Behind the Lens: Alaska

Some trips you photograph. Alaska photographs you back. For ten days this summer I chased bears, glaciers, and the endless northern light from a floatplane, a boat deck, and the side of the Parks Highway, and I came home with two works I had been waiting years to make: The Gaze and Where the Earth Surrenders.

This is the story behind them. The days were long, the alarms were brutal (5:15 AM more than once), and the weather changed its mind by the hour. That is exactly the point. In Alaska the light does not wait for you, so you learn to be ready before it arrives.

Brooks Falls, where the bears fish

We started in Katmai National Park. A floatplane lifts off Lake Hood, banks over Cook Inlet past volcanoes and glaciers, and an hour later sets down at Brooks Camp. Then you walk a boardwalk to a viewing platform and stand a respectful distance from one of the great wildlife spectacles on Earth: brown bears at the lip of a waterfall, catching salmon mid-leap.

You do not direct a scene like this. You read it. Which bear owns the falls, where the next fish will jump, when a cub will look up. I spent the day learning the rhythm and filling cards, and the lesson from Brooks Falls carried through the whole trip: with wildlife, patience is not the price of the photograph. Patience is the photograph.

Kenai Fjords, from the deck of a boat

The next morning we drove the Seward Highway to the water and spent seven and a half hours inside Kenai Fjords National Park. Humpbacks, orcas, Steller sea lions, sea otters, puffins, and then the moment the boat noses up to Holgate and Aialik: a wall of blue ice calving into the sea, so large your eye keeps rescaling it.

Photographing from a moving deck is its own discipline. The horizon will not hold still, the spray finds your front element, and the good light and the good wildlife rarely agree to appear at the same time. You keep your shutter up, your feet wide, and your expectations open.

Anchorage from above, and a photograph called Where the Earth Surrenders

Between the big field days we worked closer to Anchorage: Potter Marsh at first light, Beluga Point on the tide, the long golden evenings that summer this far north hands you for free. But the frame that became Where the Earth Surrenders is an aerial: the exact seam where the braided rivers, tidal flats, and mountains of the Anchorage basin dissolve into one another from above.

I love it because it is unrecognizable as any single thing. It reads as pure line and tone, an abstract that happens to be real. It is offered as an Open Edition and a strictly limited Collector's Reserve Edition, and it is the piece people stand in front of the longest without knowing quite what they are looking at.

Denali, and the mountain that decides for itself

North to Denali. Eklutna Lake, Denali View South, Byers Lake, and the tundra and braided rivers inside the park itself, watching for Dall sheep, caribou, and the grizzly you are always half hoping for. Denali is visible only when the weather allows, which is the whole romance of it. The mountain is not a subject you collect. It is one you are granted, or not, and either way you drive home better for having waited on it.

Crescent Lake, and The Gaze

The frame at the top of this page came on the far end of the trip, deep in Lake Clark National Park. A floatplane over the Chigmit Mountains and the volcanoes Redoubt and Iliamna, a landing on Crescent Lake, then a covered pontoon boat easing along a shoreline thick with brown bears fishing for wild salmon.

For most of an afternoon I photographed behavior: bears wading, bears fishing, cubs shadowing their mothers. And then one animal simply stopped and looked directly into the lens. Not a threat, not a pose. A held, level, unhurried look, the kind that reorders who is observing whom. I made a handful of frames and knew I already had it. I titled it The Gaze, and it is available as an Open Edition and a Collector's Reserve Edition, signed and numbered with a Certificate of Authenticity.

Prince William Sound, the long way home

We closed in Prince William Sound, through the Anton Anderson tunnel to Whittier and out among tidewater glaciers, waterfalls, sea otters, and puffins. A quieter, softer day than Brooks Falls, and the right way to end. By then the trip had taught me what every good trip does: the photograph is never really the place. It is what it felt like to stand in it.

From the field to the wall

Images like these are why I hold the printing standards I do. The dynamic range of a bear against dark water, or a glacier's blue against grey sky, survives only in a pigment print with real tonal depth, and it deserves a surface that gives it back its light. Both Alaska works are proofed and produced as a museum-quality acrylic face mount, which does with room light what the north does with a long summer evening. If you would like to see them at scale, they live in the wildlife and landscape collections, and in person by appointment at the Scottsdale showroom.