Chris Monroe, one of my favorite comic-strip artists, recently recounted the following “Lake Scene” vignette in her Violet Days strip:
Every time I drive down this road, I see this little lake through the trees. It is quite perfect, with no cabins and lots of tiny islands covered with pine trees. Each time I see that lake, I am filled with a memory … But the memory is not of a lake, it’s of a beer sign.
The beer sign hung in our basement behind the bar. It was loud due to its clunky rotation from scene to scene. All the scenes were lakes on a sunny day. It was lit within… In the summer, on hot days, us kids used to sit down in the basement at the bar and plug in the beer sign and play 45s, looking at that beach in the lake in the beer sign. It was so pretty. Who knew it was only forty miles away? Too far to bike, anyway.
Nature photography in Minnesota is brightly illuminated by that beer sign and its sky-blue waters; Les Blacklock, one of the patriarchs of the genre, likely made some of those images. But the point of this story for me is that the real experience of the little lake is a reverie in the basement, a dream of a lake.
In America, the development of nature photography as a genre paralleled this country’s gradual loss of wild places. Photography has always been a way to snatch and save something out of the welter of loss and change. Legendary photographers like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston captured the mountains and coastlines of the West in part to protect them from desecration.
Adams and Weston were charter members of f/64, the group of likeminded artists in the 1950s whose name referred to a camera’s smallest f-stop, and symbolized the kind of photos that one could make with such a pin-sized aperture: sharply defined throughout vast depths of field, with a full range of tones from white to deepest black. These images offered a kind of god’s-eye view of the landscape, a view that one could never have with one’s eyes alone. The camera yielded an apotheosis of the West that made it holy.
The development of nature photography in Minnesota was driven in part by the same urges, but also by the desire to revel in beloved imagery, to sentimentalize it. Education also was a factor; nature photographers here are often naturalists. The Blacklock family, which was responsible for much of the formation of ideas of nature photography in Minnesota, embodies this more approachable image of Nature.
Les Blacklock was born in 1921 and started photographing the environment in the forties. He is Minnesota’s best-known practitioner of this type, and he was not afraid to work commercially. He created images for calendars and Hamm’s beer signs, and also documented deer in an educational film for Encyclopedia Britannica. His work had little to do with art-world issues, and had more in common with nature writers like Sigurd Olson, with whom Blacklock created The Hidden Forest, a classic of canoe-country nature writing.
Les’s son Craig grew up working with his father, using the same large-format cameras and color film. Les was his first teacher, but Craig also worked with photographers like Cole Weston, Edward Weston’s son. In both technique and content, the son began to tread where the father had not: He studied black-and-white photography and the arcana of Zone technique, and spent a great deal of his early career shooting mountains in the West. In time, Craig found his métier back home in northern Minnesota. Looking back over a selection of his work, which will be on view in a retrospective at the Minnesota Center for Photography’s new Northeast Minneapolis space beginning August 21, the younger Blacklock seems driven by at least two forces: the desire to capture Lake Superior wilderness, and an equally intense desire to break out of the nature-photography genre and do work that stands as photography, with no other qualifiers.
Published in 1993, Lake Superior Images documents Craig Blacklock’s circumnavigation of Lake Superior by kayak. This ambitious project resulted in an exhibit at the Tweed Museum of Art in Duluth and produced a book; it also established Blacklock’s reputation. It’s not a document of one trip, however, but images gathered from about 1984 through 1992.
It would be stronger if it documented a single trip, only what one particular journey gave—because, despite the beauty of many of these images, when taken together they can get thin. The human capacity for amazement, after all, is heavily taxed of late, and there are many gorgeous photos of magnificent settings out there. Still, in small doses, these photos can be ravishing—like the book’s final image, a small sapling completely whelmed in a massive frozen waterfall. As a group of images, however, there’s no concept that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
That’s not to say that Lake Superior Images was not an achievement. Blacklock’s pictures here left behind many of the clichés his father had helped to create, and introduced to color nature photography the kind of radical sublime found in the monumental photos of Adams and Weston.
Some Minnesota photographers have been expanding the genre of nature photography. The celebrated Ely-based photographer Jim Brandenburg, for instance, recently published the well-received books Chased by the Light: A 90-Day Journal and Looking for Summer. For these projects Brandenburg shot just one image per day, a restriction that gave the images it yielded a comparable power.
Others have done interesting work that takes as its subject the impact of the human on the natural, and vice versa. Suz Szucs, in recent works at the Soap Factory, depicted road-kill deer in big, lush photos, mostly in snow and backed by intense blue winter skies. The damaged grace of the deer is harshly beautiful and thought-provoking. Many of Alec Soth’s photos portray landscapes along the Mississippi, portraying the traces of the human creatures who dwell along the river.
Craig Blacklock’s approach has been different. In the 1990s, he made photos that looked like abstract color-field paintings but were based in the real. This produced Horizons, a body of work with no subject other than sky and water, printed with razor sharpness at immense size.
Blacklock was inspired by Grand Portage artist George Morrison’s paintings, which for decades used the sky/lake horizon as their only compositional element. Blacklock has noted that he found color-field paintings frustrating for their lack of reference; Horizons allowed him to work in a formalist mode while sticking to a comfortable, recognizable subject. This impulse—the attempt to cover all the bases, to be formally beautiful but also give some point of reference, to be challenging but easily comprehensible—is the main weakness of this work and this genre. Still, Horizons is Blacklock’s most successful body of work in the MCP retrospective in terms of its audacious fidelity to an idea and the grand austerity of many of its images.
In A Voice Within, Blacklock’s current body of work, we see Honey Blacklock, Craig’s wife, posing on the shores or in the waters of Lake Superior. This series’ obvious precursor is Edward Weston’s photography of his then-wife Charis; but the rhetorical force of Blacklock’s images is entirely different.
Charis was a superb model, her body well-suited to conveying the vectors of a composition. Her body’s angularity combined with a distinctive style of movement to create the line important to dancers. In a famous series of images, she threw herself down on the sand of the dunes in California. The poses were created not by posing but by the stresses of the fall, and the need to brace and push against the force of gravity.
By contrast, the images of Honey are of a young, strong, and attractive woman in largely relaxed, deliberately composed stances that do their best to avoid any real
erotic overtones. Craig Blacklock describes Honey as being “one of the words in my artistic vocabulary, used within my aesthetic style like the horizon line.” He describes the process as an important and collaborative one: “Once the composition is arranged, I make a Polaroid, which we study together. I am primarily looking at compositional issues while Honey is looking at her emotional balance within the scene, her body language… Through this process we investigate the language and traditional subject/photographer roles of photography, where the photographer will ‘make,’ ‘take’ or ‘capture’ an image of his or her subject. This aggressive language… becomes obsolete within the highly interactive method Honey and I use.”
This may well be true, but it produces largely bland, peculiarly virtuous-looking images of a likable unclothed woman in a variety of settings familiar from Blacklock’s earlier work. While focusing on what they want the images not to do—in Craig’s words, “not to have her seen as challenged by nature, over-romanticizing it, nor conquering it”—this husband-and-wife team seems to have at best a cloudy notion of what they want the images to do.
The intentions of A Voice Within are admirable, but also lamentable—especially in the need of the creators to stay above reproach, to seem clean-living and, when it comes to gender issues, ideologically sound. One of the curses of nature photography is its tendency to produce a sanitized view of nature; this series produces a sanitized view of the body in nature. Honey’s essay exhaustively details the discomforts of the shoots—the cold, the sand in every crevice, the hardness of rocks, the occasional onlooker; she takes pains to tell us that modeling nude was not at all a sexual experience. Why not, instead of trying for an illusion of peace, shoot what it actually felt like to be in that place? What would be wrong with documenting pain and pleasure, rather than comfort? The attitude overarching the work is prescriptive, rather than documentary, and this waters down the resulting images.
Human beings are not, in general, ideologically sound on gender issues; naked bodies do produce desire. This has, let’s face it, been a major reason to use the human figure in art and photography. The challenge, I think, would be to produce images full of complex and interesting desire. Or at least of the overwhelming presence of a unique, complex human being. True relations between people—or for that matter, between people and nature—are full of the push and pull of power relations, of longing, projection, the attempt to know what is not the self.
There are some fine images in this group, however. Close-ups of Honey’s body are often beautifully handled. These images may be more sexual; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The attempt to erase desire from images of nakedness seems foolish—what makes sense is an attempt to link a real sense of presence and power to that desirability. For example, in one image, a kind of challenge and invitation are constructed by wandering lines of wavemarks on sand leading to a strongly cocked foot poised in front of the pubis; elsewhere, sinuous interlockings of the lines of the body are seen as closely as any lover would see them. My favorite is a wonderfully witty shot of the model’s feet, locked together at the soles like lovers, wrestling just under an innocent moon of buttocks.
Where some poses seem truly natural to this strong body, the heavily staged shots that “compare” Honey’s body and a feature of the landscape don’t work very well. I am pulled away from a knowledge of humanness and forced to admire the photographer’s compositional skills—never very much fun.
The Blacklocks’ wish to broaden the genre they have done so much to create is admirable; what’s needed now is for them to set aside its usual proprieties: the need for beauty and calm; the erasure of dark elements like sex, death, and garbage. Even in Minnesota, it’s okay to be fully human. The introduction of the human figure into the landscape is a good strategy for opening nature photography into fuller life and meaning—but what if that figure had all the attributes of humanness, not just the pretty ones? A photographer with Blacklock’s skills and his knowledge of the natural world could create great work if he would grant the human condition full membership in the natural world.
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