"Reflections on an Isle Royale Artist's Residency" by Russell Hart, 2013 Artist-in-Residence
"Untitled 1", photograph, 2013
NPS/Russell Hart
"Time may have idealized my memories of being on Isle Royale. After all, I fell out of our canoe more than once, camera in hand, as I tried to deposit my fellow artist-in-residence on the small wharf down the hill from our cabin. Among other things, hauling water up from the lake to the cabin and taking outside showers while being swarmed by big black stinging flies made the experience somewhat arduous for us city folk!
That was okay, though, because I believe arduousness is, and should be, a part of art. If art and the artist’s process are easy, then there’s a good chance the resulting art will be uninspired. Art requires effort, and in true art I think this effort shows in the work itself.
I came to the Isle Royale National Park residency with a project in mind, one that was more conceptual than anything I’d done with my photography before. I knew that the island’s wolf population had dwindled to a very few creatures, and that I was therefore unlikely to see any wolves, so before leaving home I made life-sized cutouts of wolves from black fabric. When I arrived on Isle Royale I did a series of photographs in which I placed these silhouettes in various scenes, from the rocks near the cabin to the deep woods. The matte-black fabric reflected hardly any light, which made the wolf shapes look like they were cut out of the landscape. The idea behind this work, which I showed as part of the presentations we gave for island visitors, was to signify the absence of wolves, and also, to use art-speak, to “flatten the picture plane,” something I’ve always liked to do in my work. [You can see some of these images in Russell's Isle Royale photo gallery.]
As I told the park’s visitors at those presentations, though my concept worked out in a technical sense, as I’d envisioned it, I wasn’t convinced that the resulting images succeeded. I told them that I was okay with that, because I believe failure is part of being an artist—that not all ideas work out to an artist’s satisfaction. Yet being on Isle Royale made me realize that I actually felt comfortable creating photographs of pure nature, something I’d never been able to do in a long career that began with certain art-school prejudices about the notion of artistic beauty. I’d never, ever thought of myself as a “nature photographer.”
This realization was transformative for me, and since the residency I’ve done quite a bit of photography of natural landscapes, as opposed to those modified or occupied by humans (or myself!). That said, the Isle Royale images I made without the wolf shapes, and the pure nature photographs that I’ve done since, are not realistic. They were, and are, usually in black and white, though sometimes in a sort of dreamlike color, and are almost always made with a digital camera converted to capture infrared radiation—wavelengths beyond the red end of the spectrum of visible light. The result of this is an image with very different tonalities and color than those produced by a “normal” camera, including foliage that looks lighter than it appears to the eye, and blue skies and water that look darker. I am not, and never will be, a realist in my art.
"Untitled 2", photograph, 2013
NPS/Russell Hart
In taking on nature as a pure subject for the first time, I found myself looking for architecture—for scenes in which the structures and shapes formed by natural forces are particularly evident. In one of my Isle Royale images, thin young trees bend toward each other to form an archway that opens to a meadow; in another, fallen trunks criss-cross in a sort of tic-tac-toe grid. Another, seemingly simple image looking up into the underside of a pine tree is more about branch structure than leaves (needles). I tend to see vegetative growth as lines and shapes rather than soft, undefined masses.
My photography has changed a lot, and changed for the better, since my Isle Royale National Park residency. I’ve even been making pictures of wildlife, although these aren’t anything like the so-called portraits—tight shots of an animal that often exclude its surroundings—that wildlife photographers like to do. Rather, they’re of animals in the context of the landscape and nature’s structures. [You can see some of that work in Russell's animal photo gallery.]
Some day soon I’d love to return to Isle Royale with this altered way of looking at its natural marvels. I’d be curious to see what kinds of photographs I might produce, and how different they would be from the ones I made as an artist-in-residence, going on seven years later."
