Friday, July 16, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #261
Daze, #261: 
Margaret Williams of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, and I, hit the perfect season to visit the Bryansky Les Nature Reserve, which was among the zapovedniks I had come to Russia to photograph. The vast forest was a patchwork of tree groves, swamps, and broad meadows, that were at full bloom. As hot as it was, it was still beautiful, but to approach this as a camera subject required great care, because if you just walked through it, clouds of mosquitoes would rise from the grasses, and swarm you. These meadows also played an interesting part in Russian history. In World War II, the German front was attacking Moscow, and local partisans from several Soviet countries, hid in this forest reserve, and constantly interrupted the supply line supporting the Nazi frontline. The partisans were being supplied with food and ammunition by the European, and American forces, and those supplies would be flown in at night by plane. The planes would drop supplies in these meadows, which the partisans marked by lighting candles around their perimeter. Of course, the Germans wanted to disrupt this support, so to confuse them, the partisans would light dozens of meadows at the same time, and the drops would only be made at one specific one.

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Friday, July 9, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #260
Daze, #260: 
In the last post, did I say stifling heat? You had better believe it! Most days are in the 90’s with 100% humidity, so when I go out with Igor to walk around and shoot, we start before dawn, so we can arrive at our destination before the sun comes up. In that way we have about an hour to shoot before fleeing the rising heat, and the horrendous torrent of mosquitoes. Before dawn there is ground fog everywhere, which disappears as the sun rises, but the rising sun, and accompanying rising temperature, causes everything to steam, so there is always a haze in the meadow patches between the clusters of trees. It is a surreal environment in which to work, made even more uncomfortable by the need to wear a long-sleeved nylon shell to keep from being bitten. Igor’s house has no running water, but it does have a big pond adjacent to it, so when we return to his house, we immediately strip down and dive in the pond to bathe.

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Friday, July 2, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #259
Daze, #259: 
The village we have come to is where our guide, game warden, (and good photographer), Igor Shpilenok, lives with his partner, Laura Williams, an American. It is an ANCIENT village, and has NO CONTACT with the outside world. There are no roads in, nor out. There are no stores. No one has TV, nor a radio, and most of the residents, except for Igor and Laura, are in their 80’s, and 90’s. Amazingly, they are ALL self-sustaining! They raise sheep, goats, pigs, geese, chickens, and they all have large vegetable gardens. Walking through the village on any day, you would see everybody out working hard at some task in their garden, or herding around their various animals, even in the stifling heat.

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Friday, June 25, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #258
Daze, #258: 
The game warden for the Bryansky Les Forest Nature Reserve met Margaret and me at a small platform where the train deposited us. There were no buildings, just a platform with a shed roof, and nothing else around. It was 6a.m. hot, humid, and foggy. The warden had a land cruiser-type vehicle with oversized wheels, and we soon learned that where we were going had no roads; we would just drive through the forest, and the swamps, off-road. During World War II, the Soviet partisans hid in this forest, and attacked vulnerable Nazi forces that were hindered by the difficult terrain in which their heavy artillery often bogged down. Our drive in made it clear how easy it would be to get bogged down. Margaret and I were ASTOUNDED at some of the things we drove over, and through. Eventually, however, the dense forest, and the bogs, gave way to a broad, open patch of treeless, dry land, dotted with several dozen wooden houses, all surrounded by vegetable gardens. We had arrived.

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Friday, June 18, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #257
Daze, #257: 
Once we had connected with our Russian counterparts, each of the photographers were given 3-4 reserves to visit, and 1 or 2 Russian biologists were assigned to accompany them. Margaret Williams, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), stayed with me, and the first reserve we were to visit was called the Bryansky Les Forest Nature Reserve, located adjacent the Nerussa River, near the border with Ukraine. Covering 47-square-miles, it is an integral part of the Nerussa-Desna Woodland UNESCO-MAB Biosphere Reserve hosting one of the last remaining unbroken broadleaf forests in the southern part of the country. The forest supports abundant wildlife, and the rivers are rich with fish. The land is very flat with loamy, sandy soil, and many bogs. It is also hot in the summer, and very humid. We would take a train from Moscow to get there, and then we would be met by a warden, that would take us to the village in which he lived, and host us at his house. All aboard!

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Friday, June 11, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #256
Daze, #256: 
The other unusual project that I became part of in 1997 took me to Russia. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia was broken into many new states. Under the domain of the Soviet empire, numerous biological reserves had been created all across the country, that recognized the spectacular diversity of Siberia. The Soviets protected these with a special status, and only officials, and resident biologist and researchers, were allowed into them. They were called “zapovedniks,” and they were patrolled by armed wardens that were instructed to shoot anybody not officially recognized, as they were likely poachers. Spread across the entire country, there were over 100 zapovedniks, and they were completely wild. When the Soviet Union broke up, the states gained control of the reserves in their state, and in the science community, there was worldwide concern that the states, especially the poorer ones, might exploit the reserves for timber, mining, and other industrial uses, that would damage or destroy these biologically valuable protected areas. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) recognized the potential of this threat, so it coordinated a group of American researchers and photographers to join with Russian scientists, to visit the reserves, photograph them, speak with the new heads of state about protecting them, and create an internet community between the biologists in the reserves, so they could exchange ideas, and remain informed about any negative developments. Margaret Williams of the WWF in the US, was about my age, and had lived in Moscow for several years, so she spoke fluent Russian, and she became the coordinator for our group. The first step was to fly to Moscow, to meet the Russian biologists, and to plan which photographers would go to which reserves. The above was my “residence” for the four days I spent in Moscow.

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Friday, June 4, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #255
Daze, #255: 
The NRDC campaign to protect the Pacific grey whale nursery of San Ignacio Lagoon using a host of personalities such as Pierce Brosnan, Glenn Close, and Bobby Kennedy, Jr. to stoke the press, did as it was expected to do, going viral in the press worldwide. Stories about Mitsubishi's threat to industrialize parts of the lagoon for salt extraction appeared in newspapers and magazines everywhere for many months. However, that did not seem to stop Mitsubishi, although it did make the general public much more aware. Then, the NRDC lead attorney in the west coast office, my friend, Joel Reynolds, dreamed up an ingenious idea. He convinced NRDC to buy a full page in the New York Times, and the Washington Post, that would call Mitsubishi out, and make clear how their proposed development would unnecessarily impact this unique whale habitat. The ad ran, but we were both surprised to find it did not have the impact we expected. Then, one day over lunch, I suggested that Mitsubishi was too nebulous an entity for the public to grasp, most just knew it as a car company, so I thought NRDC should run another add listing ALL the subsidiaries Mitsubishi owned, and ask the public NOT to purchase or invest in any of their holdings, some of which included well known entities such as Dai Nippon, Kirin, and Nikon. Within a month of running that ad, Mitsubishi withdrew their plans to develop the lagoon, and the president of Mexico nominated San Ignacio Lagoon to be placed into the El Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve, which it was. Mission accomplished!

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Friday, May 28, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #254
Daze, #254: 
Although the collective habitat of San Ignacio Lagoon is interesting, the stars of the show are the Pacific gray whales and their curious offspring. San Ignacio whales for some reason, behave in a most unique way. Not only are they curious about people in boats floating around in their water, but they approach the boats, and interact. Many times they will approach from behind and push a boat, and sometimes they will breach very close to one, just to make everyone squeal, but VERY frequently they will come alongside, and rub against the side of the boat, allowing themselves to be petted, and touched. It does not get more intimate than this. These two women are KISSING this whale. WHAT!?

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Friday, May 21, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #253
Daze, #253: 
In the last post, I detailed the richness of the San Ignacio Lagoon salt-water habitat, and here with the tide out, you can actually see it. I am in one of the now-exposed mangrove channels, and the shore is covered by hundreds of shells. Most of the ones here are clams, abalone, and scallops. These shells litter all the low tide beaches, and as the sand / silt slowly cover them over, they leach lime, and it “cements” them into the bottom as the layers build. When the tide is out, and you are clambering around on the exposed edges of the rocky shore, you can see layer upon layer of these shells that have created the edge of the shore. It is, quite literally, looking at layers of time.

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Friday, May 14, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #252
Daze, #252: 
About 1/2 hour beyond Scammon's Lagoon, our flight carries us over San Ignacio Lagoon, where we will be camped, and whale watching, for the next ten days. In this picture the water, top-right, is the Pacific Ocean, and you can see waves breaking on the sandy berm that separates the Pacific from the lagoon to the left of the bar. The lagoon is one of only three such places that the Pacific gray whales give birth, and nurse their juveniles, before taking them out into the more dangerous waters of the open Pacific. The lagoon is an interesting complex of mangrove channels, islands of sea grass, and expanses of open water, surrounded by a very dry, scrub desert. As you will see in the next post, the lagoon is also rich in shellfish with vast beds of scallops, abalone, mussels, and large clams. It is also an important feeding habitat for four of the seven species of sea turtles, leatherbacks, hawksbills, green turtles, and olive ridleys, all of which are endangered. We will land on a dirt airstrip about 1/2-hour away, and buses and trucks will take our large party into the tent camp, which is located on a rocky peninsula that juts into the lagoon.

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Friday, May 7, 2021
The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #251
Daze, #251: 
On the way to San Ignacio Lagoon with NRDC and their star-studded guest list (see previous post), we fly over the salt extraction operation at Scammons Lagoon, which, when constructed by Mitsubishi disrupted the grey whales using it as a birthing nursery, causing a decline in their visitation numbers. Now Mitsubishi wants to do the same in San Ignacio Lagoon, and NRDC is determined NOT to let it happen. The whales of San Ignacio Lagoon apparently display a most unusual “affection” behavior, and choose to interact with visitors, often allowing themselves to be “petted”. What?

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Friday, April 30, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #250
Daze, #250: 
1997 is to be a year of several epic projects outside the U.S. in places I have never visited. It starts with an invitation from my friend Joel Reynolds, at that time lead attorney for the West Coast offices of NRDC, to join NRDC and a host of famous friends in Baja. There, a place known as San Ignacio Lagoon, is one of three birthing nurseries for gray whales on the Baja coast. One of the three, Scammons Lagoon, has been disrupted by a salt extraction plant built by Mitsubishi, and whale use declined significantly. Now Mitsubishi wants to develop a similar facility in San Ignacio, and NRDC is determined to prevent it from happening. Their first move is to create a press storm, and that is the purpose of the trip, which I have been invited to join. Major media from both North and South America has been brought in to film while Pierce Brosnan, and his son, Glenn Close, and her two daughters, Bobby Kennedy, and his family, and Jean-Michel Cousteau interact with what are reported to be VERY “friendly” whales. In this picture, left to right, John Adams, co-founder of NRDC, and his wife Patricia; Bobby Kennedy, middle-back, standing behind Glenn Close, and Pierce Brosnan, second from the right. We had a whale of a time!

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Friday, April 23, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #249
Daze, #249: 
Following my visit to Afognak Island, shortly after the logging ceased, the American Land Conservancy (ALC) on whose board I sit, stepped in. In a VERY complex deal brokered by Harriet Burgess, and her team, using carbon sequestration grants, carbon offset purchases, and Exxon Valdez oil spill funds made available through the state, they start the reforestation of the island. Working with the state fisheries program, they repopulate the streams with salmon, and other species, and they partner with the American Elk Foundation to reintroduce deer and elk. Afognak is now in recovery. Salmon runs are returning to the rivers, trees are maturing, and deer and elk populate the island. All in all, it is an amazing accomplishment for ALC, and one in which I am glad to have aided. Also in 1996, I found Advocacy Arts Foundation, a 501(c)3, non-profit group to help raise funds for other artists producing advocacy-directed work, but who are having trouble getting their projects financed. Near the end of the year, I also work on a calendar with the company, Pomegranate Calendars. Entitled, The Arc of Alaska: The Last of the Great American Rainforests, it is the first (and only) holiday calendar to feature explicit text and pictures of forests that are being threatened with industrial logging.

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Friday, April 16, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #248
Daze, #248: 
To justify their abusive clearcut, the loggers held that since this was Native corporation land, they were not constrained by the rules of practice established by the 1990 Tongass Timber Reform Act. Most notably ignored was the legal mandate that streams and rivers that hosted salmon runs were to have buffering trees left standing, therefore the cut would not come to the river’s edge. Needless to say, as you can see here, that rule was ignored completely. As a result, every salmon run on Afognak ceased to exist. The shortsightedness of the corporation board then played out in a VERY unexpected way. With no deer to hunt, and no fish to catch, the subsistence lifestyle of the village collapsed, and the entire village had to go on welfare in order to provide themselves with food made extremely expensive because it all had to be shipped in by ferry. The American Land Conservancy stepped in at this point with the intent to buy back the island, reforest it, return fish populations to the rivers, and reestablish ungulates that could be hunted for meat.

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Friday, April 9, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #247
Daze, #247: 
A Native village, and a Native corporation in Alaska are two very different things, and sometimes they can be quite at odds with each other. A Native village is an entire community, and very often they are living subsistence lifestyles, hunting, fishing, and gathering for their food resources. A Native corporation owns the village lands, and those elected to serve as the corporate board supposedly manage the lands for the economic benefit of the village. Sometimes the board and the village don’t agree on what provides the most economic benefit, and that became the history of Afognak Island. Not acknowledging the value of Afognak for subsistence use, the Native corporation “sold” the island so that the old growth timber could be logged for the dollar value. The loggers hammered the island, and the bears, deer, and salmon disappeared, which ended all subsistence value.

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Friday, April 2, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #246
Daze, #246: 
If you have been following this blog, you will recall that in 1993 I was invited to join the board of councillors for the American Land Conservancy (ALC). One of the first projects I helped them accomplish was the purchase of Limekiln Creek (CA). In 1996, they asked me to join in on another project, this one in Alaska. Off the western shore of the mainland, and opposite Katmai National Park and Preserve, sits a cluster of Islands, of which two of the largest are Kodiak, and Afognak. Kodiak is the largest, and although there are a number of citizens on the island of different races, Kodiak is predominantly a Native owned island. Afognak was entirely Native owned, and has no villages. It is, essentially, an island wilderness. Both islands are part of a substantial commercial fishing industry, which includes salmon that return to spawn in the many rivers that flow off the islands to the sea. Originally Afognak was lushly forested and hosted many of these rivers (above).

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Friday, March 26, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #245
Daze, #245: 
1996 also brought me one of my most cherished acknowledgements. In 1990, American Photo magazine included several of my images in a portfolio of photographers that the article dubbed as “Earth Angels: Concerned Photographers and the Environment.” Then, in 1994, that same magazine included me in a special feature, “The 100 Most Important People in Photography,” which not only listed photographers, but dealers, and curators, as well. It was the inclusion in the 1996 issue of Audubon magazine, however, that meant the most to me. This special issue was entitled, “The Century of Conservation,” and it included a list of 100 people they believed, “helped shape the conservation movement of the 20th Century.” There were only three photographers in that list of 100 names, Roger Tory Peterson, Ansel Adams, and myself. It was a great way to start off the year.

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Friday, March 19, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #244
Daze, #244: 
After going on press in Milan, Italy, at the end of 1995, in early 1996 Aperture released, Northwest Passage, my journal, and pictures, of my trip across the Arctic, as a guest aboard Bill Simon’s spectacular boat, “Itasca,” attempting to be the first crossing by a private yacht in a single season, which we accomplished. This publication was the first comprehensive look at a broad perspective of the Arctic landscape ever to be in print. It was also made more encompassing because I had access throughout the trip to a helicopter, and this book contained some of my first, and most important, aerial work. Aperture, and I, also created a national traveling exhibit of this work entitled, “Arctic.” In the book, my friend, Barry Lopez, had allowed me/Aperture to use brief quotes from his amazing book, Arctic Dreams, and I also used them in the exhibit. The exhibit differed from the book content, however, which is why we did not call the exhibit Northwest Passage. The pictures in the exhibit were from the publication, but instead of using my journal entries as text for the show, along with quotes from Barry, I put up text covering the latest science about climate change, and in 1994 that was controversial. Several museums refused to take the exhibit because I would not let them remove these texts, telling me that such “politics” had no place in art. Really? WTF! But Robert Mapplethorpe is okay?

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Friday, March 12, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #243
Daze, #243: 
Near the end of 1995, Steve Baron, press master for Aperture, and I, travel to Milan, Italy, to oversee the printing of my next Aperture book, Northwest Passage. Printing is a sleep depriving process, as you get called to press about every six hours until the printing run is complete, and that usually takes 3-4 days. To recover, Steve, and I, treated ourselves with a few additional days to enjoy Milan, and from a friend in the states, I had learned of a very unusual estate collection of photographs that I suggested to Steve we should view. He agreed, so I called the family of historic mountaineering photographer, Vittorio Sella, and ask if we might visit, and view their archives of his work. They invite us, so the next day we find ourselves in a beautiful, large home next to a river, being shown Sella’s prints by the familie's VERY attractive, young daughter. Sella photographed with a huge wet-plate view camera in the late 1800’s, dragging it into some of the most extreme mountain locations in the world. All of this was done at a time, when there was no such thing as mountaineering gear. I mean, they did not even have ice-axes, the used poles, and he, and his teams, climbed in the Himalayas, and the St. Elias Range in North America. Insane! The prints were masterpieces, and the family filed them in a tricked-out display room with chronological drawer storage, and slant display tables for viewing. Steve and I were blown away, and asked them if they would allow Aperture to publish the work, if we could talk CEO, Michael Hoffman, into it. They knew of Aperture’s publishing prestige, and were flattered, so they said they would love to have that happen. Now it would be up to Steve, and I, to convince Michael to do it, which we did.

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Friday, March 5, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #242
Daze, #242: 
The final accomplishment of 1995, was the publishing of the book, LOTUSLAND: A Photographic Odyssey. Nearly 2yrs. before, I had been invited to photograph the home, and eccentric gardens, of an equally eccentric woman, Ganna Walska. Located in Santa Barbara, Lotusland was a sprawling estate of many acres, which Ganna had woven into a very unusual mix of plantings. She had gardens dedicated to cacti, aloes, cycad trees, palms, cymbidiums, and bromeliads, often blending them together in surprising ways, such as putting white, hoary cacti around the base of redwood trees. She also had some massive epiphytes in baskets hanging from the oaks and eucalyptus. There was a Japanese garden, as well, with a sizable pond full of Koi. My favorite, however, and perhaps the oddest part of the landscaping, was the swimming pool which featured a waterfall tower composed of giant clam shells like those in the book’s cover picture, above. I was one of three photographers featured in the book, but the majority of their pictures were close-ups of various plants, and the preponderance of my images took a step back, incorporating a broader perspective of the various gardens.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2021
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Friday, February 26, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #241
Daze, #241: 
There are some other events in 1995 worth mentioning. I attended the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara in the early ‘70s to learn to work with a view camera, and to print color. Having acquired those skills, I left Brooks after the first year, passing on their M.S. degree, and preferred to pursue an M.F.A. at the newly opened California Institute of the Arts. By 1995, my photographic accomplishments were becoming well known, and Brooks invited me back to deliver a graduation address, after which they awarded me an honorary M.S. I was also given the Chevron-Times-Mirror Magazines Conservation Award, and besides the award, they wanted photo-ops of me with the representatives from my state, so they flew me to D.C., and we walked the halls of Congress. Above, we all stand with the lovely Barbara Boxer, and below I am rubbing shoulders with Henry Waxman. As you can see, I also took the opportunity to gift them copies of my recent Aperture book, The Legacy of Wildness. Lastly, my friend, Robert Redford, was producing a movie starring Michael Douglas, and Annette Bening, called The American President. Douglas played a president who lost his wife, and he began having an affair with Bening, who played a lobbyist for a big conservation group. Redford decided that her office set should be decorated with my imagery, which can be seen throughout the film. I am also one of the few non-union photographers to ever get a screen credit, but the union insisted I had to be the last name listed on the credit scroll.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2021
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Friday, February 19, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #240
Daze, #240: 
As you have seen in the last few posts, of the many photographs that I exhibited in the hallway leading to Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt’s office, the Alaska ones drew the most praise and attention, and well they should have. My 24yrs. of working in Alaska produced many of my best images, because Alaska is one of the most remarkable landscapes that I ever encountered. In the last post, I spoke of Camp Denali, a place I visited many times, and often with my kids. The bus ride from the park entrance to Camp Denali takes 7hrs., and I always choose to do it coming in, because the drive just keeps getting better and better. However, I found that on the way out, it often made me sad to be leaving, and so I adopted another tactic when the weather permitted. Camp Denali is quite close to Kantishna, a small community that has an airfield, and pilots there offer flight-seeing of Denali. They will also fly you out to the park entrance. On my last trip to the park, my son, and daughter were with me, and we were there at peak fall. On the day of departure the weather was perfect, so we opted to fly out. With no wind at all, the pilot was able to offer us an astounding tour of Denali summit and the surrounding glaciers, but I think the most beautiful part of the journey, was flying above the lower part of the park, aglow with an unmatched display of color. This is the Toklat River Valley. Yeow!

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2021
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Friday, February 12, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #239
Daze, #239: 
In the last post, I noted that after the Advocacy Arts Foundation Board meeting in Anchorage, our group of board members, and their families, split into two groups. The more adventurous spent 10-days floating a portion of the Noatak River in the far north, the rest spent those same days in the rustic comfort of Camp Denali. Camp Denali is my favorite destination in all of Alaska, and I have visited many times, often with my children. The log cabins you are assigned, are built on a high ridge that looks down on Wonder Lake, and offers a full view of the mountain on days when it is visible. Those days are less than 45-per-year, so viewing it clearly IS a big deal. Guests at Camp Denali wait in anticipation of a clear day, and with the summit not in site, there is a lot of speculation about how big it might be. Therefore, consider this, those, “foothills” you see in this image that have no snow on their lower slopes, are the Alaska Range with summits that are generally 10,000-12,000ft. In, and of themselves, they are significant, but they are dwarfed by Denali. Note also, coming into Wonder Lake from the left, are two people in a canoe. A most excellent day to go out and paddle about,..or to just sit on your cabin’s porch and watch.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2021
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Friday, February 5, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #238
Daze, #238: 
Another group of prints that I hung in Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt’s office hallway, were created during a river float and camping trip down the Noatak River. In 1996 I created the non-profit Advocacy Arts Foundation to help other pro-active photographers get their work published and exhibited, and during at least one board meeting during the year, the board would travel to a significant destination that was a unique habitat. Over the years we visited Galapagos, Costa Rica, several notable North American national parks, and Alaska. After our board meeting in Alaska, the attendees split into two groups, those that were less adventurous went to stay in Camp Denali, those that were more adventurous flew to the Native village of Kotzebue, from where we expected to stage a multi-raft river float down a portion of the Noatak River. The Noatak headwaters are in Gates of Arctic National Park and Preserve. Along its way to the sea, the river skirts the north perimeter of Kobuk Valley National Park, and eventually flows into the Chukchi Sea at Kotzebue. Part of the river is a national preserve, and I was hoping to see it made a national park. Although that has not yet happened, we had a spectacular late-fall float, at peak color, which will be in a future blog story. To get to the put-in, we had multiple air flights into the tiny village of Ambler, where we overnighted, then the next day we flew from Ambler to where the Noatak leaves the Gates of Arctic. It was 10-day camp and float, with lots of spectacular hiking. In the picture above, our group has summited to have a look at the “big picture” of a vast, beautiful, meandering river. For scale, look carefully at the image. Coming in from the left is a back channel that does not connect to the river before it. There is a patch of greenery at the edge of that back channel, next to which you can barely distinguish four yellow tents that mark our campsite. Talk about insignificant in the grand scale of things, we were!

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2021
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Friday, January 29, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #237
Daze, #237: 
This is a portion of Icy Bay, and I put prints from this camping and kayaking trip up in the Department of Interior hallway leading to Bruce Babbitt’s office, because Icy Bay was not part of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and I thought it should be. It lies at the foot of St. Elias’s west face, and is one of the most glacial active areas of retreat in all of North America. My wife at the time, Amy Holm, and I, joined a small group of willing adventurers in the late summer, and we were flown to the shore of Icy Bay from the town of Yakutat. From there, we assembled our kayaks and spent the next 10-days exploring the bay. It was one of my most memorable camping experiences in Alaska, in part because of the dynamic beauty of it all, and also in part, because it delivered one of my few near-death experiences. If you would like to learn the full story, and see the AMAZING pictures, click on this link. Icy Bay has still not been added to the park, sadly. I would be very interested to see it today, and compare how much retreat of the ice has occurred since I made my pictures. A considerable amount I am sure.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2021 
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Friday, January 22, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #236
Daze, #236: 
In 1995, I was still serving as Curator of Photography for the National Park Foundation (NPF), and working with them, and the Alaska Conservation Foundation (ACF), on whose board I now sat, I received an offer to perform as a guest curator to the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI). The Secretary of the Interior also sits on the board of the NPF, and at the time, that was Bruce Babbitt. During one of the NPF board meetings held in their offices, which were decorated with prints of mine from various projects related to the interior lands and parks, Babbitt commented to then Director of NPF, John Bryant, that he wished he had some images like mine to hang on the large, and barren, hallway walls in his DOI office. John always supported my work, and so he jumped at the chance to do me a favor, suggesting to Babbitt that the NPF could make a “loan” of select works for his offices, and Babbitt was thrilled. It was also agreed that designing and changing the installation periodically, would fall to me, so Babbitt decided to give me an official title as Guest Curator, to make my entry, exit, and presence, as trouble-free as possible, dragging framed prints in and out of the DOI building. I put up work from numerous projects. The exhibit of images from the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area encouraged greater appreciation of the park, which was upgraded to national park status in 2000. My work in Saguaro National Monument resulted in it being upgraded to national park status in 1994, so I installed some of those pictures as well. The most commented upon, however, were my photographs of Alaska. The one above features Mount St. Elias in the distance, and within the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park but the foreground is Icy Bay, which I hoped to see added to the park, stopping the destructive industrial logging, that was creeping ever closer, but as yet, Icy Bay has not been included, I am sad to say.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2021 
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Friday, January 15, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #235
Daze, #235: 
Having a helicopter aboard to shoot from on daily flightsees, was a godsend for my work, and provided many astounding images for the resulting Aperture book, and traveling exhibit, but near the end of our trip, one more unusual opportunity to work from the air occurred. The last village we stopped in before leaving Canada for Greenland, was Pond Inlet on Baffin Island. We had come through the Northwest Passage in record time, and had time to kill before heading home. By coincidence, while ashore in Pond Inlet, a mail/cargo plane landed, and Bill Simon got a brilliant new idea. He wanted the two pilots to fly us to the North Pole. They explained that was not possible because of the distance, but they did say they were doing a run to several towns and villages, including Eureka Base, one of the northernmost outposts in the Arctic, and they would take us along if we wanted to do that. It would be a two-day trip, and we would overnight at Eureka. We would also have some time to flightsee. Everybody wanted to do it, so we were off the next morning. Of course, I dragged my Pentax 645 camera along hoping to take pictures through whatever plane windows were available, but I was disappointed to discover that the plexiglass portals of this old cargo plane were badly scratched and hazy. In the early part of our flight, I was depressed by this, and the sling chairs we all sat in were very uncomfortable, so I got up to walk around and stretch. At the back of the plane, where the entry door was located, I discovered that the door featured a 20” circular, window of clear, unblemished glass. I had to stand to shoot, but the view was astonishing, and the clarity of the glass was as though it was not there at all. The 2-days of photographing through this window were tiring because I was standing for hours at a time, but because we were much higher in the air than when I was in the helicopter, the perspective of the landscape was more encompassing and vast. This was an unexpected blessing upon the work I was doing, and the results were phenomenal. If you would like to know more about this adventure, click here.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2021 
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Friday, January 8, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #234
Daze, #234: 
Part of Bill Simon’s strategy in getting through the Northwest Passage in a single season, was to aerially survey the ocean in front of our line of navigation, so that we could avoid being blocked, or trapped in the ice, always using available open leads to keep moving forward. To accomplish that, Bill hired a helicopter, and pilot, out of Yellowknife, Canada, who met us at the native village of Coppermine/Kugluktuk. By Canadian law, we also had a registered ice-pilot aboard to advise Captain Jouning, but regardless of the expertise, from deck level, you could only see so far in front of the boat, thus, for the most part, we would have no idea what lay ahead. Once the helicopter joined our jolly crew, it changed everything, especially for me. “Itasca” generally did about 50-miles a day, so once the copter was aboard, there would be a morning flight to survey those miles, find open leads, and the location of things to avoid would be radioed back to our boat, but after that, such scouting was no longer needed for the rest of the day. So, I convinced Bill that since he was paying for each and every day, I should go up with the pilot, flightsee, and take pictures, and Bill agreed. I had only once previously used a helicopter from which to shoot, at Sundance, during my Artist-In-Residence there, and it was VERY productive. In the tiny Arctic Cat helicopter we had aboard, my vantage was even better because, I could not only open a window, but I could shoot through the all-plexiglass bubble that surrounded the two front seats. We flew above the amazing Arctic landscape everyday, and the more the pilot, and I, worked together, the more that he would sense what I was shooting, and he would position the copter to afford me the best shot.

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Friday, January 1, 2021

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #233
Daze, #233:  
Bill Simon’s yacht, “Itasca,” was actually an elegantly converted super-tanker tug boat. He chose to build around that framework because the tug had a very shallow draft, and a lot of duplicate systems, such as the engines, so if one went down, there would be another to take its place. He also chose his staff wisely, and two of the deck crew with us on our voyage, were actually craftsmen that had helped to convert the tug boat. As a consequence, after the destructive pounding from the 20-30ft swell in Nome, once we pulled into the safety of the harbor at Teller, those two crewmen did not go back to bed, but instead went down into the workshop below deck, and began making repairs, replacing windows, and re-hanging doors. By the time Bill and his other guests arrived the next morning, most of the work was done, and you could hardly tell there had been so much damage. It would turn out that swell would be the only occurrence we would encounter of a stormy sea, the rest of the trip was often glassy, waveless motoring. We did encounter a passing cold front one evening, but it was only the sky that was stirred up, not the ocean. From Teller, we cruised north, around Wales, and Point Hope, through the Chukchi Sea, and on to Barrow (Utqiagvik), where we entered the Beaufort Sea. The crystal clear Arctic air, and the glassy, flat sea did offer us another most unusual phenomenon, however, mirages. A mirage occurs when light waves bounce off the atmosphere, and return to the surface of the planet. If that surface is reflective glassy water, they bounce again, and go back up into the atmosphere. When conditions are just right, there may be A LOT of bouncing. After Barrow we passed by the oil facilities at Prudhoe Bay. Many days, and many miles later, one morning this appeared on our horizon (above). The strange cloud line is NOT really there. It is part of the mirage. The rest of the mirage are some of the processing towers we saw back at Prudhoe Bay, only now they are hanging upside-down, between the non-existent cloud, and the surface of the Beaufort Sea. What?

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2021 
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Friday, December 25, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #232
Daze, #232:  
Now an invited guest that would join Bill Simon’s expedition, attempting to be the first private yacht to cross through the Northwest Passage in a single season, I planned on bringing both my Pentax 6x7, and my 645 cameras. Bill asked if I ever shot movie film before, and I had not, but said that I was sure I could, so he bought me a very nice small movie cam, as well. When the day of departure arrived, I flew from Anchorage to Nome loaded down with warm clothes, lots of cameras, and a ridiculous amount of film. I was told the trip might take two months, and I wanted to be sure that I would not run out of film. Nome is a very small seaside town with an equally small harbor, and a freight ship occupied the single pier mooring, so Bill’s yacht, “Itasca,” was anchored in deep water offshore. When I reported to the harbormaster, he radioed “Itasca,” and they sent a Zodiac in for me. After loading my various bags, I was told to put on my rain gear, and they tarped my luggage, explaining that there was a 20ft. swell running, and things might get wet. Outside the harbor, there were no breaking waves, but it was a HUGE swell, and a wild ride. “Itasca” was swinging and rolling wildly, so offloading was extremely tricky, and once aboard, I was glad that I had already applied my motion sickness meds. It was hard to get around onboard, and I did a lot of bouncing off the walls, but I got out my movie cam, and started filming right away. As the day wore on, the swell got even bigger, and although one more guest came aboard, by the time Bill and the others arrived, the captain deemed it unsafe to go in for them, so it was determined they would overnight in Nome, and drive to the protected port of Teller in the morning, where we would pick them up. That night, the swell continued to rage and grow, and the bed in my room paralleled the surge, so I could not lie in it without being thrown onto the floor. However, in the lounge on the upper deck, where the huge TV was located, there was a sofa that was better positioned, so I went there. This deck is about 30ft. off the water, nonetheless, around 1a.m., a gigantic wave struck the boat, breaking out the windows in the lounge, and on other levels, blowing drawers onto the floor, and tearing doors off their hinges. It was quite a dramatic beginning to the trip. Deciding not to risk anymore exposure at anchor, our captain pulled it up, and headed for Teller in the dark, where we finally found quiet water in the well protected harbor.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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Friday, December 18, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #231
Daze, #231:  
Of the many things that occurred in my life in 1994, perhaps the most significant began with an unexpected phone call. I was in my studio when the phone rang, and a voice identified himself as Bill Simon, a member of The Explorers Club in New York. He stated that he was going to attempt to be the first private yacht to cross the Northwest Passage in a single season, and wondered if I would like to join the expedition as their photographer? As a member of the club myself, I had similar offers for other trips, but all of them expected me to share the expenses of the journey. Surprisingly, when I asked Bill what it was going to cost me, he replied that I would be his guest, and he would cover any expenses I incurred getting to and from the starting and finishing points, as well. That gave me pause, so I responded by saying, “Excuse me, who is this again?” To which he replied, “Forgive me, this is William E. Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury, and you will be on my yacht with several of my friends, and other members of the club.” After a moment of stunned silence, of course, I said I would love to participate in the voyage. Bill then said there was one caveat, he wanted to be sure if he and his friends were stuck on a boat with me for a month or two, that I would be tolerable company, and he wanted to meet me face-to-face, and talk with me over a meal. I assured him that I understood, and would be happy to do that, so he said he was flying into San Francisco in a week, and he wanted to meet me there for a lunch, to which I also agreed. I was given an address in Palo Alto, so on the appointed day, I flew into SF, and drove south. I found myself on a street running through the Stanford campus, and the address took me to The Hoover Institution, a political think-tank, generally considered conservative. My hair was quite long, and I was dressed casually, suddenly feeling like I needed a coat and tie. When I entered the foyer, the receptionist looked up, and without missing a beat, said, “Oh, you must be Mr. Ketchum.” She then directed me up stairs, to an office where she said Mr. Simon and Mr. Shultz were waiting to have lunch with me. When I entered the office, Bill rose immediately to introduce himself, and shake my hand. Then, he introduced me to his “friend," former Secretary of State, and the Treasury, George Shultz. I was relieved to see they were both dressed casually as well, and we sat down to a paper-bag lunch of sandwiches and cookies, while they talked with me. After about half an hour, Bill stood up and said that he enjoyed our conversation, so I WOULD join his band of adventurers to cross the Arctic, Then, he apologized, explaining that he, and Secretary Shultz, had to leave for a trip to a two-week “event” at the Bohemian Grove, but I was welcome to stay and finish my lunch, so I did. Bill proved to be an interesting person to be around, and I would like to thank fellow guest, John Bockstoce, for this picture that captures Bill's enthusiastic personality.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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Friday, December 11, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #230
Daze, #230:  
As I would come to learn, Lotusland, was created by an eccentric European opera singer named Ganna Walska. Famous for sparing no expense on her wardrobes, she also spared no expense on creating her unusual garden. Married six times, it took four wealthy husbands to help pay for it all. The estate that hosts the garden is a 37-acre expanse in the foothills of Montecito, and although the gardens blend, one into the other, there are clearly areas of specific plantings and themes: orchids, bromeliads, cacti, cycads, epiphytes, aloes or every description that surround a swimming pool, adorned by waterfalls created from stacked giant clam shells, and a Japanese garden with a huge koi pond. Beneath towering palm trees, in the dappled light of day, one of my favorites niches was the “blue” garden (above). Mixing succulents, palms, and perennial flowers together, but all in shades of blue, the air literally glows blue in the filtered light. It becomes a truly saturated blue in the overcast of a rainy day. To embellish it further, blue stones mark the path through it, and broken blue slag glass from melted coke bottles decorate the sides of the path. I did not garden much, myself, at the time, but was inspired by Lotusland to do so, and my two home gardens incorporate not only an unusual mixing of plants, but I, too, have blue slag glass chunks, and a large number of epiphytes in hanging baskets. In fact, many of my epiphytes were grown from cuttings given me during this Lotusland project. Ganna’s craziness is being channeled in my backyard.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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Friday, December 4, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #229
Daze, #229:  
Also in 1994, I received an interesting phone call from a “garden” in Santa Barbara. It seems an eccentric women named Ganna Walska, created a spectacular garden in the foothills of Montecito, and it was about to open to the public after numerous years of restoration. To celebrate the opening, and attract a public audience, the staff decided to create a book, and invited three photographers to participate, of which I was one. I spent many years in Santa Barbara, and even attended the Brooks Institute of Photography, so I was amazed that I had never heard of Lotusland, thus I was very happy to be one of those selected, and eager to see the estate. I knew the location, and had driven by it many times, but like so many of the large properties in the area, you cannot really see what is inside the walls, and behind the screen of trees. On my first visit, as I drove through the gates, and up the driveway to the original house, now serving as office spaces for the staff, I was astounded. The gardens on either side of the driveway were unlike any I had ever seen, mixing some very surprising plantings together (cacti beneath Redwood trees), and the house was painted a saturated pink, fronted by one of the largest, and most striking, cactus gardens you could imagine. This looked like it was going to be a VERY fun project on which to work.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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Friday, November 27, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #228
Daze, #228:  
Laurance Rockefeller was my first big sale, when he discovered, and purchased, my portfolio, “Winters: 1970-1980”, after attending my exhibit in New York at Nikon House. David Rockefeller probably knew me through those images, and so he attended one of my exhibits at Aperture, some years later, buying a print from my Northwest Passage adventure related to my newly published Aperture book of the same name. I joined the Board of Trustees of the Alaska Conservation Foundation (ALC) in 1994, and soon thereafter, David joined the board as well. We became friends over the next 9yrs. of service to the board because we both loved Alaska, and adventuring there. We operated by the same M.O. - we used the 3-day board meetings as our excuse for visiting the state, but we usually stayed 2-3 additional weeks, to wander around somewhere other than Anchorage. When David finally left the ALC board at the end of his term, ALC hosted a lovely party for him at one of New York’s fancier hotels,..it may have been the Waldorf Astoria. The absolute location details are a little sketchy because it was quite a night, and quite a party. I clearly drank too much, but was sober enough for this photo-op with David, when ALC gave him one of my most popular prints from my Tongass work as a going-away gift. (I am not sure why my face looks like I am storing nuts in my cheeks, maybe it is just the strobe light,..Hahaha!). After this ceremony, the luster of being David’s friend rubbed off on me, and I was accosted by two gorgeous 40-somethings, decked out to the nines in elegant clothes, who insisted I should spend the rest of the evening misbehaving with both of them,..so I did. Thank you, David!

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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Friday, November 20, 2020


The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #227
Daze, #227:  
Having worked to protect the Tongass rainforest from industrial logging for nearly 10yrs., my efforts attracted the attention of the Alaska Conservation Foundation (ACF), at the time the largest environmental NGO in the state, and they invited me onto their board. ACF was very sensitive to their image as an “Alaskan” NGO, so the board had few “outsiders,” and most were distinguished residents, among whom I found two good friends, David Rockefeller, a fellow outsider, and Celia Hunter, one of the most admired and respected conservationist living in the state. For those of you who have followed my blogs, you will recall that I first met Celia, while floating the Tatshenshini River on a trip organized by The Nature Conservancy to prevent the building of a mine in the river corridor. If you have not seen that blog, click here. Of the numerous things Celia had done in her life, one was to found Camp Denali, a unique, rustic lodge style accommodation inside Denali National Park, and one that both my children and I would visit many times.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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Friday, November 13, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #226
Daze, #226:  
The exhibit I assembled, “The Tongass: Alaska’s Magnificent Rainforest” was due to Premier on Earth Day at the National Museum of Natural History. It was a large show, so they had it installed in a huge hall on the 2nd floor, but the museum itself is vast, and after installation, the exhibit still seemed “small.” Conferring with SITES, I asked if we could add items for this show, that would not be part of the traveling show, but would make the premier venue unique and news-notable, to which they agreed. From the basement of the museum, we retrieved several taxidermy eagles, and an entire orca, all of which we hung from the ceiling. We then borrowed some live Sitka spruce and other indigenous plants from the National Arboretum. Lastly, my friends at Patagonia loaned us a “camp scene” with a tent, sleeping bags, and a stove. Of course, we had to have a kayak, as well. The venue looked amazing with all of these things in place, and knew it would create substantive attendance, especially among school children. Then, two days before the opening, SITES received a lengthy letter from Senator Murkowski’s office, telling us to re-write several of the text panels, and remove some of the pictures. SITES was intimidated, as their funding was threatened, but I knew exactly what to do, and I contacted writers working at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, none of whom believed it was appropriate to bully the arts, by threatening to defund SITES. All three papers rolled out critical stories the next day, calling out this bad Senatorial behavior. On Earth Day, the exhibit opened untouched, and with all the pictures included. The 800 people that attended enjoyed a spectacular array of food and drink in The Great Hall, where a huge African Elephant stood in the center on a pedestal, around which the cocktails were served. SITES went on to tour the exhibit to 19 locations over the next 6yrs., and project a viewing audience of over 10-million people. Several months after the premier at the museum, I was offered a one-man show, with lecture, at the National Academy of Sciences, one of DC’s most prestigious venues, and that night I spoke to a “standing-room-only” audience, of politicians, distinguished scientists, and acclaimed biologists.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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Friday, November 6, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #225
Daze, #225:  
In 1994, it was clear to me the incoming "Gingrich Congress” hoped to dismantle the Tongass Timber Reform Act signed into law four years earlier. So, I had a plan to put the Tongass back in public view. Working with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), who previously circulated my “SEAFARM: The Story of Aquaculture” exhibit, and built the “American Photographers and the National Parks” exhibit, I assembled an exhibit about the Tongass rainforest. Given that my Aperture book, The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rainforest, had assisted the passing of the legislation, I knew if the exhibit was entirely based on my work, the two pro-logging Alaskan Senators, Ted Stevens, and Frank Murkowski, would prohibit SITES from working with me. Therefore, I adopted a stealth plan. I entitled the exhibit, “The Tongass:  Alaska’s Magnificent Rainforest,” and I brought in the work of a half dozen other photographers that included both outsiders, like myself, and Art Wolfe, as well as several that lived in the state. I also wanted to show “the whole picture” of Southeast, so that it would give me the excuse to include pictures of the clearcuts, thus some images were of commercial fishing, and the cruise ships, and there was a good deal of wildlife, as well. It was a large exhibit with a lot of images, and working through SITES, we got the premier of it booked to open at the National Museum of Natural History on Earth Day.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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Friday, October 30, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #224
Daze, #224:  
In the progression of this blog, we have just finished the many events of 1993, and now I am going to backtrack a little. My drafting of this blog is drawn from the timeline of my career summary, which was created for the press and awards ceremonies. It IS a career summary of my many books and projects, and NOT an academic resume about me as an artist. As a consequence, only a few of my most important shows are included in it, and therefore I missed something of significance that occurred in 1987. Min Shirota was the son of a very wealthy Japanese family that lived in Tokyo. However, they sent Min to college at UC Berkley, and while there he developed a love of photography, and the photography scene in California. When he finished his education, he returned to Tokyo, where he opened a portrait studio, with an exhibit gallery on a second floor. He then began bringing in large one-man shows of California photographers, and publishing full catalogs (above) to go with them. I was one of those chosen, and Gallery Min made me VERY visible in Tokyo. While visiting for the exhibit, I also made a point of introducing myself to Pentax Japan, whose American subsidiary had been loaning me my Pentax 6x7 camera, and an array of lenses. Apparently, no one had ever come to Tokyo to do that before, and the President of the company, was quite impressed. He had risen through the ranks of Pentax by working in their European market, so he spoke modest German, and Italian, and then he spent numerous years in the states, so he had excellent English. Now in Japan, he enjoyed using his English to talk with me, and frequently took me to dinners or lunches. Min was impressed by his attention to me, and Pentax was as well, so much so that in 1988, they decided to sponsor me, dedicating their entire worldwide, promotional calendar to my work (200,000 copies). They also put up two huge exhibits of my images at the Pentax Forum Galleries in Tokyo and Osaka. As I previously noted in this blog, in 1989, I participated in the Basel Art Faire, where I met Hartmut Swarzkopf a lawyer from Heildeberg, who ran HS Kunst Gallery to satisfy his love of art. Harmut invited me to exhibit there, and my visibility from that show increased my presence in Europe. In 1991, I exhibited in Dusseldorf at Gallerie Dietmar Lohrl. Then, in 1992, The America House in Heidleberg hosted an exhibit. Again, I previously noted, in 1992, I was given a retrospective at the Musue Nacional de Belas Artes, in Rio de Janeiro. That show proved VERY popular, so the Brazilian Government toured it further, to the Museu da Nacional Philatelic in Brasilia, and the Museu da Imagem e do Som in Sao Paulo. At the end of 1992, Pentax installed a second large exhibit of my work for the Christmas holidays at the Pentax Forum Galleries in Tokyo and Osaka. Thank you for letting me backtrack a bit, it better defines the growth of my international exposure.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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Friday, October 30, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #224
Daze, #224:  
In the progression of this blog, we have just finished the many events of 1993, and now I am going to backtrack a little. My drafting of this blog is drawn from the timeline of my career summary, which was created for the press and awards ceremonies. It IS a career summary of my many books and projects, and NOT an academic resume about me as an artist. As a consequence, only a few of my most important shows are included in it, and therefore I missed something of significance that occurred in 1987. Min Shirota was the son of a very wealthy Japanese family that lived in Tokyo. However, they sent Min to college at UC Berkley, and while there he developed a love of photography, and the photography scene in California. When he finished his education, he returned to Tokyo, where he opened a portrait studio, with an exhibit gallery on a second floor. He then began bringing in large one-man shows of California photographers, and publishing full catalogs (above) to go with them. I was one of those chosen, and Gallery Min made me VERY visible in Tokyo. While visiting for the exhibit, I also made a point of introducing myself to Pentax Japan, whose American subsidiary had been loaning me my Pentax 6x7 camera, and an array of lenses. Apparently, no one had ever come to Tokyo to do that before, and the President of the company, was quite impressed. He had risen through the ranks of Pentax by working in their European market, so he spoke modest German, and Italian, and then he spent numerous years in the states, so he had excellent English. Now in Japan, he enjoyed using his English to talk with me, and frequently took me to dinners or lunches. Min was impressed by his attention to me, and Pentax was as well, so much so that in 1988, they decided to sponsor me, dedicating their entire worldwide, promotional calendar to my work (200,000 copies). They also put up two huge exhibits of my images at the Pentax Forum Galleries in Tokyo and Osaka. As I previously noted in this blog, in 1989, I participated in the Basel Art Faire, where I met Hartmut Swarzkopf a lawyer from Heildeberg, who ran HS Kunst Gallery to satisfy his love of art. Harmut invited me to exhibit there, and my visibility from that show increased my presence in Europe. In 1991, I exhibited in Dusseldorf at Gallerie Dietmar Lohrl. Then, in 1992, The America House in Heidleberg hosted an exhibit. Again, I previously noted, in 1992, I was given a retrospective at the Musue Nacional de Belas Artes, in Rio de Janeiro. That show proved VERY popular, so the Brazilian Government toured it further, to the Museu da Nacional Philatelic in Brasilia, and the Museu da Imagem e do Som in Sao Paulo. At the end of 1992, Pentax installed a second large exhibit of my work for the Christmas holidays at the Pentax Forum Galleries in Tokyo and Osaka. Thank you for letting me backtrack a bit, it better defines the growth of my international exposure.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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Friday, October 23, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #223
Daze, #223:  
When I first began camping at Limekiln Creek in Big Sur, the property was reportedly owned by Elizabeth Taylor’s son, who allowed people to be there. Unfortunately, a few years later, it was sold to a local rancher, who closed it to the public. After that, you had to sneak in and camp up into one of the forks, so as not to be discovered. Three friends and I did so one weekend, and made the mistake of coming down to the beach to see the sunset. Standing on the bridge above us, the rancher fired his shotgun to get our attention, and threw us off the property. We drove our car to the US Forest Service campground at Kirk Creek, where we parked, and then we walked back to Limekiln in the dark, sneaking back to our camp to recover our gear, and spend the night. When we returned to our car the next morning, the rancher had recognized it, and flattened all four tires. Then in 1984, he decided to log the west fork. That is when Harriet Burgess, and the American Land Conservancy took an interest in preventing that from happening. In my meeting with Harriet, she asked if I wanted to photograph the canyons so she could show the Packard Foundation pictures, as she hoped they would provide the conservancy a funding grant to purchase the property. I told Harriet that I already had many pictures of Limekiln, which got her really excited, so she had me print five of them, and immediately took them to the foundation. The foundation granted the conservancy the needed funds, so we bought the entirety of the canyon complex. It was reopened for camping and managed for some years by the Esalen Institute, then in 1995, it was transferred to the California state park system, where it remains today. This proved to be a very positive way for me to introduce myself the board of the conservancy, upon which I continued to serve through 2007.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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Friday, October 16, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #222
Daze, #222:  
I discovered Limekiln Creek in Big Sur in 1967, while driving back to Los Angeles from the Monterey Pop Festival. I camped there for one night, but then returned many times in the ensuing years. In 1887, the Rockland Lime and Lumber Company built four limekilns well up into the west fork of the creek to extract lime from a limestone scree deposit nearby. To stoke the fires of the limekilns, the surrounding redwoods were logged. The operation ended in 1890, when the lime deposit petered out, and most of the trees were gone. The company abandoned the kilns, which are still there to this day. A second growth of redwoods has now been reestablished. The canyon complex consists of 711-acres, and two streams, all flowing from headwaters to the ocean. The west fork and east fork of Limekiln Creek, join with Hare Canyon Creek, and all are paralleled by trails, that often incorporate some unusual connections such as fallen trees to bridge the streams. The east fork is the shortest in length, but ends at a dramatic 100ft. falls with a big pool (above) where quite a bit of naked swimming took place in the 60’s. In my numerous camping trips to Limekiln, I was also learning to photograph, and the canyon offered some very difficult lighting to master, and a chaotic thrash of trees and streams that challenged composition. Much of my work today reflects the lessons that I learned from photographing there. It was now surprising to me that my new colleague, Harriet Burgess, had not only invited me on to the prestigious board of the American Land Conservancy, but she asked if I knew about Limekiln, and would I like to help protect it from being logged again. Of course, I was more than interested.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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Friday, October 9, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #221
Daze, #221:  
Also in 1993, I was visited at my LA home/studio by a remarkable woman named Harriet Burgess. For awhile, Harriet served as the senior vice-president of the Trust for Public Land. It was there she honed the skills of negotiating the protection of habitats by using “conservation easements,- the practice of buying out a landowner, and ultimately transferring the purchased land to the public, as protected property. On Earth Day in 1990, Harriet left the Trust, and created her own group, which she called the American Land Conservancy. She then began selecting some extraordinary individuals to be on her board. They included, David Brower , founder of the Sierra Club; Martin Litton, a board member of the Sierra Club, a lifelong conservationist, and a person often referred to as the “grandfather of the Colorado River,” which he ran many times; Bruce Babbitt, who served as head of the League of Conservation Voters, and in 1993, became Secretary of the Interior for Bill Clinton’s administration; Stewart Udall, who served as Congressman from Arizona, and Secretary of the Interior, under presidents, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson; Pete McCloskey, who served as a Congressman from California, and was a co-author of the Endangered Species Act; and lastly, Galen Rowell, a famous mountaineer, and widely published photographer. She had come to visit me, to ask me to join this board as well. At first I was speechless, but of course I said, yes! Then I asked about how I might contribute. Harriet responded by saying that she hoped I would take some pictures for various projects on which they were working. These included protecting Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles, AND the hopeful purchase of Limekiln Creek in Big Sur from the jackass rancher that had owned it for many years and was considering logging the Redwoods in the canyon. What? Limekiln Creek? Before the year ended, I was also given the UCLA Alumni Award for Excellence in Professional Achievement. It was a most interesting 365 days!

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Friday, October 2, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #220
Daze, #220:  
The fourth book in 1993, of which I was part, involved numerous photographers, and their images covered the entire US, and Alaska. CLEARCUT: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry, was conceived by the founder of North Face, Doug Tompkins, and several of his colleagues. Working with the volunteer, pro-conservation, flying alliance, Lighthawk, the creators hired photographers from across the country, to fly above, and photograph, specific forests that had been industrially logged. Because of the work that I had done in the Tongass, they asked me to shoot there, which I was glad to do, and happy to be invited to participate. I met a great pilot in Ketchikan, and we flew for several hours over Prince of Wales, and Baranof Islands. It was a great shoot, and, unfortunately for the Tongass, there were more than enough sites to depict. Ultimately the editors chose some vicious cuts from Baranof. The book was published by Earth Island Press in an oversized design with hundreds of pages - a mega-publication to say the least. The collaborators that created it, then mailed it to a very specific audience, politicians and forestry administrators, and everyone who was anyone in the media, all at their expense. I don’t think the book was ever offered for sale. Needless to say, it created a firestorm when the copies were received, and it became a VERY controversial project of which I was proud to have been a part.

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Friday, September 25, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #219
Daze, #219:  
Presidio Gateways would be my third book published in 1993. This project was given to me by Jim Harvey, at the time, CEO of Transamerica. He wanted to create it to be a gift that would be handed out at the transfer of that property from the Department of Defense to the Department of the Interior, incorporating the grounds into the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA), and he wanted it to honor the HISTORY of the Presidio. Jim gave me control of the project, so to expand the contemporary photographic scope of the pictures, I brought in peer photographers, Linda Butler, Mary Swisher, Lyle Gomes, and Brenda Tharp. Linda, Mary, and Lyle worked in B&W, Brenda, and I, contributed color. Linda concentrated her work on historical artifacts, the rest of us shot the Presidio property, and architecture. In addition, from the military archive, I culled an astounding assortment of historical pictures, and a spectacular array of vintage, hand-colored, picture postcards. I assembled a big edit of these images, and since Aperture had done four of my books, and another about the immigrant entry point on the East Coast, Ellis Island, I took the project to Michael Hoffman, the Director of Aperture Foundation, pointing out that the Presidio served as the West Coast entry point, and would be complimentary to the Ellis Island publication. Aperture not only wanted to print the proposed book, but envisioned it a money-maker, and agreed to pay for it to be printed, as well. Unfortunately for us all, Jim Harvey paid all the photographers by donating the money to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area Association, a non-profit. It was there, one of their jackass administrators decided to “get involved.” He vociferously objected to my having been given control of the project, and so he “stepped in.” Although we all got paid, he refused to work with Aperture, and insisted the book be printed by the “hometown publisher,” Chronicle Books, even though they were financially shaky, and had nowhere near the skilled design teams that worked for Aperture. He also chose to eliminate almost all of the historic, hand-colored pictures, saying they made the book look “dated.” He cut the picture selection by 1/3 as well. When finally published, the book was decent enough to serve the give-away event, but the childish design left it without much of a national market, AND with the give-away date approaching, and the book still on-press, Chronicle informed the GGNRA association that they would need a $20,000 grant to finish the publication. When a know-it-all, actually knows NOTHING, good things are ruined. I was very sad about the outcome.

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Friday, September 18, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #218
Daze, #218:  
In late 1992, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Cornell University organized a 20-year retrospective of my work, that was displayed at the museum for several months. Following the exhibit there, it was to travel to Palm Beach, FL where it would be displayed at The Society of the Four Arts. As a consequence, Aperture decided to publish a monograph to accompany that exhibit. The Legacy of Wildness: The Photographs of Robert Glenn Ketchum, spanned numerous bodies of my work, and is the only time images from my series, “Stoned Immaculate,” ever appeared in print. As usual, Michael Hoffman, the President of Aperture, and I, had some back-and-forth about the book, this time over the title. He wanted it to be “The Legacy of Wilderness” NOT “Wildness,” which he thought was referencing my behavior. So, I had to point out there were NO pictures of wilderness in the edit, and that “Wildness,” was a reference to Eliot Porter’s book, In Wildness Is The Preservation Of The World.

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Friday, September 11, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #217
Daze, #217:  
As a result of British Columbia’s Premier, Mike Harcourt’s withdrawing the permit for the Geddes mine from the Tatshenshini River corridor, influenced by his friend, American Senator, Al Gore, then nominating it for UNESCO World Biosphere status, the largest, contiguous, designated-by-law wilderness on the planet, was created. There was celebration to be had by all of those involved, and they turned to me to help with that. As I was the first to break the story in a 1991 issue of LIFE magazine, I was asked to print one of the images from the story, which was then gifted to both Gore, and Harcourt. Above is, “Where the River is Wide, and the Log Islands Look Like Sticks,” one of my most dramatic images from that shoot. It was a great morning to awake in camp on one in one of the most beautiful river corridors in the world.

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 Friday, September 4, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #216
Daze, #216:  
In 1993, my previous story about the Geddes mine development on the Tatshenshini River, and the subsequent national magazine coverage, set off a firestorm of public, and political, interest. Senator Al Gore took up the cause to protect the river in the US, and then he leaned on his friend, Mike Harcourt, Premier to the Canadian province of British Columbia, to cancel the mine’s permit. As a consequence, a large, and significant group of writers, and photographers, got together to produce a Westcliffe book, Tatshenshini River Wild, which had a unusual life. While it was still “on-press,” Premier Harcourt canceled the mine’s permit, so those involved in the publication, added a page to the book with his letter announcing the decision. The book became a eulogy, rather than a battle weapon. Harcourt went on to propose the river corridor be placed in a UNESCO World Biosphere status, which it was. That act linked Canada’s Kluane Provincial Park, with two massive American National Parks, Glacier Bay, and Wrangell-St.Elias, and created the largest, contiguous, designated-by-law, wilderness area on the planet.

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 Friday, August 28, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #215
Daze, #215:  The Rancho San Carlos property grazed cattle before the development began, and cows were everywhere during the time of my commission. As I noted in a post two weeks ago, the Rancho is a high fire danger zone, because it is hot and dry in the summer, and much of the terrain hosts chaparral and chamise (whose common name is greasewood - which does not sound good). Further the closest fire station is 1/2-hour away (at least). After properties began to be built upon, and homeowners moved in, it was a community decision to get rid of the cattle. What they discovered was, that without the cattle grazing, the flammable vegetation came back with a vengeance, and made conditions far more dangerous, so they brought the cattle back. Graze on!

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 Friday, August 21, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #214
Daze, #214:  
On the road in to the San Carlos Rancho complex, you pass through an expansive grove of huge, old oaks that are quite impressive. A lot of them are bedraped with Usnea, more commonly know as “Old Man's Beard.” It is a unique plant because it is a lichen that forms from the symbiosis of a fungus, and an algae. Usnea is VERY sensitive to air pollution, and is a bioindicator of a region where the air is very clean. The acid from it is also a medicinal herb, and is especially effective for sore throats and pneumonia. Importantly for me as a photographer, as the late evening light begins to turn the canyons dark, but still sets the draping Usnea aglow, it is beautiful to behold, and a great way to end the day before heading back to the Rancho for another killer dinner, with nice people, and A LOT of great wine.

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 Friday, August 14, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #213
Daze, #213:  
In the last post, I was listing the diversity of the Rancho San Carlos habitats, and I said some of them are Big Sur-like. This is in bushwhacking in Robinson Canyon, and could easily be Big Sur. There are no redwoods here, but there are in other drainages on the property. When the development was finally realized and approved, of the 20,000 acres that made up the Oppenheimer ranch, 2,000-acres permitted private ranchettes, and the remaning 18,000-acres became the Santa Lucia Preserve, publicly accessible, but not developable. I am sure this is a great place to live and recreate, the only drawback, is as it ever was, you are a LONG way from commercial support areas, and you have a VERY high fire danger to deal with. It was a privilege for me to watch all of this unfold, so thank you Tom and Alayna Gray for inviting me to participate.

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 Friday, August 7, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #212
Daze, #212:  
The wild property of Rancho San Carlos is stunningly beautiful, native California. Many of the rolling hillsides host groves of oak trees, under which a profusion of wildflowers bloom. There are numerous streams, and in some of those canyons, there are big sycamores, and choking undergrowth, plush with poison oak (last post), and so dense, not even the cattle will forge into them. Others canyons are reminiscent of Big Sur, and they are appointed with stately redwoods and lush fern gardens. An amazingly diverse habitat, on the south-facing slopes that take the serious heat of summer, there are cactus gardens, and yucca clusters, that also put on incredible blooming displays when the days warm up. I visit many times (who wouldn’t), learn all the nuances of the properties varied habitats, revel in the luxury of the rancho accommodations, and the graciousness of my hosts, Tom and Alayna Gray. Gee! Let’s see how this works - eat, drink, socialize, and drive around all day looking for pictures that capture the essence of it. This a pretty good job I have - LOL!

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 Friday, July 31, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #211
Daze, #211:  
Tom and Alayna Gray are not only the resident developers of Ranch San Carlos, they are also great hosts. The property is a lengthy drive from the available facilities of the Carmel Valley, so instead of having me stay in a hotel, and eat at restaurants there, part of my commission is to be their guest at the sprawling rancho complex, a beautiful Spanish-style home in the middle of the property. The home is fully staffed with housekeepers and a chef, and because there are many bedrooms, people considering buying into the development also stay there when they visit, all of us sitting at fabulous meals together, and drinking A LOT of great wine. Tom and Alayna spare no expense in making potential buyers enjoy their stay, so they want to build in this emerging community. Alayna will often take guests on horseback rides, and Tom drives them around in a jeep, as many of the roads are still dirt. I am allowed the use of a 4-wheel drive as well, but the most fun is to travel by golf cart, which has also been furnished for me. Cattle are grazed all over the acreage, and there are quite a lot of wild animals, including large populations of turkeys, and mountain lions.

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 Friday, July 24, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #210
Daze, #210:  
It is also in 1992 that I receive another commission to work on a spectacular piece of property, and am introduced to two very fun people. Above the Carmel Valley, past the Quail Lodge and golf course, gates open to a road that rises rather steeply into rolling chaparral-covered hills, and then surprisingly levels off on a plateau studded with grand oaks, and carved redwood canyons. This 20,000 acre parcel was originally owned by the Oppenheimer family, who built themselves a beautiful rancho and a large stable complex, where they kept polo ponies. (They would often play polo with the Hearst family at San Simeon.) My commission is part of the new future of this property, as it has been purchased by a large real estate company in San Francisco, and they want to develop it as Ranch San Carlos. Their initial vision is to carve it into numerous “ranchettes,” build a golf course, and the course and stable would become common property for all the homeowners. This plan will morph constantly, because Monterey county and Carmel have great opposition to the development, but the principle relators managing the development, Tom and Alayna Gray, are smart, and diligent, reconfiguring the plan to suit each new obstacle.

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 Friday, July 17, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #209
Daze, #209:  
In 1992, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University organizes of 20yr. retrospective of my work, which also travels to the Society of Four Arts in Palm Beach (FL). In Los Angeles, the Huntington Museum, Library, and Botanical Gardens, organizes a slightly smaller retrospective as well, and I become the first “living” artist to be exhibited there. Additionally, they acquire 150 of my prints for the permanent collection. Merry Foresta, a photography curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum includes several of my prints in the traveling exhibit, “Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography,” which travels widely to national museums, accompanied by a complete catalogue (above). Further, 1992 marks the year the UNCED “Earth Summit” conference is held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and I am invited by the American Ambassador to Brazil, to have a retrospective exhibit at the prestigious National Museum of Fine Arts (Yes, the one that suffered the terrible fire several years ago.) It is the first photography exhibit ever installed there. In conjunction with the UNCED conference, Domberg Editions, one of the premier fine art publishers in Europe, produces a portfolio a numerous artists that is given to all the heads-of-state that attend the conference. I am the only photographer included in the portfolio, and they choose one of my Tongass prints (post 157). Lastly, my work on the Tatshenshini River, first published in LIFE magazine (post 205), floods into the national media, and I have additional images published in Time, Newsweek, Audubon magazines, and many others.

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 Friday, July 10, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #208
Daze, #208:  
On the bayside of the Presidio property, exists one of the public’s most loved places to picnic and stroll, Chrissy Field. West of Chrissy Field, following the shoreline will lead you beneath the southern “toe” of the Golden Bridge to another historic structure, Fort Point. Finished in 1861, Fort Point was constructed to prevent southern gunships from entering the San Francisco Bay during the Civil War. None ever came, however. The fort is an amazing piece of architecture, well worth visiting, and if there is a swell running, some great surfing can be seen, as the point forms a well shaped wave that wraps into the bay. Most spectacularly the POV of the Golden Gate Bridge (above) really allows you to grasp the monumentality of that structure. What a view!

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 Friday, July 3, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #207
Daze, #207:  
The Presidio of San Francisco has been a military post for more than 150yrs. The expansive grounds were originally sand dunes, west of the city, upon which the military encamped with tents. It was cold and windy because it was exposed to the onshore flow from the coast, so the military planted those trees you saw in the last post, as a windbreak. When you are in the Presidio forest, you will note that the trees were planted in rows on a perfect grid, and as you walk through them, they all line up. The Presidio also hosts one of the most distinguished cemeteries outside of Arlington (VA). A reading of the headstones is a scroll through family names that helped to build the city and our state. Being a military post over so many decades, the Presidio has five different periods of historic architecture preserved in complete groupings at different post and home/barrack sites. In the transfer from the Department of Defense to the Department of the Interior, those historic buildings will house new companies and foundations of various kinds, and they may be remodeled inside, but it is a mandate of the new leases that the architecture must be preserved. To the western shore of the reserve, there is also the iconic Baker’s Beach, bordering the Pacific.

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 Friday, June 26, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #206
Daze, #206:  
When I was serving as Curator of Photography for the National Park Foundation, and creating the book and traveling exhibit, American Photographers and the National Parks (posts #116-117), one of the NPF board members was Jim Harvey, CEO of Transamerica. Ultimately, Transamerica underwrote the cost of the book and exhibit, which were a HUGE success, and Jim and I became good friends, as he appreciated my management of such a large, complex project. Transamerica’s home office is in San Francisco, and Jim was also very involved with projects within the city. In 1991, remembering my successful NPF project management, Jim reached out to me once again to organize, and create pictures for a proposed book about the Presidio of San Francisco. The Presidio is a military base with a considerable history, and in the near future the property and all the structures therein, are going to be transferred from the Department of Defense to the Department of the Interior, and will be incorporated into Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the creation of which, Jim has been very involved. There is to be a ceremony at the time of transfer that will be hosted by Transamerica, and Senator Al Gore will speak. Jim would like me to create this book to commemorate the historical, and present day, Presidio, which Senator Gore would then gift to the audience at the ceremony.

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 Friday, June 19, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #205
Daze, #205:  
In 1990, and posts #196-199, I tell of being invited to float the Tatshenshini River in hopes of getting images published in the American press, that might dissuade the building of an open-pit mine adjacent the river, which could potentially damage the vast watershed. The trip was a wonderful wilderness experience, and the pictures amounted to a very successful shoot. The complete story of my adventures on the TaT can be found here. Back in my studio, and realizing there were a lot of great images, I gave some thought to where they might be published, and would be seen by the largest possible audience. LIFE magazine immediately came to mind, as it, and National Geographic, were two of the most widely read magazines in the world. Moreover, I had recently been published in LIFE’s special edition, “The World’s Best Photographs: 1980-1990,” and through that, had become friendly with an editor there, so I sent the TaT pictures to her, and struck gold. She loved the pictures, and thought the story important, so in 1991, the first images to appear in the American press regarding the mine and the river, appeared as a 4-page spread in LIFE, entitled “Lost Horizons,” with the image from post #198 opening as a double-page layout.

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 Friday, June 12, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #204
Daze, #204:  
In 1991, after my photo-op, meet-and-greet, with President Bush and his wife, Barbara (last post), acknowledging the impact my Aperture book, The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest had on the passage of the Tongass Timber Reform Act, I board a plane for Sweden where I am being awarded the United Nations Global 500 Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award. This award is also because of the Aperture book. The presentation is done in the Nobel Hall of Stockholm, and the certificate and pin are bestowed upon me by the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustav. After the award ceremony, the awardees and invited guests sit down to an elaborate, and elegant, dinner featuring gold flatware, spectacular china plates, scrumptous food, and a bit of bubbly libation. As it turns out, another photographer is also being awarded for his incredible photography, particularly his work with wolves in Northern Minnesota. We have not met previously, but I know of Jim Brandenburg's images through the pages of National Geographic magazine, and find him to be a very funny guy to hang out with. In the picture above, we have just left the banquet, and we are displaying the certificate and pin we have each been awarded. (You might also note my/our inebriated red eyes). A good time is had by all, and then there is the late evening light, and the beautiful Swedish women of Stockholm, to enjoy for the rest of the night.

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 Friday, June 5, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #203
Daze, #203:  
From 1985 to 1990, my work in the Tongass rainforest draws a lot of attention to the US Forest Service’s timber “management” policies, and NOT in a flattering way. After two years in the field, Aperture published, The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest, which, with the help of the Natural Resources Defense Council is handed out to Congress. In the ensuing years, I work with the office of Senator William Proxmire to help further the passage of a piece of legislation known as the Tongass Timber Reform Act, including putting up an exhibit in the Senate Rotunda as a backdrop to a reception he hosts for legislators, that might want to talk with me about the bill. Ultimately, the bill passes, and is signed into law by then President George H.W. Bush. It is the most significant timber reform legislation in American history, and my work, and my Aperture book, are widely acknowledged as being influential. As a result, I am given the United Nations Global 500 Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award, and I am invited to have an audience with the President and his wife in the White House. In 1991, my third Aperture book is published, Overlooked in America: The Success and Failure of Federal Land Management (OIA), and I bring a copy of it with me to give the President when we meet. The meeting is brief, really just a photo-op, and politely, not political. I express my appreciation for him signing the bill into law, and he talks effusively about the effort I put in to make the book. I then offer my present, and hand him OIA. In a quick glance he reads the title, holds it up for the photo-op and quickly puts it on a table behind him and his wife, Barbara. However, she very graciously picks it up, opens it, and leafs through the pictures telling me how beautiful they are, and asking where they were made. In the picture above, the book is still behind my back. Note also, although I have on my politically correct dark suit, I sport a diamond stud ear ring, a very long ponytail, and my “sidewalls" are shaved on either side to the crown of my head, which hosts a lengthy “curly-top.” I am sure the President and his wife had quite a conversation about our meet-and-greet, once I departed - LOL!

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 Friday, May 29, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #202
Daze, #202:  
In 1990, after 4-years of lobbying and exhibiting to promote the Tongass Timber Reform Act, it is finally passed and signed into to law by President George H.W. Bush. My Aperture book, The Tongass Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest, is widely credited with helping this get done, so in 1991, I am given the United Nations Global 500 Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award, and invited to the White House for an audience with the President. Aperture also publishes my third book, Overlooked in America: The Success and Failure of Federal Land Management. The images in this book were all created in the Cuyahoga National Recreation Area, where I previously completed a commission from the Akron Art Museum, and the National Park Service. The print work is toured by the museum extensively, but they do not want the expense of publishing a book. I am an “information collector” about various subjects that interest me, and I clip and file articles and news stories that I find related to those subjects. One of those has always been the management of public lands by the government, for which I have collected articles for more than 15-years. With funding several supportive donors, I re-purpose the Cuyahoga Valley imagery as “generic” American landscapes, and I draft paragraphic “bytes” about various land management issues and locations - some good, some bad - that span our 50 states. Interestingly, my accumulated clippings reveal how the span of time has shown progress in some cases, and serious decline in others. It is VERY revealing. I am also honored to have Charles Callison, one of the foremost authors on this subject matter, write a caustic essay for the book as well. Michael Hoffman, CEO of Aperture, says he is glad the pictures in the book are spectacular, because he thinks the short bytes, and Callison’s essay, are VERY dark. With the help of several non-profit environmental groups, this publication is handed out the the Congress, and I gift one to the President and his wife, Barbara, when we meet in the White House.

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 Friday, May 22, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #201
Daze, #201:  
My collaboration with Zhang Meifang and the guild of embroiderers which she directs is an exchange of my learning what they can do, and me presenting them with new ideas and subjects they have never tried. Not surprisingly, Zhang proceeds cautiously, but with each success, we all become more adventurous. As I have expressed my desire to work at larger scale, she finally agrees to do a 24”x 30” image that I present to her of sumac leaves. With this subject, however, I want explore more than just a larger embroidery, I want to explore the exaggeration of photographic depth. I have chosen this image because the foreground is sharply in-focus, and the background is slightly out-of-focus. The foreground is also in sun, and the background in shade. I want to further capitalize on the illusion of depth by asking for some stitching to be built up in complicated layers, and to leave other parts of the background matrix with no stitching at all. It is my idea to do this on a black matrix background, and leave the darkest parts of the image without embroidery, then loosely render the visible background trees, and detail precisely the foreground sumac and grasses. At first Zhang resists because they have never used a black matrix, and she says the embroiderers will not be able to see the outlines of the traced photograph, but a white pencil solves that problem. Then Zhang seizes the moment, and fully grasps, my in-and-out of focus concept. Enthusiastically she designs very complex stitching variations and layers for the foreground, including one called dazi, where several different colors are threaded into a single needle to blend them together in the stitch. She also consults the Suzhou Institute of Silk Textile technology to explore “rare earth dyeing techniques” to use lanthanum oxide to make the red colors more vivid than traditional red silk thread. Finished in 1990, “Sumac along the Chattahoochee” took 18-months to complete, and all thought it was a GREAT success. The first public exhibit of the image is in New York, where it is purchased by Rhett Turner (media mogul, Ted Turner’s son) and it remains in his collection to this day. To see other images of this, and read further detail click here, and see posts #35-40.

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 Friday, May 15, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #200
Daze, #200:  
In between my numerous commissions in the late 1980’s (many previous posts), and my float of the Tatshenshini River (last 4 posts), I continue to fly to China twice a year to further the collaboration I have begun with one of the premier embroidery institutes in Suzhou. Our first two textiles, posts #163, a small 16”x 20”, black & white image, and #164, a 20”x 24”, full-color, stitch showcase, are deemed a success by all, and so we push forward. The guild director with whom I work, Zhang Meifang, is choosing subjects to teach me more about what the embroiderers can accomplish, and I am choosing subjects to challenge how they work through different ideas. “Wild Meadow,” above, was the first panel of a 3-panel photograph, that I created while working on my Cuyahoga River Valley project. I wanted to grow the scale in our embroideries, and suggested we do each of the panels at 30”x 40”, to which Zhang simply laughed. However, she understood the textural reasons I made the photograph, and saw it as a chance to show off more of their stitch techniques. This (the above) was done rather quickly (many months) as a sketch, but it is a shimmeringly vibrant 11”x 14” embroidery, incorporating dozens of complicated stitch styles, and when I last saw it, it was on the wall in the home of Clifford Heinz, who had purchased it as an addition to his significant art collection.

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 Friday, May 8, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #199
Daze, #199:  
My third favorite place on a float of the Tatshenshini River is the massive expanse of the river where it conjoins with the Alsek. Not only is the scale of the river amazing, there are dozens of significant surrounding mountains, down from which over 20 visible glaciers stream, virtually in any direction you look. A night and morning at this camp is incomparable,..almost. Fittingly, my final “favorite” part of the Tatshenshini river float, is the 2-day spectacle that concludes the trip. The river enters Alsek Lake on the backside of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. The lake is huge, and surrounded by some of the tallest summits in Canada and North America. Glaciers stream down from all of them, entering the lake at many points, where they calve massive icebergs, that drift about to the whim of wind and currents. They also crack, and creak, occasionally splashing as well in a startling rollover. To sit on the shore on a warm sunny day, while hearing them, and viewing their dance, is as fine a way to spend time as I have ever known. The picture above is one of the last images I ever made on the river. It is the last night of my last float trip, and in a day filled with some serious difficulties, we are finally ashore, camp has been set up, and we are about to have dinner. It is almost 1a.m. - a brutally long day. The reward is this spectacle. You are looking at 15,325ft. Mount Fairweather in alpenglow. The glacier streaming down from it is the Alsek, 7-miles across at the waterline. A big day, a big world, a big show! Over and out! If you are curious why the day was SO long, you can read about my adventures on the “TaT” here.

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 Friday, May 1, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #198:
Daze, #198:  Having floated the Tatshenshini River several times, I have come to appreciate particular sections of the river for various reasons. The only whitewater you encounter is a series of shallow rapids on the first day. This not the Colorado, and these are only Class 3 rapids, but they are rated as a 4 because of the stunningly cold water. They are always exciting, as the flow through them is very fast, and for the most part you just get splashed sober, but on one trip, our overladen cargo raft got sideways, and the rocks tore a portion of the bottom out, relieving us of two cases of beer. Very sad, indeed! The next point on the river is the beach upon which I am standing in this picture. The view across the river, is quite dramatic as you can see. Importantly, this place was the purpose of my first float trip. The proposed open-pit mine to be built by Geddes, would have been on the side of that mountain, and the tailings ponds would have engulfed a significant wetland and beaver habitat, beneath the downslope to the right. Since our group hoped to take this float trip to create a national magazine story that might prevent the mine from being built, getting this exact picture was essential. As we floated toward this beach, it rained hard ALL day, and clouds obscured much of the landscape around us offering few views, so everyone was a little depressed. When we hit this beach, it was still raining, so we all just went to work establishing camp, and setting up for an evening meal. Suddenly, the rain broke off, the clouds lifted, blue “holes” let the late evening light shine through, and I made this image. It would be used as a double-page spread in LIFE magazine, the first to break the story of the proposed mine development in the North American press. The full story of my numerous adventures on this river can be found here.
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 Friday, April 24, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #197:
Daze, #197:  The Tatshenshini is an extremely large river system that originates in Canada and flows to the Pacific, passing through Kluane Provincial Park in Canada, and between the American national parks of Wrangell-St. Elias, and Glacier Bay. There are few rapids to negotiate, but the river is very cold, and flows fast through a bewildering maze of braids and channels. River floats require experienced guides who can read the the many channels correctly and keep their rafts in the deepest water. A loaded raft could weigh 800lbs., and were it to mistakenly slip into a side channel that becomes shallow, the raft could ground, creating some difficult rescue circumstances. About halfway to the Pacific, the “Tat” is joined by another huge river system, the Alsek. At this confluence, the volume of the river nearly doubles, and in places, it is several miles wide. There are numerous accessible shores on which to haul out and camp, and small freshwater side streams pour in everywhere. In traversing this river, you pass by an endless array of summits, massive icefields, and innumerable glaciers that descend into the valley. Quite near the outlet into the Pacific, the river flows through Lake Alsek, part of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. The lake is surrounded by some of the tallest mountains in the park, including 15,325ft. Mount Fairweather, and numerous large glaciers descend from these summits into the lake, where they calve sizable icebergs, that must be negotiated carefully. The visual drama of this final leg of the passage is often the highlight of any float, especially if the weather is clear and the surrounding peaks can be seen. The full story of my numerous adventures on this river can be found here.
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 Friday, April 17, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #196:
Daze, #196:  Fortunately for me, 1990 also brings another project that returns me to Alaska, and rescues me from the wilderness of teepees, t-shirts, sacred crystals, and miniature golf courses, to be found in gateway communities (last 3 posts). I am contacted by Carolyn Muegge-Vaughn, Director of the Nature Conservancy-Alaska, who invites me to photograph a huge river on a 10-day float trip with some Alaskan “celebrities.” The Tatshenshini River flows from Canada to the Pacific, passing between two American national parks, Wrangell-St. Elias, and Glacier Bay, before pouring into the Gulf of Alaska. Carolyn is organizing this trip because the Canadian government has issued a permit to construct a large open-pit mine adjacent the river, and she believes it threatens both American parks and the very productive fishery of the Gulf, were there to be an “accident” with the toxic tailings accumulated, which might flow into the river. To add to the Alaskan “appeal” of any story that our trip might produce, we will be joined by Ginny Wood (left), and Celia Hunter (right), two widely known, and greatly respected Alaskan Pioneer Women, now in their 70’s. Both were military pilots during the war. Both are ardent and outspoken conservationists, and together, they founded a famous wilderness lodge, Camp Denali, in Denali National Park. It is a blessing for me to meet these two, as we will remain good friends throughout the rest of their lives, I will visit Camp Denali many times, and eventually I will spend 9-years on the Board Of Trustees of the Alaskan Conservation Foundation with Celia. Believe me, these two kick ass! The full story of my numerous adventures on this river can be found here.
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 Friday, April 10, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #195:
Daze, #195:  As you see from the last two posts, my project with the Rincon Institute of Tucson, AZ, regarding “gateway” communities, takes me to some unusual places. A gateway community is one that forms outside the entrance to a national park. It seems reasonable to have such places to provide lodging, food service, and perhaps even host stores whose goods somehow relate to the park, and might further enhance your park experience, but that is often NOT what happens. Those previous posts were of Gatlinburg, TN, which sits adjacent Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and as those pictures reveal, there are few businesses there that have anything to do with the park. Instead it is more like a bizarre circus of tawdry, and COMPLETELY unrelated commercial enterprises, that do little to nothing to enhance your visit or knowledge of the park. Above, is another such location. This is Tusayan, AZ, which sits just outside the southern entrance to Grand Canyon National Park. Tusayan is (fortunately) very small, having slightly more than 500 residents, and only 144 acres of land, but that has not stopped the community from “thinking big.” In fact, many residents don’t want to be seen as support services to the park, instead they hope to be a tourist destination unto themselves. With that in mind, the community has gone out of its way to attract tourism, in particular, by using “catchy” architecture. Teepees are everywhere, including a campground where you stay in one, and, yes, they appear on the inevitable miniature golf course as well. There are also a number of geodesic dome structures. The one in this image is an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant, of which there are many. Curio stores and trading posts abound as well, many selling “Native American” craft objects, that strangely have “Made in China” stamped on them. One such store, which also sells “rare” minerals, and crystals, is located in a small complex of “cosmic” pyramids. Perhaps the upside of all of this is, after seeing the “spectacle” of this community, I could not wait to leave and get into the park, where there is definitely a VERY different kind of spectacle.
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 Friday, April 3, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #194:  Daze, #194:  These are two storefronts in Gatlinburg, TN, where I have come to work on a project proposed to me by Luther Propst of the Rincon Institute in AZ. He wants to study the impact of “gateway” communities, on the national parks around whose entrances they have formed. Gatlinburg is within a few miles of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but there is little evidence in the city of anything having to do with the park. The city is, instead, a circus of retail shops selling kitchy art-junk, game arcades, miniature golf courses (last post), candy shops, and restaurants. The window above is an “art & jewelry” store, and it is currently exhibiting someones blown glass bead sculptures, about 1/2 of which are size variations on sailing ships that might be galleons. Next door to that is a “Jesus" t-shirt shop, featuring hundreds of t-shirts with wild drawings and slogans such as, “Jesus Rocks World Tour: Coming Soon,” No Fast Lane in Hell, Just the Ultimate Dead End,” and “It’s Not Who You Are, It's Who You Know. I am so inspired by all of this, I immediately buy a triple-scoop ice cream cone, dipped in chocolate and praleen-crush, and shortly thereafter, win two stuffed panda bears in an exotic animals shooting gallery.
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 Friday, March 27, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #193:  Daze, #193:  Following the success of the campaign to protect Saguaro National Monument from intrusive development, Luther Propst, the person with whom I worked at the Rincon Institute asks me to contribute to another project. He wants to study “gateway” communities, small cities that grow up just outside the entrance to national parks. Unfortunately many of the most prominent ones contribute little to enhance or enrich the park experience, but rather they are circus-like - every store is hawking something (none of it park related), and what is not retail, or food, has become game arcades, bumper cars, and a lot of miniature golf courses. One of the largest, and most sensory overwhelming of these towns, is Gatlinburg, TN, immediately outside of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. You literally emerge from the trees of the park into a world of concrete, shooting galleries, roller coasters, candy shops, and at the time I visited in 1990-91, there were 18 miniature golf courses. Above is one such extravaganza themed around pirates, and traveling the 7-seas. Another of my favorites is based on an “Africa” theme, complete with gorillas, giraffes, lions, zebras, and warlike “natives."
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 Friday, March 20, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #192:  Daze, #192:  The start of the new decade continues to build on my successful exhibits, and my two Aperture books, The Hudson River and the Highlands and The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rainforest, especially the Tongass, which has become an increasingly hot political topic since the book published in early 1987. In the ensuing years, Senator William Proxmire’s gift of the Golden Fleece Award to Congress for their “management” of the Tongass costing tax dollars, my exhibit of Tongass prints in the Senate Rotunda, and at the National Academy of Science, where I also lectured to a standing-room-only audience of scientists and politicians, has certainly helped to grow the cause and stir the pot. So much so, The Tongass Timber Reform Act is passed by the Congress, and in 1990, President George H.W. Bush signs it in to law. Soon thereafter, I am invited to be the Centennial Speaker at the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory. Then, LIFE magazine publishes a Collectors Edition, entitled, The World’s Best Photographs: 1980-1990,” and it includes an image of mine from The Hudson River and the Highlands. My work with the Rincon Institute of Tucson, AZ culminates with our media and direct-mail poster campaign to protect Saguaro National Monument from a proposed development that would disrupt habitat, succeeding, and with that accomplished, Luther Propst, their Director, has a new project idea, and he asks me to be involved. He wants to analyze “gateway” communities, being those that surround the entrances to national parks.
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 Friday, March 13, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #191: Daze, #191:  Having the Peter Wach Gallery invite me to the Basel Art Faire in 1989, the first year a collective of American photography dealers participates, is a huge moment for my work in Europe. Basel in the summer is idyllic, as you can see from these pictures I have posted (above, businessmen playing “giant” chess on their lunch break, and the open-air market in the central plaza; and last post, twilight above the river and cathedral, and students and tourists sun-bathing at the river’s edge). These images are made, however, working around the commitment to be present at Peter’s booth display. His booth has a small wall section with some of my prints framed, but he has also imported an entire 30”x 40” Cibachrome box of my prints, for which he has also arranged a desk, where he wants me to stand and scroll through the prints for the audience. It is an exhausting, and repetitive, task for me, but HUGELY popular with the exhibit visitors, many who come back everyday of the faire, and bring their friends. Our success makes some of the other dealers crabby, but they are just jealous because we receive so much attention. In the ensuing year at Basel, Peter invites me back again, and again we use the scroll-show-and-lecture display to popular appeal. Because of my inclusion at Basel, I meet Dr. Hartmut Schwarzkopf who operates H.S. Galerie in Heidelberg, Germany, and who offers to represent me there, which he still does so to this day. I also make friends with Harry Lunn, who brings my work to his prestigious gallery in Washington, DC, briefly, before it closes. However, his two top assistants, open their own galleries after his departure, so Robert Mann Gallery takes me to New York, and Marie Martin continues representing me in DC. Less important, but no less fun, after Basel 1990, I train to Italy, where my friend, John Ravize, and I chase World Cup Soccer games for the next month. Talk about a party, AND I get to see Maradona’s last world cup, as well as one of the greatest finals ever in Torino, England vs. Germany! It went into overtime, and was won by Germany in the shoot-out. OMG what a night!
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 Friday, March 6, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #190: Daze, #190:  I traveled to England and France in the summer of my Junior-Senior year at UCLA, and was briefly in Zürich at the beginning of my aquaculture project with Elisabeth Mann Borgese, but aside from those moments, I have never been anywhere else in Europe, so I am excited to be invited to exhibit within Peter Wach’s booth at the Basel Art Faire. Until 1989, the faire has been one of the most significant, global art events in any country, but they have not included many photography galleries among the exhibitors. Thanks to the efforts of my representative in Ohio, Peter Wach, and his gallerist colleague, Kaspar Fleischmann, in 1989, Art Basel, is attended by most of the major photography galleries in North America. Peter also invites me to be part of his booth. Most of the galleries have choosen to display the very finest of their vintage printwork, much of which is black & white. There are impressive prints from Paul Strand, Steichen, Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams, but very little color. Peter has planned otherwise, which is his reason for inviting me. The booth wall space at Basel is EXTREMELY expensive, so I am given a small display of several prints, but Peter has also shipped a 30”x 40” Cibachrome print box FULL of my loose prints to the faire, along with his framed materials, and he has arranged for a display desk, around which he wants me to stand, and scroll through that collection, while engaging viewers, and talking about Cibachrome printing. It takes A LOT of work, and repetition on my part, but the idea is a smash success, attracting large, standing audiences to hear me, and bringing good print sales,..as well as pissing many of the other dealers.
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 Friday, February 28, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #189: Daze, #189:  My busy decade of book publishings and commissions is finally drawing to a close. Although The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest has been released, I am still traveling to the Tongass to do further work, and enjoy numerous kayak and river float adventures, as I have clearly been “bitten” by the “Alaska-bug.” (I have also been bitten by A LOT of bugs in Alaska - LOL!) My work in the Kettle Moraine of Wisconsin continues, I am still shooting in the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area of Georgia, and more recently, in the Sonoran desert of Arizona, but my commission to photograph the Cuyahoga Valley has come to completion, and I spend a good deal of time working with my Cibachrome Master Printer, Michael Wilder, to prepare an exhibit for the Akron Art Museum. That large exhibit premiers at the museum in 1989, to a very excited audience, and in the course of the display, the museum sells over 100 prints, closing out several of my editions in just a matter of months. Thank you Akron/Ohio, I had never seen sales like that before. Also in this year, the Sierra Club gives me their Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography, and the city of Los Angeles honors me with a Certificate of Commendation for my “numerous contributions to the art of photography.” The icing on the cake for this decade, provides me more surprising exposure to an international audience. For many years, the Basel Art Faire in Basel, Switzerland, has been THE art event in the world. The faire, however, has not previously shown much photography. Then, in 1989, my friend and lifelong representative of my work, Peter Wach, and a gallerist from Switzerland, Kaspar Fleischmann, convince the collective photography dealers association, AIPAD, that they should attend and display. Although almost everyone exhibiting chooses their very best vintage work, mostly black & white, but Peter thought some contemporary work should be shown as well, especially color, and so he invited me to be part of his booth display. He also wants me to attend, because he has an idea about marketing me.
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photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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 Friday, February 21, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #188: Daze, #188:  The real estate developers proposing to build on the border of the northern section of Saguaro National Monument in Tucson, AZ, and the Rincon Institute have been in mitigation discussions for sometime before my arrival, and, in fact, the developers understand the impact their proposal will have on the Saguaro habitat, so they are open to altering their plans, BUT they own the land in question, and want to be compensated for it, if they are to give it up. The Rincon Institute has gone to Congress for funding help, and the Congress has agreed to help the conservation easement purchase with a considerable amount of money, but the funds are being held up by a committee trying to embarrass President Bill Clinton, so the project I am being handed is, how do we get the Congressional committee to release these pledged funds? Knowing now that there is NOTHING like critical, broad, public visibility to rattle politicians, I conceive of a national campaign of magazine stories, and a direct-mail poster campaign, with Congressional hand-out of the poster, which would feature images of the landscape in question. The Rincon Institute loves my idea, and gives me the go-ahead, but, first things, first. I have to photograph the section of the desert that is proposed for development. Just another day/daze in my life.
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 Friday, February 14, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #187: Daze, #187:  As in my other commissions, this newest one offered to me by The Rincon Institute of Tucson, AZ involves a landscape I know little about, so as with the others, I begin to study the subject I am being asked to photograph. The Sonoran Desert covers an extensive area, flowing through parts of California, Arizona, Mexico, Baja, and Baja California Sur. It is a hot, dry environment, and hosts a sizable variety of unique, endemic plants, and animals, notably the saguaro and organ pipe cactus. Small sections of it are protected in two parts near the city of Tucson, and in the El Pinacate bioshpere reserve in northern Mexico, but aside from those locations, this desert represents a vast acreage of wild, and relatively undisturbed land. In the northern section of Saguaro National Monument, however, change is threatening the integrity of the park habitat, and that is why I have been brought in. A resort developer on the southern edge of the monument is proposing a large real estate development that will border the monument, interrupting, and in some cases, overwhelming, stream and riparian corridors that are part of the adjacent monument’s connected ecosystem. The Rincon Institute wants to start a campaign, whatever that might be, to prevent, or scale back that development, and they would like me to advise them as to what we might do, beyond just taking pictures. Gulp!
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 Friday, February 7, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #186: Daze, #186: The 80’s are not over yet, and here comes another commission. So far, this decade has bestowed upon me three major publications. First, my huge curatorial project for the National Park Foundation, traveling as an exhibit, and published by Viking Press, as American Photographers and the National Parks. That was followed by two Aperture books, The Hudson River and the Highlands and The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest, as well as five commissions, the Hudson River Valley (posts #134 & #137-150), the Tongass Rainforest (posts #151-160), the Cuyahoga Valley (posts #173-176), the Chattahoochee National Forest (posts #165-167), and the Kettle Moraine/tallgrass prairie ecosystem in Wisconsin (posts #182-184). I have also been made the first visual Artist-In-Residence at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute (posts #178-180), and I have begun extensive traveling in China, while collaborating with a textile guild through the UCLA-China Exchange Program (posts #161-164 & #168-171). The Tongass exhibit in the Senate Rotunda of the Capitol was not a bad exhibit venue, either. Phew! But it ain’t over, ’till it’s over, so there is one more commission to go. Because of my national visibility and my conservation agenda, I am approached by Luther Propst of the Rincon Institute of Tucson, AZ, who wants me to photograph a section of the Sonoran Desert that he believes should be included as part of Saguaro National Monument, but it is threatened by a massive real estate development on its southern border, and he would like to change that. I am already spending a lot of miles in the air moving between my many projects, so why not,..and this one is a VERY different landscape.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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 Friday, January 31, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #185: Daze, #185: The latter part of the '80’s was not only busy with projects for me, it marked the “internationalization” of my work. Having had no previous exposure in either Europe or Asia, I scored both. In post #172, I recall being in the huge Photokina exhibit and book, Modern Color Photography: 1936-1986, which marked my first exposure to the European market. Then, out of the blue, I received a letter inviting me into this show (above). A beautiful new museum, the National Taiwan Museum of Art, had just been built in Korea, and of the inaugural exhibits planned, one was the expansive, “Chinese Influence on the American West Coast Contemporary Art.” The curator had seen my portfolio, “WINTERS: 1970-1980,” and recognized my vision, connecting that body of my work to the sensibilities of Asian aesthetics, so they felt my photographs fit within the parameters of this exhibit being curated. It was fortunate for me because being the youngest in the show, I was included with some very significant American artists as my company: Wynn Bullock (one of my most admired B & W photographers), Morris Graves, Adrian Saxe, Mark Tobey, Richard White, Mary Hicks, and Guy Williams. These artists spanned all artistic disciplines of the time, from photography, painting, and print-making, to sculpture and ceramics. Great company! Good Fortune! AND, a complete catalogue (as seen above). From my perspective, the curator also made a PERFECT choice of which of my prints to include. Thank you!
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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 Friday, January 24, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #184: Daze, #184: While working on my Artist-In-Residence for the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha, co-funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wisconsin Arts Board, I resided in a lovely old farmhouse in the Kettle Moraine, that the UW had turned into a biological field station to study the re-establishment of a tall grass prairie in an oak savanna. Professor Marlin Johnson and his students worked on that project, and a large community garden they established, and I wandered the property trying to translate the landscape that endowed the farm. The Kettle Moraine is unique to eastern Wisconsin and southwestern Michigan because that is where the line of moraine residue stretches after the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet which covered these states, and, in fact, all of the Great Lakes. Any glacial mass, and especially one this large, picks up an immense amount of rock, boulders, and silt/topsoil as it creeps across the landscape. Because this was a HUGE ice sheet, with numerous glacial fingers, it collected an incredible amount of debris that was then deposited when the melt back occurred. The Kettle Moraine was formed of these deposits. Within the soil/rock residue were buried volumes of ice, which melted more slowly because they were covered by the dirt. As they did melt, the covering soil collapsed forming potholes and lakes. Potholes generally range from 3-200ft. wide, but lakes were created also, some of them quite large. Now this area has rebounded, vegetation has moved in, and the potholes and lakes are often connected through systems of streams that flow through them. All that water nurtures a now-vibrant surface habitat of lush native plants, and large established trees, many of which are ancient, impressive oaks. As this landscape is part of the Atlantic Americas Flyway, million of birds travel through this domain every year. On their long flight, they need food and resting places, and the farms fields, ponds, and lakes, of the Kettle Moraine are a favored place to stop. At the height of the migration, birds are EVERYWHERE, and the squawking and cooing can be heard for miles. (If you would like to see the entire body of work from this project, use this link.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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 Friday, January 17, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #183: Daze, #183: My National Endowment for the Arts/Wisconsin Arts Board funded Artist-In-Residence, at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha was a most unique opportunity. I was expected to experience the efforts at a biological field station in the Kettle Moraine, where under the guidance of Professor Marlin Johnson, students were trying to re-establish a tall grass prairie habitat in an oak savanna, and manage by means of what would have occurred naturally in the original process of that environment, such as prairie fires. The field station was located on an historic farm bequeathed to the university, and Marlin resided on-site, in the original home. That is also where I would stay, when I would come to work. The property also had numerous outbuildings, including a large hothouse, an equally large barn, and a towering grain silo. Marlin was a master of many trades, and maintained it all. He was also a great guy to hang out with, so I always looked forward to my visits. Students who assisted him came and went on a daily basis, and all had specific chores they were expected to do. Most seem to love what they were doing, and the surrounding in which they found themselves “going to school.” I was NOT expected to document their efforts. I was left free to interpret the landscape their work was affecting. And, what a landscape that is. The Kettle Moraine is a unique geological formation, primarily to the state of Wisconsin, but also trailing off to the north for some distance into Michigan. The moraine is the deposit of the Laurentide Ice Sheet which once covered all of the Great Lakes, and most of the states in that region of the country. When the glacier retreated, the moraine debris was left, creating the terrain I was commissioned to make visible. Lucky me! (If you would like to see the entire body of work from this project, use this link.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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 Friday, January 10, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #182: Daze, #182: The last half of the 80’s proves to be one of the busiest, and beneficial 5yrs. of my career. My Aperture book, The Hudson River and the Highlands is published. I receive a commission to photograph the Tongass rainforest. I receive a commission to photograph the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area. My second Aperture book, The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest, is published. I help in distributing the book to the entire Congress, making many new supportive, political friends. I meet Robert Redford, who offers me the first visual Artist-In-Residence at Sundance Institute. I am asked to work with Senator William Proxmire to create a D.C. event intended to further the passage Tongass Timber Reform Act, that results in an elegant cocktail reception, and exhibit of my work in the Senate Rotunda, which ultimately brings about the passage of the legislation, heralded as the most significant timber reform in American history. Then, I am invited by the University of Wisconsin to serve a second Artist-In-Residence at a biological field station in the Kettle Moraine, co-funded by them and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (above). All of this work makes for some significant traveling, but it is one of my most productive periods as a photographer, and I am blessed to be able to visit so many beautiful places on a rotating basis, AND get paid to do it! Thank you one and all.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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 Friday, January 3, 2020

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #181: Daze, #181: Although I continue to travel to the Tongass, and other places in Alaska in general, with the publishing of the Aperture book, The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest, I find myself returning to Washington, D.C. at regular intervals to follow up on the book distribution to Congress, and to meet with the office of Senator William Proxmire, who is planning a strategy to push forward the history-making Tongass Timber Reform Act. With each year that passes, the bill gains more supporters, and he believes he can deliver the final blow that will make passage inevitable. On a yearly basis, he hosts a well publicized ceremony of giving the Congress his Golden Fleece Award for their poor performance over attention to one issue or another. He now plans to give it to them for their management of the Tongass, and he sees me as an essential part of that award moment. What his office has planned is that prior to the award ceremony, he will host a meet-and-greet, food and cocktail event in the Senate Rotunda, where Senators and Representatives will be invited to meet me, and I will have a selection of my prints displayed. This is no small thing to make happen. Because they have all been given my book, they know who I am, but there are always many other things for them to do, so who knows who will show up. The print display is beautiful, the food includes fresh wild salmon and crab from the ocean surrounding the Tongass, and also local Alaskan beer, brewed from Tongass waters. The event is a smash, although protested furiously and boycotted by Alaskan Senators Ted Stevens and Frank Murkowski (pawns of the timber industry - as is Senator Lisa Murkowski to this day), and everyone else is there. In particular, a group of “renegade Republicans” led by Ralph Regula from Ohio, someone that is supporting my Cuyahoga Valley Commission for the Akron Art Museum and the National Park Service. There are 28 of them and they engage me in some SERIOUS dialogue about wasted tax dollars, and the biological importance of this rainforest. When all is said and done, Ralph thanks me fore a GREAT afternoon event, and tells me that he and his cohorts WILL vote for the reform bill. A few days later, Senator Proxmire hands out the Golden Fleece Award with much press attention. One year later, the Tongass Timber Reform Act passes as the most historic timber reform bill in American history, and the victory is accomplished by “a lot” of Republicans that “crossed over,” and voted for it. Who might they have been? In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the bill into law and invited me to The White House for a photo-op, and his personal acknowledgement of the importance of my book, and the work I had done.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020 
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 Friday, December 27, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #180: Daze, #180: My Artist-In-Residence at the newly formed Sundance Institute proved to be a 4-season experience, and not just a winter one for which the Sundance Resort (skiing) was noted. When Robert Redford bought the ski resort, he immediately began making changes, planning to broaden its seasonal popularity. Among those changes were opening the mountain lifts in the summer to tourism and mountain biking, building very beautiful lodge suites at the base of Mt. Timpanogos, and adding several new buildings to the resort complex. Notable among those was a large, banquet like room where concerts could be hosted, and during my residency, the premiere American dancer Twyla Tharp was also enjoying her Artist-In-Residence, teaching young dancers. One of the other new buildings was a small theater the sat about 300 people, and where Robert would “screen” films on the weekends, often created by emerging Hollywood filmmakers. These evenings were always fun, and interesting to attend, because after the film, the directors and filmmakers would engage in a conversation with Redford on the stage. These screenings increasingly grew in their popularity, and as the three years of my residency unfolded, more and more of the weekend showings would find stars of significance sitting in the audience, having flown up from Los Angeles, just to attend. Eventually, these events became so popular, Redford decided to name them The Sundance Film Festival, and within a few more years, attendance had risen to such a degree, he had to move the screenings to nearby Park City, where more lodging and accommodations were available to accommodate what had now become an overwhelming number of participants and viewers.
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 Friday, December 20, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #179: Daze, #179: After Robert Redford bought the Sundance ski resort and founded the Sundance Institute, he set up a series of Artist-In-Residences for screenplay writers, filmmakers, and dance in which Twyla Tharp was the first dancer. He then decided he should have a visual artist/photographer as part of the program, as well, so he called me (to which I responded rather rudely on the first pass - see last post.) Nonetheless, we did finally meet, talk about what he expected, and excitedly, I said, “YES!” He actually did not expect anything, other than for me to come and do whatever inspired me to create. He told me that he was offering me the opportunity, because of the significant effort I had put into the Tongass rainforest campaign, and he hoped I would find being an Artist-In-Residence at Sundance, a chance to indulge myself in whatever I found of interest, with no overriding purpose. He also acknowledged that he knew I was working on other projects, so my residency could be spread over several years, and I could come and go, when I had the chance. While there, Sundance would cover my travel in and out, my accommodations while on site, and all meals. Finding such an offer irresistible, my first visit was in the winter of 1987, not long after he made me the offer. As the limited resort rentals were already booked for that season, he invited me to stay in his guest house, located on the property of his ranch and home. I arrived with my assistant at the time John Voss, and some unusual accompanying equipment - I brought two large light tables. I have never had the opportunity to tell Robert this, but during my one month stay that winter, I not only took in some great skiing, and made many great pictures, I also assembled and edited what would be my next Aperture book, Overlooked In America: The Success and Failure of Federal Land Management. It was a most productive residency. The winter was spectacular. The face above is part of a sub-summit of Mt. Timpanogos, called Elk Point. Dramatic in the winter, it sits directly in front of Redford’s driveway (from where I took this picture). BUT, I had no idea what a Sundance fall looked like, and as it turned out, fall is likely the best season of all. Look at this landscape!
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2019 
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 Friday, December 13, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #178: Daze, #178: With Aperture’s book, The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest, now out, and the Congressional handout and walk-around completed, I found myself back at home and working in my studio, when one day the telephone rang. When I asked who was calling, the voice at the other end said, “Robert Redford.” Thinking I was being pranked by some friend, I said, “Sorry, I am really busy and don’t have time for this,” and then I hung up. A few minutes passed and the phone rang again, and this time, the same voice said, “Before you hang up on me again, we have a mutual friend in Eelco Wolf. That got my attention. Eelco was a representative for the Polaroid Corporation at the time, a well known collector, and someone unusual for one of friends to throw out, off the top of their head. I gasped, and said, “Oh my god! Is this REALLY Robert Redford, and did I just hang up on you?” To which he laughed, and replied, “You did, but don’t worry about it, I appreciate that you are hard at work. In fact, that is why I am calling.” Redford was a board Member and spokesperson for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and as such, he knew all about my Tongass supporting book, which they had helped me to hand out to the Congress. He thought I might be “overworked” from that effort, and wanted to offer a respite, but he wanted to do so in person, and asked if he could come to my home/studio. Soon thereafter, he was at my front door, and we spent several hours together, getting to know each other, and discussing my work, and his idea that would involve me. He had recently bought the Sundance ski resort area, and created the Sundance Institute, which offered Artist-In-Residence support to screenplay writers, filmmakers, and Twyla Tharp, in dance. He had not yet given a residency to a visual artist or photographer, and he thought I should be the first one. He felt it would be a chance for me to step back from my more seriously dedicated “political” photography, and just enjoy being a visual artist. As you might imagine, I said, “YES!”
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2019 
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 Friday, December 6, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #177: Daze, #177: In 1987, Aperture publishes, The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest. This is a HUGE moment for my wife, and co-author, Carey, and me. First, it caps two years of work in the field, and another 6-months of in-depth research, interviews, and endless writing-editing-re-writing. It also greatly advances my maturity in book publishing. Michael Hoffman, the CEO of Aperture, really wanted to do a picture book about the Inside Passage, and feared possible reprisal from politicians, corporations, and donors, for the extreme criticism our text leveled at the US Forest Service, and Congress’s management of the Tongass. Similarly, he was VERY concerned about the inclusion of the clearcut pictures, and the purloined maps that revealed road planning that the USFS denied they were doing. He also did not want the title of the book to be “The Tongass,” because he felt no one knew what that was. We remained adamant, as did our project funders, the Lila Acheson Funds, and the McIntosh Foundation, and I openly argued with him that the reason we WOULD call it “The Tongass” was because he was right - no one knew what “the Tongass" was, and WE were going to bring that knowledge into the public consciousness. Eventually, he relented. As importantly, I had expressed my disapproval of what I thought was mediocre color printing on my first Aperture book, The Hudson River and the Highlands, and I wanted to go “on press” to supervise the color printing on this one. I got my wish, and was allowed to do so. This introduced me to Steve Baron, Aperture’s press master, with whom I struck up a life-long friendship, and with whom I stood side-by-side while printing my next six books. With the assistance of the McIntosh Foundation, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, I also went to Washington, DC, to participate in handing out the book to the entire Congress, where I learned to walk the halls of the House and Senate, and promote the issues of the book to key legislators. One of those was Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin. Proxmire had power, and powerful friends, AND he was a PROPONENT of protecting the Tongass, something he would push forward in a big way in the coming years. I would be involved with that push, and you will read about that later in this blog, so stay tuned!
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 Friday, November 29, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #176: Daze, #176: One other element within the Cuyahoga River Valley to be absorbed, and with which I had to contend, and felt should be acknowledged, was the issue of historic pollution. Because it was national news, most people knew that the river near its headwater in Cleveland was so industrially filthy, that it caught fire and burned for several days, but the toxic invasion was more insidious than that. As I mentioned in the last post, I was surprised to find gas and oil wells in the middle of producing farm fields, but it was only after some research, I discovered that was not the only invasion of the fields. For decades, industries in the surrounding areas, especially Cleveland, had used the farm fields as a dump for discarded metals, toxic liquids, rubber tires, and numerous other unsavory and inappropriate items, not really suited to the food and water chain. Many farmers were paid to allow this dumping, which involved digging up their farms, burying the materials, and then restoring the surface soil, so the farming could continue. At the time, everyone seemed to accept that as an okay idea, but eventually, as those materials began to break down, they leached into the soil and water. When I arrived to work on my commission, one of the most scenic attractions in the park, Brandywine Falls ( brandywine falls ), was so acidic that below the overview deck that hosted weddings, and viewers of spectacular fall colors, there were signs next the river telling people to stay out of the water, as it might burn their skin. Many of the field locations actually became designated Superfund sites, and were targeted for clean up, such as the one above. This is a picture of the site whose leachate was responsible for the acidic water at Brandywine Falls. I made it clear to both the National Park Service and the Akron Art Museum, that I was going to photograph these situations, as well as the beauty of the park, and much like my work in the Hudson River Valley, previously published by Aperture as, The Hudson River and the Highlands, at least some of those images must be included in any exhibit or publication that might result.
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 Friday, November 22, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #175: Daze, #175: As diverse as the geology of the Cuyahoga River Valley is, so has been its use. A term we hear often in reference to parks and other locations is “mixed use,” and that is especially true of this valley. The most apparent presence are small farms and private homes, but strikingly, some of the farm fields have gas wells smack in the middle of them. Areas of the park have also be quarried for the sandstones which had various uses, including the construction of buildings. There are also small townships within the valley, that host stores and popular restaurants. The National Recreation Area as a whole, is actually many components stitched together under federal oversight and financing. At the Cleveland end, a substantial part of the CVNRA is a large Cleveland Metropark, and similarly, at the Akron end, it was another park area referred to as Sand Run. Some of the properties in the park had been abandoned over time, but historical structures, such as the barn above, were restored for the public to enjoy. Other properties still had people living in, and on, them, and a number of small farms were still operating. It was a very complex system to weave into a cohesive whole, and it was made more difficult because those still engaged in living in the valley, were unsure as to whether the government would eventually evict them or not. My project was supposed to help smooth that process out. Yeow!
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 Friday, November 15, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #174: Daze, #174: Having been selected in the competitive commission of the National Park Service and the Akron Art Museum to photograph the Cuyahoga River Valley, I had a good deal to learn about the history and biological importance of the area. I knew, as did most everyone, that the river was so polluted near its head in Cleveland, that it actually caught fire and burned for several days, but beyond that I was not aware of much else. Once the project began, however, I made a considerable effort to be more informed. The area of concentration afforded by my commission was the extension of the valley from Cleveland to Akron, and what I discovered about that was, historically, that section of the river had been a barge canal and towpath, used to ferry freight from the Great Lakes through to the Ohio River, for shipment downstream. That towpath was being restored by the NPS as part of the new development plan. Biologically the park was very diverse thanks to some unique bedrock structures and sediment deposits. There are over 100 waterfalls in the park, some obvious and very popular, such as Brandywine, the tallest waterfall in Northeastern Ohio, and others pour over abrupt ledges in narrow ravines, feeding into the Cuyahoga. The image above is The Ledges, a dramatic and very beautiful outcropping of bedrock, that offers expansive views of the forested valley below. It is a wonderful place to climb and explore, and there are also Talus caves among the boulders below the outcrop. Other geologic elements that comprise the areas unique features, include traces of the Defiance moraine, Berea Sandstone, Bedford Shale, Marcellus Shale, Utica Shale, Devonian Huron Shale, and Sharon Conglomerate. The interaction of these various deposits created many of the gorges and waterfalls, and fostered the diversity of forest and understory growth.
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 Friday, November 8, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #173: Daze, #173: As if 1985-86, are not busy enough for me (see previous post), in 1986 I am considered in a competitive commission from the Akron Art Museum and the National Park Service, to photograph the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area, which I win. At the time, most of us only knew of the Cuyahoga River because it was SO polluted, it actually caught fire, and burned for several days. In 1974, some years after that incident, a group of powerful Ohio politicians put together an historic restoration plan combining the waterway with city parks at either end (Cleveland-Akron), and in between, a number of small farms, private homes, and commercial businesses. The river was once used as the freight barge connection to get products from the Great Lakes into the Ohio River for shipment downstream, and when Cleveland began its renewal process, after the fire incident, cleaning up the polluted lakefront and river, and rebuilding downtown, the idea to carry that into the river valley, and through to Akron, was born. The plan was not greeted happily, however, as many people, especially those that lived in the valley, saw it as a federal takeover that would seize their homes, and push their commercial businesses out. With the process evolving over 12yrs., positive changes were made, but property owners still did not embrace what they saw as ultimately removing them. The commission I received from the museum and the Park Service hoped my results would help change that public view by revealing what a unique habitat the valley corridor was.
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 Friday, November 1, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #172: Daze, #172: 1985 and 1986 are HUGE for me as a young, emerging photographer. My Hudson River commission from the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund, is published as an Aperture book, The Hudson River and the Highlands. I receive a second commission from them, which is co-supported by the McIntosh Foundation, to photograph the Tongass rainforest of Alaska. I meet John Adams and Michael McIntosh, who have just recently founded the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and with whom I am still collaborating to this day. I receive yet another commission to photograph the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area from Tom Cousins, not only one of Atlanta’s most significant developers and collectors, he is also on the board of the High Museum. I am accepted into the UCLA-China Exchange Program and invited to visit Suzhou, China, where I hope to begin translating my photographs into unique embroideries by collaborating with that country’s most significant guild of embroiderers. Finally, and surprisingly, because I have no European presence as yet, I am included in this massive exhibit and publication (above) arranged around the massive, bi-annual European photography fair, Photokina. Some of THE most important color photographer’s in history are among these pages, as well as several of my images. Thank you VERY much for discovering my work! (I am also about to receive a third commission, this one from the Akron Art Museum (OH) and the National Park Service, to photograph the Cuyahoga National Recreation Area, but more about that in the next post.)
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 Friday, October 25, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #171: Daze, #171: When I state Carey’s and my downclimb of the Mt. Huangshan's stone staircases is steep and plunging (last post), I am NOT KIDDING! LOOK at this! She and I start before dawn, spend most of the day doing this, and arrive to meet our guide/handler at our guest house for dinner, as we had promised him. On the way, a MOST AMAZING day is had. Besides startling virtually all the Chinese we pass who are going up, when we stop for a rest at the midway guest house "for Chinese only," there is clearly a buzz about us being there. They are even more surprised when we walk inside to buy a coke, but no one stops us. Then, back to plunging. As the day draws down, Carey and I reach the end of the steepest stairs, and things begin to level out a bit. At one such terrace between further stairs, we stop at some benches to snack, drink, and re-lace our shoes for the final tiers of descent. On that same terrace are four “tea-girls.” These girls are part of an ethnic minority that grows the tea on the terraces which can be seen in the valley below. Rising well before dawn, they carry baskets of fresh tea leaves on their heads, and climb up the stairs to strategic points, where they can intercept the upward-bound tourists during the day, and sell their tea leaves. They are on this terrace now, because they are all headed home, having sold all of their goods. When they see our Patagonia fleece jackets, all my cameras, our fancy boots, and daypacks, they are agog. We can hear them chattering, and know they are talking about us, so Carey says “Hello!” in Chinese, and asks if any of them speak English. None speak much, but the exchange, makes them braver, so they walk over to us “to have a closer look.” One girl touches both the daypacks, and the fleece jackets, and all of them, politely, want to touch Carey’s silky, blonde hair. After some amusing minutes pass, our shoes are re-laced, we don our packs, and we walk to the top of the next flight of steps. Two girls literally run down the flight in front of us, so, wanting to show them we can, and have, been doing that as well, we take off, with the two other girls behind us. Everyone is running, but hitting every stone step. At the next terrace, the first two girls are nearly out of sight, but the other two linger. When we approach the next descent, each of the girls comes up on either side of us, and as we all start down in unison, they begin to whistle a simple tune, in perfect rhythm to our run. As we pick up the tune, broad smiles spread across their faces, and as we continue the melody, they wave, and then just leave us in the dust. It is a remarkable exchange, that makes a very long, but spectacular, day, even more so. Soon, our guest house appears, as does our guide/handler, but instead of being angry with us, he is just happy to see we have arrived, and we retire to the restaurant for dinner. For those that would like to follow this entire story, click here: posts #68-#118.
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 Friday, October 18, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #170: Daze, #170: After several very enjoyable days in a guest house on the summit of Mount Huangshan, Carey and I, have explored a myriad of trails, scenic view terraces, sunrises, and sunsets. We have also had some great dinners. We are always joined by our guide for this meal, which he uses to advise us about what we might do the next day. On our last night, he explains that in the morning, the bearers will collect our bags, and we will descend to the valley floor, staying in the same guest house we used, before coming here. Then, on the following morning, we would board a bus that would take us to Shanghai. He turned in after the meal, so Carey and I took a last walk under the stars, and hatched a VERY different plan. We have studied the various trail maps of the mountain, and believe we know where the stone staircase down to the valley floor begins, so that night we pack our bags, leaving them with a note for our guide, saying we will meet him for dinner at the guest house on the valley floor. Before dawn, while the others are seeking their view platform of choice, she and I go AWOL, and head for the staircase. We have NO IDEA what we are getting into, but after several hours of plunging down one STEEP stone staircase after another, there is certainly no going back. Our gear, looks like no one else’s on the mountain. We sport Patagonia fleece, state-of-the-art, climber’s daypacks filled with snacks, a very fancy Nikon camera system many lenses dangling from my hip-belt in foam padded-pockets, and most significantly, really great hiking boots. There is NO ONE on the stairs going down, but by midday, we start passing HUNDREDS of Chinese walking up, most in what foreigners refer to "Chinese slippers” - cheap, thin cloth shoes with plastic soles. Only some of those we pass carry a daypack, and ALL are dressed similarly - the men wear slacks with (mostly) long-sleeved, white collared shirts, and the women sport, dresses, slacks, or in some cases, jeans. When greeted in passing by Carey and I, most stand speechless, as though they have never seen anything like us. It makes for a VERY long and amusing day. It is also one of the most spectacular hikes of our lives. Going down!
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 Friday, October 11, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #169: Daze, #169: Carey, I, and our English speaking Chinese guide/handler, overnight in a guest house on the valley floor beneath the Huangshan Reserve, and then take an incredible funicular ride to the summit the next morning. Unlike the dreary, foggy, rainy day before, on this morning the sun is shining brightly, and the sculptured peaks and trees we view on the way up in the funicular, are simply fantastical. At the top, bearers collect our luggage, and take it to the guest house, where we will stay. Our guide gets us established, and then informs us, that we are on our own to wander the numerous trails, all of which lead to various scenic view platforms, and pavilions, and all connected by the amazing stone pathways that include 60,000 stairs carved into these mountains over several centuries. He says he will meet us for dinner, but he will stay in a “Chinese” guest house, and not in ours, because ours is only meant for foreign visitors. Sunrises and sunsets are major daily events, and also cultural spectacles. EVERYONE on the mountain attends one or another of the view platforms at dawn and dusk, to huzzah loudly at whatever the day offers. All hotels provide pre-dawn wake up with a light breakfast, and indeed, it is the sunrise I find most dramatic. We are in southern China, and the vast agricultural valleys, and tea terraces below, are VERY hot and humid during the day. At our elevation, that turns into a fog about the peaks at night, and often when you arrive at a view pavilion before dawn, it is CROWDED with people, all socked in by a drippy, cold fog. As the sun rises, the fog burns off slowly, revealing various peaks and ridgelines, here and there. This might go on for an hour or more, and with each revelation, those who see it, all exclaim their excitement loudly. There is considerable braying! Humorously, one might be at a station that is still in the fog, and from elsewhere on the mountain, where a clearing is occurring, you can hear the wild shouts from another pavilion. Carey and I soak all of this in for several very nice days of weather, taking lots of pictures, and visiting as many points of interest as we can. Our guide joins us for our dinner meals to discuss our day, and offer advice for the next, AND the food is quite good, so she and I are having a great time. Still, we would have liked to have experienced the incredible stone staircase up and down, and not just those here at the summit. For those that would like to follow this entire story, click here: posts #68-#118.
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 Friday, October 4, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #168: Daze, #168: With projects starting up in the Tongass rainforest of Alaska, and the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area, near Atlanta. I am doing a good bit of air travel in the U.S. I am also doing a very long flight to Shanghai/Suzhou, China, two or three times a year, to work with a premier embroidery guild as part of a collaboration facilitated by the UCLA-China Exchange Program. In the early stages of developing this cooperation, my partner - 1st wife, Carey,- frequently accompanies me. Besides the work I pursue at the embroidery institute, our host, Zhang Meifang, who has risen to be the Director, wants us to experience the many things that the country takes pride in, and that makes up part of their national character. She knows we are adventurers, and committed to various environmental issues, and so she plans a VERY unique trip for us to experience a reserve of mountains the Chinese refer to as sacred. Mount Huangshan now a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, and although VERY popular as a Chinese tourists destination, the Chinese government currently feels that it is not quite ready for foreign tourism, so it is still unusual to find foreign tourists there. Zhang is not only Director of the embroidery guild with whom I am collaborating, she is also a congressional delegate to the National People’s Congress, so she has far-reaching power, which she uses to create our trip. We are excited for a chance to do this, but we have no idea what it entails. It starts with a train ride from Suzhou, that drops us at 4a.m. at a tiny rail station, where a car is waiting. It is a rainy, foggy day, and we drive for two hours through farmlands and rural villages, finally turning into to a steep-sided valley, and ascending a horribly maintained road, that parallels a spectacular river. We have entered a venerated tea-growing area, and many of the surrounding slopes are terraced for growing. We also pass many girls on the drive, who are offering fresh tea leaves at their roadside stands, or from baskets balanced on their heads. We eventually arrive at a small cluster of old-school Chinese guest houses, where we will spend the night. At the guest house, we are met by a man that will be our personal guide, so he gets us settled in and fed, while he explains our program. We may walk around on the lower trails at the mountain’s foot today, then spend the night at the guest house, to rise early and take a funicular to other guests houses at the summit. We will then stay there for several more days to hike around. When we ask if it is possible for us to walk up instead of ride, he tells us that the trails on Huangshan consists of 60,000 or more stairs carved into the rock, and they cannot be completed in one day. Such a hike would require a stay at a midway guest house, deemed, as yet, unsuitable for foreigners. We are disappointed, but tell him we understand. We dine with him that night, and in the early morning, join him for a spectacular ride to the summit.
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 Friday, September 27, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #167: Daze, #167: The woodlands of the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area (CNRA), adjacent the city of Atlanta are more diverse than the forests of the Hudson River, where I have just completed and published other work. This far south, things are more hot, and humid, a greater part of the year, and this has created a fantastical jungle of growth, where species entwine themselves with each other, and make passage through the forest difficult. While this variety may not be all that obvious in the green of summer, when fall arrives, and each species does “its thing,” the color show goes off like fireworks, displaying just about every shade and tone every seen. It makes for a potent visual mix, and I fully indulge myself. How about the "suspended animation” above,..YEOW! You should see this printed at 48”x “66!
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 Friday, September 20, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #166: Daze, #166: The Chattahoochee National Recreation Area (CNRA) includes both a national forest, and the Chattahoochee River, which flows through the middle of Atlanta. Tom Cousins, one of Atlanta’s great patrons and developers (see last post), has created the huge complex, Wildwood Office Parks, adjacent the river, and he has commissioned me to photograph the CNRA. Although it is only the mid-80’s, Cousins’ Wildwood development is considered “environmentally sensitive,” because of sight planning that made many structures less visible in the landscape, and as I would learn, Cousins also provided 1,700 acres of land now incorporated into the CNRA. I knew he offered me this commission because he was especially fond of some of my images in the series, “Order From Chaos,” so I face the challenge of working in the forest without hesitation, but I know I also need to address the river. Much of the year, Atlanta is VERY hot and Humid, and as you can see in the previous post, the cold river water and the hot, moist air, often create morning fogs along the river’s edge, so I begin to study the visuals of that. The forest also has a stunning fall and spring display, and I look forward to those seasons, as I know there will be a lot of opportunity to shoot.
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 Friday, September 13, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #165: Daze, #165: 1985 proves to be quite a year for me. Aperture publishes The Hudson River and the Highlands, I am invited to visit Suzhou, China, through the UCLA-China Exchange Program, and The Wallace Funds and the McIntosh Foundation offer me a commission to photograph the Tongass rainforest of Alaska. As if I am not busy enough, I am also offered another multi-year commission that brings me to Atlanta. Having seen my “Order From Chaos” work, it has attracted the attention of one of Atlanta’s great art patrons and most significant developers, Thomas Cousins. Cousins has built a HUGE corporate property adjacent the Chattahoochee River, and he wants me to make images of the river and the surrounding national forest, which is all part of the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area. He intends to use those pictures to adorn the walls of the many large office buildings that are part of his Wildwood Office Parks development. Cousins, it turns out, is a major figure in the city, and one of its most significant developers. Wildwood is actually just a small part of an empire. He also developed the CNN Center, the Omni Coliseum, and the Peachtree Tower, remaking the skyline of the city. To further Atlanta’s rejuvenation and growth, he purchased the St.Louis Hawks basketball team, bringing them to Atlanta, where he also owned the ice hockey team, the Atlanta Flames, and the soccer club, the Atlanta Apollos. A great sport enthusiast of many disciplines, Cousins redesigned Bobby Jones’ East Lake Golf Club that had fallen into disrepair, and it is now considered one of the leading golf courses in America, and is part of the PGA Tour. Oh yes, and he served as Chairman of the Board at the High Museum for a time. Clearly, this is someone I would like to provide with a successful result from the commission being offered me.
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 Friday, September 6, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #164: Daze, #164: One of Zhang’s reasons to choose to work with “Snowfall,” (last post) was that it would be “simple” to embroider, and not take much time (about 6-months). There was no need to dye an extensive palette of color, or to offer up more than a few stitch styles, although they had more than 40, created by design through many generations, that they could use. Because “Snowfall” proves to be a success, everyone is eager to move forward with something else, and I want to understand the range of what we can do, so I ask if we could attempt a piece in color that would incorporate as many stitch styles as suited the textures of the foliage,..and I had a very specific image in mind. I had just recently created it working on my commission in the Hudson River Valley and it is a fall scene around a lake with a wide variety of very different trees and fall colors in the view. The print is quite dramatic because of the brilliant red leaves set against the wet, black tree trunk, and the pastel colors of the background, and I feel certain the Chinese will understand what I am proposing. There are several gasps, and then ensuing hours of discussion, when I reveal the print to them, but in the end I read this correctly, and Zhang agrees with the embroidery team, that they will do this image as a 20”x 24”, 1-sided, wall hanging, and she will use the subject matter to show off both their dye and stitching skills. 1-1/2yrs. later, I am invited back to Suzhou for the unveiling of “Red Maple with Black Trunk.” It is a spectacle of color with shades that run from luminous reds, to subtle variations of pastel, and there are stitches upon stitches, making the surface of the piece dimensionally textural. We are beginning what appears to be a very successful collaboration. When I bring this piece home and frame it out, I have it for less than 6-months, and it is acquired by the Cargill collection, where it currently resides.
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Friday, August 30, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #163: Daze, #163: As a participant in the UCLA-China Exchange Program, I hope to be invited to collaborate with embroiderers from Suzhou, widely considered to be the best in the world. To achieve that, UCLA introduces me to Dr. He Shan-an, Director of the Nanjing Botanical Garden, who offers to be my sponsor, introducing me and my ideas to the administrators of the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute (SERI), and serving our a translator. As fate would have it, Dr. He not only likes my ideas and my imagery, he is a lifelong friend of Zhang Meifang, who is about to ascend as the institute’s director. Dr. He succeeds in getting me invited, and is there in Suzhou to facilitate introductions when I arrive in 1986. I am the first non-Chinese to ever ask to work with these embroiderers, and I am also one of the first non-Chinese visitors to Suzhou, since China and the US decided to open their doors to each other. The national institute wherein I might work, was created by Mao, to make embroidered political tapestries, and it is still very much that place. The first order of business is a banquet where I sit with Zhang and the current Director, having a huge meal with about 30 other embroiderers and administrators. During that meal, I learn (through surreptitious translation) the current director tells Zhang not to even think about working with me, to which Zhang replies that she will make her own decision about me, when she takes charge, which she does a few days later. On this first visit, I spend two weeks, having long discussions about many different photographs, and my ideas to translate them. As the end of my visit approaches, SERI has not agreed to collaborate, and UCLA previously advised me that I may not succeed in getting them to create anything during my initial introduction. When the car arrives to take me to the train, however, Zhang and He await inside. and on the way to the train, Zhang tells me she will agree to do an embroidery. Surprisingly, she has chosen “Snowfall” from my black & white portfolio, “WINTERS: 1970-1980,” and she offers to make a complicated 2-sided, 16”x 20” embroidery out of it. I am very excited to have actually reached an agreement, and 6-months later when I return, this (above) is what I am presented. It is diaphanous, transparent in the whites, and exactly the same on both sides. Special “looping” stitches representing falling snow, and the highly detailed stitching in the dead tree, set against the background of the “cross” stitched forest, creates a perfect 3-dimensional illusion. Everyone agrees the results of our experiment are beautiful, AND the image has retained VERY photographic qualities, although it is entirely rendered in thread.
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 Friday, August 23, 2019

The Daze of My Life:  Robert Glenn Ketchum, An Autobiography #162: Daze, #162: When UCLA agreed to allow me into their UCLA-China Exchange Program, it set some interesting political wheels in motion. I would need a letter of invitation to collaborate from the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute (SERI), and I had no contacts there. Additionally it would turn out that the appropriate contacts were also high-level politicians, by protocol, only approachable through someone of equal status. Fortunately, UCLA has a very connected population of both Chinese students and teachers, and they went to work for me, trying to find me the appropriate sponsor. Interestingly, the person they find, is a visiting professor doing research at UCLA, and his name is Dr. He Shan-an. He is the Director of the Nanjing Botanical Garden, among the most prestigious in China. He travels widely abroad communicating his expertise in b