On the invitation of the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, I began to think about how to respond as an artist photographer to the work being done by K.U. Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets. CReSIS measures the depth of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to understand the rate of melting and thus better understand the rate of climate change. I wanted to see Greenland.
Before I went to Greenland, I imagined that my work would be about describing the Jakobshavn Glacier for an audience back home, much like photographer William Henry Jackson did in 1871, when he accompanied Dr. Ferdinand Hayden, geologist to Yellowstone, bringing back gorgeous photographs of that uncharted territory. My reality was different. I did aerially photograph, from a helicopter, the ice fjord leading to the calving front of the Jakobshavn Glacier and I did photograph the glacier front and its surface, but what I saw was confusing and frustrating. I could not understand what I was seeing because there were no human markers below me on the ice. I had no sense of scale. Was that chunk of ice twenty stories high or knee high?
Looking at my aerial pictures at home gave me no clarity. I later learned that the front of the glacier is about 70 meters high, about like a twenty story building. Finally I remembered that the heart of the work that CReSIS is doing is measuring the depth of the glacier and the rate at which it's melting and thereby being able to predict the rate of climate change and that understanding climate change is a challenging task. My own frustration in trying to understand the scale of the glacier pointed out to me that understanding the scale of climate change is equally difficult.
Both CReSIS and I were there to gather visual data to understand the glacier and this common work is what this exhibition is finally about. You will see here examples of CReSIS data along with my images. One of the best things about being in Ilulissat when I was there was the opportunity to observe the work that the CReSIS and NASA teams were doing in their work together. CReSIS was measuring the glacier depth and NASA was supporting their work by measuring the topography of the grid they were flying. I watched them in the airplane hanger at their computer data processing as the team in the radar equipped plane collected data from two four hour flights a day.
Another of the benefits to being there when I was, from June 23 to June 30, was that the sun never set. A midnight cruise among the icebergs in Disko Bay was among the most exhilarating experiences of my life, especially the minutes of silence when the fishing boat motor was turned off and we floated in cold sunny silence.
The landscape in Greenland on Pre-Cambrian rock, where there are no trees, was splendid to my eye. I explored the fen that has a rocky path leading to the ice fjord that leads to the mouth of the glacier. I kept remembering the prairies of Kansas.
A Greenland Glacier: the Scale of Climate Change
Spencer Museum of ArtUniversity of Kansas
February 7, 2009-May 24, 2009
From inside working steel mills, I have experienced the mystery of transformation by fire of raw materials into steel. It is a process somewhat like any truly creative work- dangerous, terrifying, and beautiful. The stakes for a steelworker involve his or her very life. My obsession with the workings of steel mills was a journey into an underworld of darkness and fire and I felt that I was close to an ancient process, both thrilling and threatening. I worked primarily in East Chicago, Indiana, but also in Cleveland, Ohio, Burns Harbor, Indiana, and Coatesville, Pennsylvania.
After two years of photographing in steel mills, I'm now photographing the sources of raw materials for making steel. IÕve done both ground and aerial photography near Virginia, Minnesota where iron ore is mined. These pictures raise questions about the destruction of land necessary to produce steel which feeds many of our desires.
In the Spring of 1978, quite by accident, I began the photography that would shape and direct my work for the next thirty years. Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, where I lived, asked me to photographically record some survey work that he and his students were doing on a nearby virgin prairie.
My visits started in early March and as the spring progressed and grasses and legumes and other plants emerged from the ground, I began to see the rich ecological diversity of a prairie. This was my first experience of seeing an undisturbed ecosystem and I was almost overcome with passion to know it better. Its subtle beauty completely captured me. I came every day to photograph the ground. This eighty acre prairie belonged to Nick and Joyce Fent, who gave me a key to the gate, a key to a place so full of beautiful information that I knew then that I could explore it for years and still not know it all, not even close. I made over 4000 black and white pictures of the ground over the next year before I finally raised my camera up and started including the horizon line and color.
I read Gregory Bateson:
'What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the back ward schizophrenic in another? What is the pattern that connects all the living creatures?'
It seemed to me that if I looked long enough and hard enough at the prairie ground, I would begin to see these patterns in the prairie. I photographed with a wide-angle lens from waist level moving through the grasses looking, looking, looking.
My exploration of the prairie carried me into color and aerial work and reading about biology and Plains Indians and Persian miniature paintings and explorations of both eastern spiritual disciplines and my own Christianity. I questioned broadly and the prairie led me.I only printed a few of these black and white prairie ground pictures until now.
I decided to return to this earliest work and to scan some of these negatives. At first, I made single images, but quickly became bored with them. A visit to the New York Public Library to see an exhibition of EHON books, Japanese scroll books that were about personal subjects, like poems, convinced me to make scrolls from my grasses pictures. In the original work, I did not include the pictures I'd made for myself of my friends and family and dogs that sometimes accompanied me. Those pictures were not part of the 'serious' work of seeking to understand the structure of the prairie. Now, almost thirty years later, I understand that they are part of the story, too. So, these prairie scrolls are not the reprinting of earlier work, they are instead, a body of work that has required almost thirty years to become fully realized.
When I began exploring the shelves in the collections storage area of the Museum of Science and Industry in 2003, I was immediately drawn to the wooden boxes which contained tools or machine parts, I could not identify hardly anything I saw. I'm interested in not just what these objects are, but also in the careful and fine ways they were made and protected in wooden boxes- like jewels. Opening each one I entered a story where I could imagine who made the object and why and what its maker believed about the world of science and industry and how the object came to be on the museum shelf. Each box contained a whole world view and each box contained fierce attention to design and craftsmanship.
The design of the 1897 sleek stenographic machine in its sleek leather case with shoulder strap surely rivals the newest laptop computer design in 2008. While the museum continues to collect today, these early acquisitions help us celebrate the origins of thought that created the Museum of Science and Industry seventy-five years ago.
In 2007, I returned to the Museum of Science and Industry on invitation of the museum to explore further for an exhibition. After looking behind the scenes into almost every aspect of the Museum, I realized that it was the collections storage areas that still fascinated me most, so I photographed in those rooms to show the amazing juxtapositions of objects, combinations of time and memory that puzzled and delighted me.
The exhibition was presented by Openlands Project, Chicago Metropolis 2020 and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, with the generous support of LaSalle Bank and Exelon Corporation.
Evans photographed the Chicago metropolitan region between March 2003 and August 2004, in all four seasons. Evans made a total of 50 flights in helicopters, hot air balloons and Piper Cub airplanes to obtain her remarkable photographs. The result is Revealing Chicago: An Aerial Portrait, a series of images with commentary by the former Midwest correspondent for The Economist, Charles Wheelan, that collectively paints a portrait of the Chicago region at the beginning of the 21st century.
Revealing Chicago shows the interconnectedness between the city and the surrounding metropolitan region and the nature within it, inspiring a new level of understanding and stewardship for the land and its resources, said Jerry Adelmann, Executive Director of Openlands Project.
The exhibition coincides with the publication of the book Revealing Chicago: An Aerial Portrait that features essays and an introduction by Charles Wheelan. The lavishly illustrated 192-page book with over 120 color images is published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. The exhibition and the book raise important issues about the region's growth, revitalization and conservation, as well as providing a unique look at the beauty and vibrancy of the area, said George Ranney, President and CEO of Chicago Metropolis 2020.
With the population of the Chicago region expected to increase by two million over the next 25 years, ensuring that the region grows in a manner that adds to its beauty is essential. In the book, Revealing Chicago: An Aerial Portrait, Evans' photographs and Charles Wheelan's text not only tell the current story of the metropolitan region but also explore the challenges-environmental, economic, and social-it faces with continued development. An aesthetic tour-de-force, both the exhibition and the companion book highlight the importance of making decisions today that will enable Chicago to sustain its prominence into the future.
Late in 1996, I began a photographic aerial survey of mixed grass prairie, covering the area of its ecological boundaries from Canada to Texas. At that time I began reading about the nineteenth-century botanical expeditions to the Great Plains, and felt an immediate affinity and admiration for these naturalists. Probably the main reason I photograph at all is because I fancy myself to be an explorer. Lately, instead of exploring outdoors, I've been exploring the vast collections in the storage areas of Chicago's Field Museum, one of the world's largest natural history museums. I am equally moved by the beauty of both the virgin prairie and the carefully collected and preserved specimens (Figure 1).
Years ago, when my children were little, I began picking up dead birds and an occasional mouse I'd see when I was out for a walk. I'd zip these creatures into plastic bags and put them in the freezer in order to take them out later to photograph them. My daughter would be aghast when, after school, she would bring a friend home, open up the freezer for a Popsicle, and find it populated with dead birds. So, when I started working in the birds collection at The Field and discovered that they have a freezer, I felt I'd come home.
As I worked in the various collections, starting in the herbarium, I began to question my own process. Wasn't photographing these mounted plant specimens the same thing as photographing someone else's painting and calling it mine? Wasn't I simply appropriating someone else's work? I justified my work by telling myself that I'd made the selections from thousands of choices and I'd figured out how I wanted to present them, and isn't art, after all, about organization and selection? Isn't that how I also photograph in landscape? That thought reminded me of why I take pictures at all. It's because I see something that I want to share, that I want to hold up and say, 'Look at this! Isn't it amazing?' So, the answer to my question is, yes; I am taking a picture of someone else's work, as ever, to show you how amazing it is. My pictures are an homage to these plants and creatures and to their collectors.
Another question, harder to answer, was, why kill all these beautiful creatures? They are lost to the world often in the prime of their lives. And why kill so many? Is it that important to gain the information we get from killing so many? Look at the coyote (Figure 2), glossy, gorgeous and dead. It was hard to photograph this coyote. I visited it four or five times before I was able to bring myself to set up the camera. I was in the process of losing my parents during this time, and the sad beauty of the coyote deepened my mourning.
But this, the dispassionate act of collecting, of cataloguing, is how we come to understand the world, isn't it, we of Linnean descent? Karl Linnaeus gave us his taxonomic system in 1735, and he considered it to be inclusive of all of life, though we know, of course that the things he names are infinitely more complicated and interesting to observe than any taxonomy allows. Nevertheless, as playwright Mary Zimmerman has written, 'Scientific inquiry into the ways of the world is an act of sustained, intense attention, which is another way of saying an act of love.'1
When I look again at the coyote, and look at the jackrabbit (Figure 3) I remember Albrecht Durer. Are you familiar with Durer's painting of Large Tuft of Grass (1603) and his Hare (1602)? Northern German painters such as Durer, Hans Hoffman, and others had a keen sense of observation, almost scientific in its intensity. Or is it artistic in its intensity? Is there a difference ?
The dried leaves, the feathers, the fur, the glass, and the labels of the specimens I photographed at the Museum embody a tactile sensuousness that I want to communicate. The clarity of detail possible with digital printing and the quality of color and paper available with Iris printing make this expression possible. It is important to me to present the specimens in a way that shows the viewer something close to my own experience of seeing them. However, the finished print, in an odd way, sometimes looks more like the specimen than the specimen itself. Perhaps this is because these highly detailed images move all the visual information to a two-dimensional surface.
The plants held just as much a sense of presence as the animals, and in some ways were even more evocative, in the yellowing of the paper on which the specimens were mounted, in the flourish of handwriting on the labels, in the romance of time and place suggested by these labels. I had just been reading about the great western explorer, John Wesley Powell, when I came across a specimen of Big Bluestem grass collected by George Vasey, a great nineteenth century botanist, on Powell's first expedition toward the Grand Canyon in 1868. Powell didn't make it to the Grand Canyon that year and George Vasey dropped out of the expedition early, but this is one of the specimens he brought back home. As I held this specimen, my skin tingled and I felt as if I were touching the hand of the collector himself.In the exhibition, we tried to heighten this sense of involvement by including field journals and other written material produced by the scientist/collectors, including an 1868 letter we found in the Field archives from Vasey, in which he reports receiving a promise of assistance for his Colorado collecting expedition from General Ulysses S. Grant.
Another theme of the exhibition is the paradox between the unique individual and the generic type. For every species that is collected, there is a type specimen: the one specimen that represents all the other specimens and by which the others of its kind are measured, sort of the Miss America of that species. But just as important as the unique, individual type specimens are the large populations that accompany it. Look at the drawer of meadowlarks (Figure 5). Each black bib is slightly different, one from the other.
Matt Matcuk has written that as the world rages on, scientists must still collect. 2 For example, the bullsnakes (Figure 6) were caught during the Great Depression, the Texas spiny softshell turtle during World War Two. Matt said he found this somehow comforting. So did I. One of my first meetings about this exhibition with my Field Museum project team was the week after September 11. As we sat in the museum cafe, the museum staff members were very focused on discussing the development of this exhibition. I was not focused. I was distracted and wondered how an exhibition of this work could possibly matter in light of the tragedy a few days earlier at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania. How could my work, or the work of scientific collecting, matter in the shadow of those events? But I got through that time of doubt because I eventually was able to remember that sustained, intense seeing of the world does matter. It always matters.
How else can we know where we fit in relationship to everything else in the world, but by seeing it with attention, concentrated sustained attention. And that is where my work and the collectors' work comes together.