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| © Robert Glenn Ketchum |
| Click photo for more pictures of Southwest Alaska by Robert Glenn Ketchum. |
What was the outcome of your Washington initiative on Southwest Alaska?
On the second day of the conference at the Reagan Trade Center I held my own press conference. The plan was for me to give my PowerPoint slide show about the issue, because even in Washington most people still don't know where Southwest Alaska really is or what Bristol Bay is all about. The PowerPoint has a lot more pictures than the print exhibit itself. I go into my little story about how big it is, how many millions of dollars of commercial value the fish have, and then what the threats are. I use the pictures of the habitat to show them that it's not the frozen wasteland they might think it is. Southwest Alaska isn't even above the Arctic circle, so it's got a beautiful spring and summer.
The press conference took place in press conference Room 6 of the Capitol building. You don't get into those rooms unless you're sponsored by a member of the Senate or a member of the House. So in this case, [Democratic U.S. Representative from New York State] Maurice Hinchey, who's known me since the Tongass campaign, and [Democratic U.S. Representative from the state of Washington] Jay Inslee had set up and were hosting the press conference for me. They told me I'd be able to display a few prints and do my PowerPoint show for legislative aids to the House members who will ultimately be asked to vote for the bill, and who more than likely don't know anything about the subject. The legislators themselves usually don't come to events like that; they send their aids and staff members. The aids and staff digest it all and then go back to the representative's office and regurgitate it in round table discussions where the legislator is brought up to date on a particular issue or bill.
So that's what I thought I was going to do. It was the end of a long day I'd spent walking around lobbying for banning offshore drilling in Bristol Bay and turning it into a national marine reserve. I had targeted all my California legislators -- [Senator] Barbara Boxer, [Senator] Dianne Feinstein, [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi, [Representative] Henry Waxman, [Representative] Loretta Sanchez, and [Representative] Jim Costa -- because they all know me. We knew we weren't going to get to all of them personally. But where we could we did a photo op, and where we couldn't we met with their top legislative aids and gave them our PowerPoint CD and written materials and, you know, did our pitch.
As an aside, we weren't inventing this. We were doing what Ansel Adams did in the 1930s when he lobbyied on behalf of the Sierra Club to make Kings Canyon a National Park. He walked around and showed his portfolio to members of Congress. But that day we were making the rounds with a film crew and with Cristina Mittermeier, the head of the International League of Conservation Photographers, who also had a photographer with her.
Was that part of the plan?
Oh, yeah, I've learned to do that. You come into somebody's office with six people and a film crew and everybody lights up. They're on their best behavior. And so that was part of it.
So I'm wearing my little Washington suit and it's toward the end of the day and I'm supposed to do this press conference. At three o'clock I walk into the conference room and it's not just filled with staffers -- here's MSNBC and NPR and all of the Alaskan media, and there's the head of the World Wildlife Fund and the head of Defenders of Wildlife. And I'm like, this doesn't seem right -- this is much bigger than I expected. Alaskan fishermen had flown in fresh salmon and Alaskan beer and all these other Alaskan products. It's clearly much more than a casual staffer press conference.
And who turned it into that?
Hinchey and Inslee, as it turned out. So I'm standing there waiting to speak, and Hinchey and Inslee walk in. And Maurice [Hinchey] walks over to me right away and says it's good to see you again and good to be working with you on a project again. And he says let me introduce you to my co-sponsor, who admires your work, and he introduces me to Jay Inslee. And Jay says, before I even became a politician, I read your Tongass book. I've lived in Seattle all my life, and that book was magic to us. And I just think it's great that now I get to work with you on Bristol Bay. And with that he turns to the microphone and introduces himself and Maurice, and does this very nice introduction for me. He says a few words about the offshore drilling bill, and that they've invited me here today to brief everyone on this issue because my books define it.
And then he says, we have a present for Robert. Three minutes ago we put H.R. 1957, the bill we've all been working for, on the House floor. We decided to introduce it early because Robert's here. And now we have to go back to the House floor because we're still in session. So we're turning things over to Robert, and you can direct your questions to him and enjoy his PowerPoint show. Then they both walk over to me and shake hands and walk out, and I'm speechless.
So I do my thing and take a lot of media questions. And there's a couple of Alaskan fishermen who are there from the villages and we get them engaged in the conversation too. Finally it starts to wind down. And a woman from the World Wildlife Fund who I work with comes up next to me and whispers, ‘You're going to like this a lot. You know, there has to be a companion bill in the Senate.' And I said yeah, I know that. And she said John Kerry's going to be your sponsor in the Senate. So I got all that in one day. That was a really, really good day.
But how did you make those kinds of inroads years ago, when you were working on the Tongass book? You were pretty much unknown to the Capitol crowd.
At first I was basically led around by [former Wisconsin Senator] William Proxmire's staff and a group called the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council that was the primary grassroots motivators at that point. I didn't know what to do, and they were telling me. They were helping me put my Tongass work up in the Capitol rotunda, arranging to show it at the National Museum of Natural History, stuff like that. And we were coordinating events around those things to drive the legislation and make stuff happen. I was a willing participant, but I wasn't the orchestrator of it. From that time on I've just become increasingly more empowered. Nobody's leading me around doing this stuff; now I orchestrate it myself. I'm actually leading groups around teaching them how to do it better. That's all part of the "performance" that I was talking about.
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| © Robert Glenn Ketchum |
| Click photo for more pictures of Southwest Alaska by Robert Glenn Ketchum. |
So where do the two Congressional bills stand now?
A few weeks after my exhibits in Washington I got a call from the World Wildlife Fund, asking if I could FedEx them a box of Rivers of Life books and sign two of them specifically for Feinstein and Pelosi. And I said sure, what's up. They said that Kerry was going to meet with Dianne and Nancy about getting them on the Senate and House bills as co-sponsors, and he wants to present them with your books.
So, you know, here we have a fairly significant legislator using my work to drive legislation. That's the best of all outcomes as far as I'm concerned. I also have enough respect in the conservation community that they all want to work with me. Those groups are calling me now and asking can you help us, we need your pictures, having realized that my photographs can help them drive their issues. It used to be me calling them up and saying I've got these pictures, maybe you can use them. So that's the good fortune of a 40-year career.
You'll appreciate this. When we brought the Southwest Alaska work out about three years ago and started to tour it, we approached the big museums where you really get high attendance like the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and offered them the show. They all know me, yet the response was always the same: You know, if this show were about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge we would probably take it. But this doesn't seem all that important and we're really not interested, thanks. Then, a few days after the press conferences in DC, after all the legislators had issued their own press releases on the matter, I got a call from the American Museum of Natural History saying can we reconsider that Southwest Alaska show. And so now I'm talking to the exhibits committee about bringing it to New York. Now you hear more about the Southwest than ANWR.
Has your political experience over the years had any effect on the way you shoot? Does knowing when you're shooting that the pictures will serve a political purpose take some of the art out of your photography?
Do I think about that stuff when I'm shooting up there in a plane or down there on a boat? As an artist, no, I'm not thinking about any of that stuff. I'm looking in the rectangle of the viewfinder, and the landscape is going below me at a relatively good clip because the plane's flying or the boat is floating along. It's all about seeing. It's about what's going on in the full frame of that rectangle. I've always operated like that.
At the moment of taking the picture, all the homework I've done -- research, interviews, and so on -- plays a subliminal role. I'm not thinking this is Grant River, an important stream I need to have a picture of. I'm thinking light, color, and composition. I'm deciding whether or not the horizon should be in the shot. I'm working out formal issues. The politics of it all is gone for the moment. When I edit for the books I come back to the political agenda. But later, if I've got a shot that isn't perfect but really serves the purpose of a book, it may get into the edit.
To me books and exhibitions are very different things. That same picture would never get into one of my exhibitions because my exhibitions are entirely about my art output. My books, by contrast, are a tool for communication. To me the art of the book isn't about making the book look like your art, which was more Ansel's style. The art of the book is to make a book that is a complete and moving vehicle, one that presents a whole lot of information to its reader. And that's a whole other kind of art, one that involves sequencing and editorial choice and integration with text.
So how much time do you spend actually shooting these days?
Some portion of my time is spent in my studio getting the work edited and organized, and doing all that other stuff you have to do to pay your bills and survive, which for me is largely sales of artwork. I've always been able to balance those things out pretty well, and in any given cycle or any given year, I may be doing one more than the other. But if you look at the Southwest Alaska project, I spent four and a half years in the field, sometimes nine months at a time.
The part of Southwest Alaska that this is all about is larger than the state of Washington. Yet it only has 150 miles of paved road. So I floated 16 or 18 major rivers and many lesser ones, and flew hundreds of hours, to do the pictures. That was the only way to access most of the area. I think you can really tell that by looking at the photographs. Some of the areas that I photographed are so pristine and so remote that the pictures just really look...
Wild.
Yeah. They look wild.
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