Tuesday, June 16, 2020
THE TONGASS: Stop the Cut, There are Salmon in the Trees, #199,
Tongass, #199: In 1986, I return to the
Tongass rainforest for a second summer to complete my commission. In the previous summer, my assistant had been my friend, and fellow artist,
Philip Slagter. This summer, I will be joined by various other friends at different points of the project, spread over several months. The first trip I organize is to return the
Ketchikan, from where I intend to access a
US Forest Service cabin on the shore of
Goat Lake in
Misty Fjords National Monument. Philip and I had seen the lake and cabin in a flightsee the summer before, and I had yet to use the resources of these many USFS cabins, spread throughout the Tongass, so I wanted to see what they would be like. I am joined now by another photographer and his wife, Krys and Jan Cianciarulo, who will be my first assistants of this year. Goat Lake is large, and it sits in a granite basin about 1,800ft. above a fjord. It has a spectacular waterfall pouring out of it, and the reason the USFS built a cabin in such a place was to provide goat hunters access to the high country. To get there, we will take a float plane out of Ketchikan, and land on the lake. We will only be there for three days, but they will be quite unique because this is high alpine rainforest, in one of the wettest parts of all of the Tongass, often receiving 325” of rain, and sometimes more.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020, @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd
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Tuesday, June 9, 2020
THE TONGASS: Stop the Cut, There are Salmon in the Trees, #198,
Tongass, #198: In 1992, I was invited to have a major one-person exhibition at the
Houston FotoFest. When I received the diagrams of the various galleries I would use, the entrance to the space featured large, curved walls. Since there were ample galleries throughout, rather than hang framed images on the curved walls, I decided to do something else, and I created unique prints for that room. Taking advantage of the new
Fuji Crystal Archive digital print materials, I created several prints that would be hung without frames, just using clips and pins, allowing them to curve with the wall. The image above is “Roads to Nowhere (5,000 miles and growing)” measuring 48”x 150”. I took this photograph on
Prince of Wales Island the first summer of my
Tongass rainforest commission. The print incorporated the text you see to the right, which is too small to read as a jpg., so here is what it says:
The Tongass National Forest of southeast Alaska is the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, and nurtures North America’s greatest concentrations of eagles, and grizzly bear. Freshwater river systems support abundant wild salmon populations, and the marine environment sustains a healthy diversity of shellfish, crab, halibut, seal, and whale.
In spite of this, over one
billion dollars of the American taxpayer’s money has been spent as corporate welfare, subsidizing timber companies to build more than 5,000 miles of road in order to access and clearcut the forest. Most of the usable wood from these clearcuts is shockingly undervalued, and sold at this discount to Japan. The clearcuts also damage or fragment valuable habitat, negatively impacting the recreational tourism, and wild commercial fishing industries, whose long-term contributions to the state economy are sustainable, and ultimately have greater value.
According to a 10-year schedule recently published by the Department of the Interior, $165 million
additional tax dollars will be spent to underwrite a substantial amount of new corporate road building. Many of the roads proposed will be constructed in 50 areas presently designated to be roadless.
Our tax dollars are being used to assist profitable private industries in building roads that lead to nowhere, and damage valuable public resources. At the same time, the nation’s infrastructure of highways and bridges is deteriorating, and most urban areas suffer crippling traffic and gridlock, because they lack the necessary federal funding to repair, improve, and expand transportation systems that already exist.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020, @RobertGKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd
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Tuesday, May 26, 2020
THE TONGASS: Stop the Cut, There are Salmon in the Trees, #196,
Tongass, #196: After the previous day of interviewing loggers at a log camp, and then being driven indoors by a torrential rain, my assistant,
Philip Slagter, and I, awake to an overcast sky at our B&B in
Craig, but the rain has stopped. We are due to return to
Ketchikan by ferry around midday, so we decide to eat breakfast, check out, and do one last cruise through some of the clearcut areas, closest to us, and along the road to the ferry terminal. As you have seen from the last 10 posts, most of the images I have made are singular frames, and most often of expansive views, so the first few shots of this morning start with that was as well, but it seems redundant. How many pictures of this destruction can one make, until they all start to look the same? As I ponder this dilemma, the overcast seems to be dissipating, and although there is still no sun, the day grows considerably brighter. With plenty of time still, before our departure, Philip and I wax philosophical about my artistic dead end of the moment, and in that conversation, he casually suggests that it is unfortunate that no one picture can capture the scale of the miles and miles of destroyed old growth forest that we have seen in the last three days.
Prince of Wales is a vast island, and even though my pictures suggest the expanse of the destruction, sitting where we are, and looking out over the terrain, provides a very different sense of it than any one picture can do. Then a thought occurs to me. In my recently completed work in the
Hudson River Valley, I occasionally used multiple frames to explore an expansive view. In that project, those views were grand, and most of the subjects beautiful. Here, perhaps I might render this subject in the same way to reveal the hideous.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020, @RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd
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Tuesday, May 19, 2020
THE TONGASS: Stop the Cut, There are Salmon in the Trees, #195,
Tongass, #195: After our morning in a logging camp on
Prince of Wales Island doing interviews, my assistant,
Philip Slagter, and I, go on a “field trip” with one of the loggers to see where he has been working. Nicknamed, “Woodie,” he takes us to a cut where he is currently gathering slash (debris wood to be burned), and after explaining the extent of the tract, he brings us to a “view” location for some picture taking. While I do take some overview shots, on an increasingly gray and rainy day, I am draw to the matching tonal colorations of a pile of slash timber and the gray sky above. When Woodie sees me making a picture there, he announces that this is a burn pile he accumulated entirely by himself, a sizable task. Acknowledging his considerable accomplishment, I make the image that appears in the previous post, one of my most purchased industrial image prints. Shortly thereafter, the sky falls in and it begins to rain hard, so we return to the logging camp where we share further conversation with the loggers,..and drink. Philip and I have now been “in country” long enough to drink with the best of them, so we do. Not really in condition to drive shitty roads back to
Craig, we do so anyway, and I am just crazy (and drunk enough) to still stop and take pictures (above). Finally, driven into our car by rainfall, we wend our way back to town, where we crash at our bed-and-breakfast, BUT not before some food and further drinking in a “local favorites” bar. Really? Really!
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020, @RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd
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Tuesday, May 12, 2020
THE TONGASS: Stop the Cut, There are Salmon in the Trees, #194,
Tongass, #194: After our first day of road-tripping on
Prince of Wales Island (last 6 posts), my friend, and assistant for the summer,
Philip Slagter, and I return to a B&B in
Craig for the night. In the morning we are met by a “guide” who is willing to take us into a logging camp where we will be allowed to photograph and do interviews. The loggers have been told we are just “observing” for a book I am writing, but the point-of-view in my work is not mentioned. Even so, totting cameras and tape recorders, and dressed in state-of-the-art
Patagonia gear, they clearly treat us with polite suspicion (as well they should). We spend the morning in the “mess” shack, drinking coffee and having a “round-table” discussion with several of them, and then one of them named “Woodie,” offers to take us to a cut where we can make pictures. It is a cold, grey day, raining off-and-on, and although I do make a number of pictures of larger overviews, the one that has resonated in my book and throughout my exhibits is above. The silver-grey tonalities are amplified by my Cibachrome printing process. This is a pile of slash that has been collected to be burned, and Woodie hauled all of this here, by himself, something he was quite proud of. I am sure it was A LOT of work, SO, this is, “Rootwads and Slash/Ode to Woodie.” The sad end to a patch of old growth
Tongass rainforest.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020, @RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd
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Tuesday, May 5, 2020
THE TONGASS: Stop the Cut, There are Salmon in the Trees, #193,
Tongass, #193: My last post jumped one summer ahead to show you a map of what
Philip Slagter, and I, are discovering on the ground in our first summer.
Prince of Wales Island has a very few “main” roads, but off of those main roads, hundreds of spurs, extend out into thousands of even smaller spurs, and they penetrate every stand of timber they can find, accessing and clearcutting the forest into a patchwork of destroyed old growth habitat, and decimating hundreds of salmon spawning streams. The cutting is reckless, and wasteful, leaving massive amounts of down timber to rot, and referencing it as unusable “slash.” This kind of management of a rare and valuable PUBLIC resource is the disgrace of the US Forest Service. If our politicians really want to reform and reduce government excess, they should start by “clearcutting” all those who manage “harvesting” the resource they should enriching. These people draw their salaries from our tax dollars, but they work for a few select timber companies, some of which are not even American owned. This habitat and its MANY renewable resources are OUR trees, and OUR salmon, and they are being devastated by corporations, in many cases from abroad, that could not care less, they just want to be profitable turning the
Tongass into pulp, so they can sell diapers to the 3rd World. To me, this is a CRIMINAL activity.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020, @RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd
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Tuesday, April 28, 2020
THE TONGASS: Stop the Cut, There are Salmon in the Trees, #192,
Tongass, #192: By the second summer of my visits to the
Tongass, what I am doing there is known to many. My wife Carey has joined me to do interviews with people, and we talk to quite a range of them including fishermen, loggers, retail merchants, and cruise operators. One day, however, stands out as particularly unique. We are in a hotel in Juneau when the phone rings, and the caller identifies himself as a US Forest Service employee that wants us to show us something he thinks will be VERY revealing about the timber harvest on
Prince of Wales Island. Interested, we agree to meet him for lunch, and he asks that we do so at a remote cafe, well outside of town, where none of his fellow employees might see us together. When we meet, he is also out of uniform as a further precaution. While having casual conversation about our project, he asks if we had been to Prince of Wales, and if we know the USFS public line about their limited roadbuilding. We have, and do. USFS “press” claims their roading activities are VERY limited, and especially respectful of all salmon streams. At this point, he casually passes several rolled maps over to Carey, saying “This is what is actually being done. Don’t open them here.” He then asks if we really intend to publish such documents, and when we respond, yes, if they are pertinent, he says we will surely anger A LOT of people, and some will lose their jobs. Then he asks if we use USFS wilderness cabins when we trek, advising that if we do, we should no longer register for our permits under our actual names, because “hunting accidents happen all the time in the rainforest.” When we get back to our hotel and unroll the maps, this (above) is what we find. On the USFS maps that have been released to the public, there is fine print text at the bottom, in a little noticed disclaimer stating, “no roads under two miles in length are shown because of scale.” On these maps we have been given, literally thousands of “spur” roads under two miles in length scrawl every which way, blanketing the island. We published these maps in our Aperture book,
The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rainforest, making the real truth public for the first time.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020, @RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd
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Tuesday, April 21, 2020
THE TONGASS: Stop the Cut, There are Salmon in the Trees, #191,
Tongass, #191: In many cases, the logging corporations try to make their deforesting operations, more “discreet” to the tourist’s eye. Cruise ship passengers are the largest group of visitors, so many cuts are on an island's interior. Near a shore where it might be more visible, loggers may leave a “screen” of trees at the edge of the beach, then clearcut everything behind it. On the roads around
Prince of Wales, a similar game is played with many of the cuts being “screened” from the most driven roadways. traveling these main roads, you do see cuts, but should you turn on to one of the smaller side roads, within a short distance you will arrive at an epic “ground zero” with a complex hatch-work of roads and spurs, eating into the forest in every direction. This road engineering and design is one of the most publicly deceitful acts that the logging companies pursue, and it is all done with the approval of the US Forest Service. Please stay tuned for the next post - I will show you the “map trick,” from actual USFS maps, leaked to me by a disgruntled employee, who was opposed to the further destruction of the largest temperate rainforest in the world.
photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2020, @RbtGlennKetchum @LittleBearProd #LittleBearProd
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