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"I have always been drawn
towards the smells of the seasonal changes, the discovery of what’s out
there and my entire life I have just kept pushing the boundaries of that
lifestyle."
Widely regarded as one of the world’s premiere wildlife and
landscape photographers, Art Wolfe’s obsession with the wilderness began at
a very early age. As a kid, he spent much of his free time scrambling
through the forests and ravines that abounded in the Seattle, Washington
suburbs where he grew up.
By the time he entered the University of Washington--where he
studied art-education in hopes of becoming an art teacher--hiking, mountain
climbing and adventuring virtually consumed his free time. And where Wolfe
adventured, he also brought cameras to record his explorations.
Eventually, says Wolfe, photography became the driving force behind
his travels: "Soon after college photography became the tail that wagged
the dog," he says. "Initially I started out documenting trips that I was
on, now I was going on these trips expressly to take the photos."
Like the proverbial bear that went over the mountain to "see what
he could see," Art Wolfe has spent more than two decades in search of
distant horizons and the visions that lay beyond. More than mere records of
wild places, however, Wolfe’s photographs consistently reveal a soulful
and profoundly poetic vision of the world. Indeed, Wolfe seems possessed
of an almost magical ability to arrive at places at their most utterly
dramatic moments.
Though he began his career as a successful shooter for outdoor
magazines (he landed major assignments with both "National Geographic"
and "Audubon" on his first attempt), Wolfe quickly abandoned
magazine shooting in favor of book publishing. "Once I started working on
books, I was less intrigued by doing magazine assignments because I liked
the way books portrayed the work," he explains. "You have much more
control over how your work is presented in books and books are more
permanent."
Though only in his late
forties, Wolfe has published no less than 40 books of photographs, among
them "Light on the Land", "Pacific Northwest", "Migrations", "Rhythms from
the Wild", "Tribes and Water, Rainforests of the World". Most recently he
has also become his own publisher and is currently at work circling the
globe in search of images for his upcoming book "The Living Wild"

When did your interest in natural history and wildlife
begin?
I think it really started when I was in grade school. I
grew up in the suburbs of Seattle and there were farms nearby, one neighbor
had sheep, another had chickens, and beyond that there were wooded ravines
all around. I spent a lot of time playing in the woods and creeks looking
under rocks, catching polliwogs--all the things that you would think that
little kids would be doing in the forest. I have always been drawn towards
the smells of the seasonal changes, the discovery of what’s out there and
my entire life I have just kept pushing the boundaries of that lifestyle. I
started photographing after college, really on a local level, documenting
the mountains of the northwest and climbing many of them and documenting
the trips. Then I started traveling abroad and I kept going further and
further and I have never stopped. Today that spirit of discovery and
exploring and seeing new places and new cultures just keeps driving me
forward.
Do you think that growing up in the rugged
landscape of the Pacific Northwest had a big effect on your career
choice?
I often ask myself that question: If I had been born on a
farm in the wheat fields of Kansas, would I, in fact, have become a nature
photographer? I don’t know if I can answer that. I’m very much a homing
pigeon; I live one mile from where I was born. I love going very far
afield, but I also love coming back in three weeks and reacquainting myself
with my home and going out to a movie and dinner--then I’m ready to go
again for another two or three weeks.
Having said that, I wonder
if I was born in the midwest if I would have pursued a life of being a
nature photographer. Maybe not. Maybe I would have become Kansas’ best
wheat painter. I would have to think that given the great natural beauty or
the Pacific Northwest, the amount of time I spent in the woods and in the
Cascades here, that that was all part and parcel to developing what I do
today for a living.
Both of your parents were commercial
artists. Did you think that influenced your becoming a
photographer?
Absolutely. My mom was a commercial artist and my
father was a painter and also a photographer; my mom was also involved in
photography. They were just doing wedding photography, but there were
always cameras and tripods around all the time. My dad never said ‘Here’s a
camera, let’s sit down and I’ll teach you how to take pictures of people,’
but just by being exposed to photography it encouraged me and got me
interested.
The more important thing that my parents did was to enroll
me in a weekend arts school that accepted lower-income kids. Although I
resisted initially, they felt that it was necessary for me to learn more
about the arts and thank God that they did that. The school was free to
kids that could not afford private schools; it was funded by a college
trying to create an atmosphere where artistically-inclined kids could have
access to supplies and to furthering their artistic skills.

When did you begin to study photography seriously?
It
began when I was a student at the University of Washington. I hadalready taken
most of my electives; I knew I wanted to have some sort of outdoor
occupation and I kept trying to think of occupations that would get me
outdoors. I always thought that forestry might be it, but I hadn’t really
realized until then that what forestry really meant was cutting logs,
cutting down trees. I finally just asked myself ‘What is it you really want
to do?’ I realized that where my real talent lay and what made me the
happiest was being in the art world. So after having satisfied all of the
other credits, I marched myself up to the fine arts department and for the
next three years I took nothing but painting and art-education
classes.
Were you involved in exploring the wilderness during
college--was that still a major interest of yours?
Oh, yes, it
never ended. I was always hiking on weekends, I was part of a climbing
community out here in Seattle and so the wilderness was always there. Every
weekend we were out hiking and I was always taking pictures along the way.
I never dreamed that I could make a living from those pictures, I just
wanted to document our adventures and eventually that became an
addiction.
Were you a serious mountain climber at the time?
Yes, I
had climbed Mt. Rainier five or six times, as well as all the mountains,
all the volcanoes, all the steep peaks of the northwest. I got even more
involved in the climbing world after college and eventually went on an
Everest expedition. I also climbed Kilamanjaro. It was during that time
that photography became the tail that wagged the dog. Photography became
the reason for going on the trips, when initially it started out documenting
trips that I was on. Now I was going on these trips expressly to take the
photos. So there was a big turnaround at that point.

Being part of Everest attempt must have been an amazing
experience. What was it like to be climbing on the tallest mountain in the
world?
It was a very exciting time. I was on the first team
permitted into China after Nixon opened it up. We went on the route where
they just recently discovered Sir Edmund Mallory’s body. It’s the
northeast ridge and it’s the most difficult route on the mountain and it’s
in Tibet. For three months we lived in Tibet; I had gone over there with
no intention to climb to the summit, but I was the official expedition
photographer. There were summit climbers that could take very good photos,
however, so I wasn’t concerned with getting the summit
pictures.
How close to the summit did you get?
I
wound up going up to around 25,000 feet which is quite high. The summit is
29,000-foot-plus and there were three more camps above the 25,000
foot level that I reached. It gets very slow going on that route because
it’s a very technical climb and I was above where I should have been
anyway. If you don’t have the hunger, the desire, burning deep inside
somewhere, you wouldn’t ever want to go to the summit and it wasn’t one of
the things that motivated me. I was more motivated to go in and see Tibet,
to see it before most people ever had a chance to. That trip was what also
got me photographing indigenous cultures and really solidified my
world-travel lust.
In terms of a career, you really jumped
right into the fire by getting a National Geographic assignment at a very
early age. How did that happen?
At the time I was great friends with
a guy who was dating the former secretary to one of the main editors at
National Geographic. She kindly put in a call to this editor and said she
knew a young photographer out in Seattle that would love to come to
Washington and present his portfolio. The editor was Mary Smith and she was
a highly respected editor who had worked with Jane Goodall and Diane
Fossey. I showed her my portfolio and she sent me back home with an
assignment to do a story on long-eared owls. Long-eared owls are a fairly
secretive owl and I had found a nesting pair and I went back and shot them
for the magazine. That was in 1979 and I was 28 years old then--just a
year and a half after college.
Didn’t you think that was kind of
a brazen thing for a young photographer to do--to fly down to National Geo
with your portfolio right out of college?
Yes, it was, but you can’t
think about these things too much--you just have to dive in and do it. I
was very excited about the assignment, but I was also going through a very
steep learning curve. I felt that I was the only one out there for a while
who was doing this type of photography. I didn’t learn until later that
there were others, like Frans Lanting and Galen Rowell, who were about the
same age, who were doing the same thing.

Did you end up shooting other assignments for National
Geographic?
Yes, I did a story for them on trumpeter swans in 1984
and I did a book assignment for them in the Soviet Union and then I just
stopped shooting for them. I never tried to pursue any other story ideas
with them simply because I started getting more and more involved in books.
I started my first book, which was called "Baskets of the Northwest Coast"
during the early 1980’s and once I started working on books, I was less
intrigued by doing magazine assignments. I liked the way books portrayed
the work.
You’ve obviously had a great deal of success
since then with book publishing--many books have you
published?
I’ve published more than 40 books now and I have a dozen
more currently in progress.
How have you managed to be so
prolific in book publishing?
It’s just dog hard work. I work on five
or six books at once and only once has a publisher come our way with an
idea. The ideas have always originated from my coconut initially and then I
find a writer to help further define them--and then find a publisher that
is interested in doing it. You have to be aggressive in the marketplace
and I’ve always taken the time to suggest the stories and, in recent
years, build mock-ups to define the book’s idea clearly.
I also
should say that most books that I do would drive any photographer bankrupt
because they are not economically sound--they don’t pay the bills. But the
stock generated from the book does. The books themselves rarely make
money. I could spend an advance from a book on just one portion of the
shooting that goes into a book.
People have the idea when they see a
big splashy book that they are just gold mines, but the general rule is
that the more elegant the book, the less money there is to be made.
Guidebooks and educational books generally do much better. The big color
books are being treated more and more like calendars, where book stores
want to get rid of them by January 1.
As we progress as a company we’re
going to take the nicer books and start to publish them ourselves and
figure out a way of getting them to an audience which we still know exists
out there. We’ll do it through the web, we’ll do it through direct mailing
and we’ll do it through public talks and I intend to support the books far
more than I’ve done in the past.
Many people know you best as
mainly a wildlife shooter but, in fact, you are also equally passionate
about photographing landscapes and people. Do you have a subject
preference?
No, I don’t. I have done two book on indigenous cultures
and I often shoot urban landscapes--mostly historical locales and manmade
subjects and I find that equally exciting to shoot. I don’t really have a
preference. I can switch from landscapes to wildlife and people depending
on what I am focused on at the moment.
I have been shooting other
subjects for a long long time, I never pigeon-holed myself as a wildlife
photographer. I was successful in positioning myself in nature photography
early on, but I never looked at myself as exclusively doing that. I looked
at myself as a fine art photographer and a generalist. A large part of
that, for me, was that it was drilled into my head as an art major in
college that you have to be open to all possibilities.

Let’s talk about your work with wild animals. You’ve spent a lot of
time with bears and big cats and other dangerous animals, have you ever
had a moment when you thought your life was in danger?
Yeah,
earlier this year we were in Nepal and we nearly got attacked by a sloth
bear--in fact, it attacked our guides, but they were able to fend it off.
Only later did I find that sloth bears behavior is much more aggressive
than any bears you find in North America and they kill up to 300 people a
year in India.
I had been photographing this female bear from a distance
and we were following it respectfully with long lenses, but then she
disappeared into the bushes with her two cubs. The cubs were nearly fully
grown. I didn’t think she was really all that apprehensive or concerned,
but the sloth bears’ behavior even on a good day is aggressive and that I
didn’t really understand that then--but I do now! It was a pretty startling
moment; she came like a bat out of hell out of some dense brush and
attacked us. Fortunately our guides knew that animals like this
existed in this environment and were able to fight it back.
On that same
trip, while in Africa, we had a fairly close encounter with a rhino. These
are examples of not knowing behavior before you start
photographing. Generally over the years I have a pretty good sense about
what an animal is going to do, but when it’s in a completely new
environment, and you don’t have that much time to study up, it can lead to
serious problems. Fortunately both times we came out of it unscathed, but
we learned a lot from those attacks and it was a pretty humbling
experience.
In most cases you’re working quite a distance from
the animals and using long lenses, aren’t you?
Yes, like most
photographers we often work with long lenses and try not to interfere with
an animal’s behavior; but on the other hand, with this new book that I’m
shooting called "The Living Wild", I’m trying to get as close as I can and
use wide-angle lenses. The wide shots make a much bigger statement about the
habitat the animal is in, while staying close enough with the wide-angle
lens that the animal doesn’t disappear.
It’s a real challenge to shoot with
both of those perspectives in one shot. The results are nice, they’re
going to be among my strongest work to date, but it’s still a lot more
difficult to work that way. I would never have approached a sloth bear or
rhino with a wide angle, but you can often use less powerful lenses with
that same intent, where you’re still encompassing a bigger landscape with
the animal still satisfyingly large in the
frame.
What is the secret to getting that close to animals?
I
think a lot of it just not being afraid to be close and also, not
intimidating the animal that you’re approaching. You have to learn not to
have eye contact, to remain relaxed, to go low and slow and just watch the
animals’ behavior. I think a lot of it is the energy that you put out--if
you act nervous and a little hyper, the animals are more likely to leave.
If you remain very calm, very relaxed, the animals tend to pick up that
energy and permit you to get a lot closer than most people would want to
get.
The first time I ever tried to get really close to an animal was in a
city park in Seattle and I found a saw whet owl and it was so calm and
relaxed that I was able to get within 28-inches of the owl and photograph
it and it’s a totally wild owl. It was amazing. I found it in a wooded
ravine and I went back, got my cameras and it was still there when I
returned. So I just slowly got closer and closer, I didn’t look straight
into its eyes, because that often intimidates an
animal.
Did you end up shooting other assignments for
National Geographic?
Yes, I did a story for them on trumpeter swans
in 1984 and I did a book assignment for them in the Soviet Union and then
I just stopped shooting for them. I never tried to pursue any other story
ideas with them simply because I started getting more and more involved in
books. I started my first book, which was called "Baskets of the Northwest
Coast "during the early 1980’s and once I started working on books, I was
less intrigued by doing magazine assignments. I liked the way books
portrayed the work.

What is it like to get that close to such a dangerous animal--is
it hard to set the fear aside entirely?
You’re never
absolutely 100-percent confident with wild animals, but for the most part
you look at the odds of what can happen and you weigh the risks. In the
case of bears that can easily kill you, you watch their behavior and you go
statistically with whether there has been a history of attacks in a given
area. Most bears, for instance, are concerned with filling their stomachs
with salmon or berries--people are not part of their natural diet, so you
have that in your favor. As long as you don’t surprise them or get in
between the mother and the cubs, you’re reasonably safe. With wolves, the
other big predator in North America, again, we’re not part of their system
and so they shy away from you. That is also true of cougars, although in
recent years as people have begun building track housing in their habitat,
there are more and more encounters.
As long as you know what you’re doing and
you approach animals slowly and openly, so that they know that you’re
there and you’re not surprising them, you have a much better chance at
staying safe and getting close. A lot of people think you have to sneak up
on an animal, but with a predator I think that’s a very bad idea,
especially with bears because they have very bad eyesight and their
reaction generally is to charge what they don’t understand. In areas where
they are accustomed to people, like the McNeil River in Alaska, if they
hear you and see you from afar, they keep you in mind, but they
generally allow you to get very close--you’re not really a threat to
them.
There have always been
wildlife photographers who are also hunters, does that seem like a strange
combination to you?
It is an odd thing and I’ve never understood it.
I’ve never hunted and I’ve never owned a gun and I never intend to. Where I
criticize the hunting community is really in the trophy hunting area and in
the killing of predators. If they legitimately want to put some meat on the
table, I still don’t like it because those people can obviously drive down
in their Land Cruisers to the store and buy a hunk of meat if they want
it. And that’s always been their argument--that this is subsistence
hunting. But that’s been going on for a long time. It’s the killing
of predators that I find that grotesque, I find it really
abominable.
And that is still happening in a big way. I always thought
that there is so much negativity born out of this whole issue that it’s
just been a dying occupation, but I’ll guarantee you that more and more
fairly wealthy people go on safari to hunt and it’s a big business. I have
no idea what motivates someone to go shoot an animal to get a trophy for
the wall. What does that say about them?
Let’s
talk about your landscape work a bit. What is it you’re looking for when
you’re taking landscapes?
What I look for in landscapes are those
rare moments when the light and the elements of the landscapes come
together in a very pleasing way. You can’t have a good landscape without
one or the other; you can’t have great light and nothing to shoot, I’ve
seen that too often and it just falls flat. You also can’t have a great
mountain range in very blah lighting and expect it to do very well
either. It has to be a combination of the two and it doesn’t happen very
often, but since I travel so much opportunities do present themselves
occasionally. And the word occasionally applies here because I would work
on a book for 10 years before I bring it out. What happens a lot of the
time is that photographers are so anxious to do a book that they get
signed by a publisher and then they have like a year and a half to do it;
of course they have 10 good shots along with a lot of filler
photos.

What is a typical shooting day like for you? Are you shooting
all the time or do you have certain hours you like to
work?
If it’s a sunny day, if it’s just a cloudless day, we’ll
shoot early in the morning and then after the sun is high and the
light is flat, we’ll use that part of the day to scout locations for the
sunsets. We won’t shoot at all from about 9 a.m. until around 4 p.m.; all
that time is spent relocating and sometimes traveling a great
distance.
In the southwest of the United States, for example, we often cover
three or four hundred miles just to be at the right location late in the
day. Most of the time though we’ll travel 50 or 100 miles during the day.
If it’s a cloudy day, however, we shoot all day long. We change our
subjects from grand landscapes or vistas to more intimate details, but we
just keep shooting.
You’re very well known as a 35 mm
photographer, but in recent years you’ve been doing a lot of landscapes
with medium format cameras--what’s the main advantage of the larger
format?
The big advantage of a larger negative is that I can make
larger prints for the gallery market. As we expand into more galleries and
go after corporate art sales, it’s more appropriate in many
cases--especially with landscapes--to have a negative that blows up even sharper
than a 35 mm negative would. If you have a larger negative to start with,
you’ll get a better image at the other end.
The larger prints are
very stately, but they are somewhat less ephemeral than the 35 mm images
that I shot for my book "Light on the Land", for example. Those
images are more dramatic because I was able to capture the light much more
quickly than I can with a medium format; on the other hand, if the subject
requires detail or textures, medium format will outshine the smaller
format.
Have you done any wildlife shooting with medium
format?
No, but I’ve recently heard
that Mamiya is bringing out an autofocus version of the 645 and with the
big lenses that they have, it would be a very easy thing to jump into. One
of the reasons that I went with Mamiya is that they offered a motor drive and it
felt a lot more like a 35 mm then say, a medium-format camera, which
seemed a lot more cumbersome. Now with autofocus, it becomes even more
like a 35 mm and a lot more user friendly.

How much do you travel in a year and what is the lifestyle
like?
The lifestyle is very neurotic and there is never time to have
much of a personal life. It’s a much much faster-paced lifestyle than most
people would ever really want to experience and I’m not sure anyone would
want to spend a year doing what I do. A lot of people think, on a very
superficial level, that this is as glamorous as it gets and they’d love
traveling to the Arctic or the Amazon with me. That would be fine for the
first four days, after three weeks it gets a lot less
romantic.
The fact of the matter is that it’s a lot of work and there
is much more of a commitment required than most people realize. I work
seven days a week and I travel an average of nine months a year in a normal
year, but now I’m traveling more like 10 months of the year because I’m
trying to finish this book I’m working on.
What is
the hardest part about being on the road all the time?
Wanting to
just stop and rest. A lot of times for the first few seconds when you wake up
you have no idea where you are and once you realize you’re in the
mountains of western Mongolia, all you can think of is how nice it would
be to wake up in your own bed and walk downstairs to breakfast.
There
is nothing at your disposal when you’re traveling. All the
creature comforts you’re so used to at home are gone; you can’t get in the
car and go to the corner store. When you travel everything is an obstacle
you’ve got to surmount and that gets old after awhile. Even food is
a challenge--a lot of times we’re using freeze-dried foods out of
necessity. You keep thinking about how long it’s going to be until you get
home again.
But on the positive side of this, there must be moments
when you see things that no other humans will ever see--you are often the
only witness to natural miracles.
That happens on almost every trip,
otherwise we just wouldn’t go through what we go through. And yes, those
are the rewards, those are the reasons that we travel as much as we do; when the
lighting is spectacular or when the animals are behaving as you only dream
they will, you have your reward. Knowing that those pictures will
ultimately wind up in a very nice book and be shared with people all over
the world, that is immensely rewarding. That is the carrot at the end of
the stick that I use to keep pushing myself onward. It’s not the individual
trips as much as the overall projects.

Early you mentioned you latest project, The Living Wild. What’s
that book going to be about and where did the idea come
from?
Well, as you know, the millennium is coming up next year and I
just felt that creating a new and strong body of work would be a great way
to commemorate that. I began asking myself what that body of work could be
and I thought, Why not go after the hardest animals to photograph in the
world?’ Not all of the animals are endangered, but they are all animals
that are notoriously difficult to photograph. I’ve approached some of the
top outdoor conservationists in the world to write the essays for the book
and they’ve all agreed to work on the project. The other interesting thing
about the project is that we’re self-publishing it. It’s going to be
published in the fall of 2000.
Do you have a favorite
book in all the books you’ve done?
I love "Light on the Land". It’s such a personalized book. But I think I’m
going to like the book I’m working on now a lot because it’s forcing me
into new directions. Certainly it’s putting me into new situations
that I would not have been in had I not chosen to do the book. I would
never have spent $30,000 for the chance of seeing a Panda; I couldn’t have
afforded to do that, but when it’s part of a book, there’s a reason for
doing just that. It’s gotten me into place I would normally have
never gone and I’m happy about that because life is short. The way
that we’re photographing this book, using very wide compositions, is
different than the way we’ve photographed all the books we’ve shot in the
past. Also, the fact that we’re publishing the book ourselves will make new
alliances that we normally wouldn’t have made. So it will help the rest of
the business whether we’re book publishing or not. We become much better,
smarter business people as a result of attempting this book. And we will
be successful in doing that.
Are there times when you put a
lot of time and energy into a major trip and fail
photographically?
Oh, sure. I just got back from Mongolia looking
for snow leopards and I came home with some pretty nice landscapes and
some other wildlife, but I never had a chance to see or photograph a snow
leopard. I spent around $10,000 on that trip and got nothing. I’ll have to
go back in November to try to get those pictures. I’m pretty tenacious;
I’ve already been there twice and I’ll go back one more time for this book
to try and get a shot of a wild snow leopard.

You’ve also had at least one disastrous experience that would
really have crushed most photographers: all of your cameras and all
of your exposed film was stolen after a major trip. What was that
experience like?
It was the second worst thing in my life next to my
mom’s stroke. I’ll never get over that and, in fact, there is so much
anger still there--it was such a needless thing. I could get over the loss
of the equipment in a heartbeat, I’m not emotionally attached to any
object like that, but the film meant everything to me.
There was so
much film. It wasn’t like missing 20 rolls, I lost 600 rolls of exposed
film and 600 rolls is a tremendous amount to lose, especially the way that
I work, I put so much effort into my shooting. I’m almost like a rangy
coyote at the end of a trip; I don’t eat well, I don’t sleep well, I just
work my ass off. And then to have some dark cloud come into your life and
take that all away the day before you’re going to have that film
processed, it is so unacceptable to me--at least give me the satisfaction
to see the work. There were shots, quite honestly, that would have helped
define my career. I had some extraordinary light and weather--things that
I’ve never seen before or since. I photographed a double rainbow over
Monument Valley for the first time in my life and I shot it with a
panoramic camera; I knew that that shot would be a very famous image. It
would have been published everywhere. It turned out thrown away in some
wooded ravine to rot and I’m sure of that as
well.
What geographical areas did you cover in that
trip?
It started in Denver and we drove and worked the whole
west--which I haven’t done in many, many years. Most of my trips are to
Africa and places like that, so we really put a concerted effort to work
the west with large format. It was in May and we got up at four in the
morning every morning because in May light comes up around 5:30 a.m. We
wanted to be in the right place at the right time every time. Often I’d
stay up all night long shooting star trails. We played around and we did a
lot of experimental work and it was a very long 30 days. And it was the
second to the last day of the trip where we got ripped
off.
You must have been in a state of shock.
We were
absolutely devastated--annihilated is the word. I was in stunned silence. I
didn’t know what to do. It took us an hour just to comprehend that we
needed to file a police report. The police just treated it like another car
break in until four days later when we informed them from Seattle that the
quantity and the value of the film was somewhere around 2.5 million
dollars; they just didn’t have a clue initially nor were they interested
until they heard that figure. That number was based on the images that
were probably in the take and the estimated sales figures.
Then the
police said, ’Well why didn’t you have us come out and fingerprint the
car?’ And I told them ’We tried everything to get you guys out there and
you insisted that we drive the car to the precinct.’ It’s an ugly
story.

You have a unique perspective on the environment because you
spend so much time in the wilderness. What do you think about the state of
the global environment today?
The environment is definitely
dwindling, there is no question about that. We have an expanding population
worldwide, but I don’t want the book I’m working on right now to be a doom
book. I don’t it to be a requiem for wilderness. So we’re looking at gray
whales, humpback whales and bald eagles and California condors--and the
first three of those animals have come back and they are back in very safe
numbers because people interfered and figured out what was happening and
what was going wrong. Nature is resilient.
In the mid 1980’s experts
were saying that by the year 1990 there would be no Bengal tigers left in
the wild and we went on a trip a couple of months ago throughout India and
we were in parks where there were cubs and more tigers than there had been in
the last 10 years. The government of India started realizing that Bengal
tigers represent huge revenue in the tourist trade; they’ve really made a
concerted effort to stop poaching.
The point is that there are still a
lot of natural areas out there and we now have to look at what is
necessary to preserve entire eco systems. A lot of things are happening in
a positive way. On the other hand it’s inevitable for man to keep building which
I think is too bad because in forward thinking cities, they are building
strong core cities and leaving as much greenery on the outskirts as
possible. This is why Europe, for example, still looks pretty much
like Europe has for such a long time. You can drive through a lot of cities
in Italy and France and the outskirts of the cities look pretty much as
they did 100 years ago. We can learn a lot from that.
It’s not all
doom and gloom. There is a lot of room for improvement, a lot of different
ways to use technology; I think if the new generation really addresses
these problems we’ll see the grizzly bears roaming just as they always have
100 years from now.
Will tourism replace the growth or lack of
industry in a lot of these places?
I hope so. As we’re talking
I’m looking out my window at Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula--areas
that could be a prime example of where a tourist economy would replace the
logging economy and preserve the habitat. Then the people that rely on the
logging industry for their livelihoods could be part of a stronger tourism
economy.

Do you have any advice to young photographers?
I think
that today learning computer skills is very important for the future.
Technology will be driving this business more and more. But also, I think
it’s important to get an understanding of art; so whether or not they
think that they can draw or paint, I still think it’s great to have that
formal training. One way or the other, it still comes down to the quality
of the image; whether it’s computer generated or traditional, the success
of an image depends on whether the composition works, the nuances of
light are interesting--all the things that art directors look at. The
other thing is that it’s a much bigger world out there and a lot to go into
the business with your eyes wide open. The most important thing to
remember is that just making money from your work does not validate whether
you’re a good photographer or not. I don’t know why people feel like they
have to sell their work to be happy as photographers. A lot of people who
earn their living at something else feel that they have to sell their
photographs to be successful. I don’t know why that’s so necessary. You
should be happy with the quality of the work that you’re doing and keep
pushing yourself forward. That should be their primary concern. Of course,
I am exactly what I’m criticizing: I love to have my work published and
have people look at it and say nice things. So I understand that. But on
the other hand I need to do that because that’s where all of my income
comes from.
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