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Northwoods Journal—Land&People
In a dark spruce forest–two lakes and a portage from my bush camp–I have discovered a place of mystery and wonder. In these quiet woods I sense the primeval, as if no one has stood there before. So it seemed natural to go there on the first day of my photographic journey.
I had set myself the challenge that for 90 days, between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, I would make only one photograph a day. There would be no second exposure, no second chance. My work would be stripped to the bone and would have to rely on whatever photographic and woods skills I have.
My quest was both arbitrary and rigid. Arbitrary in that no one had compelled me, or even asked me, to perform it. Rigid in that once engaged, the constraints I had chosen would force me to examine myself and my art in a manner I’d never before attempted. The wild and isolated place in which I live, outside the small, end-of-the-road town of Ely, Minnesota, would never look the same to me.
I arose before dawn the first morning. A cool mist licked my face as I paddled the two lakes. The forest was calm as I stalked through somber bogs. While the day still smelled of dawn, I reached my secret spot, a spruce forest the likes of which still stretch unbroken to far-off Hudson Bay.
Perhaps because this forest is not so overtly beautiful–no vistas, no towering trees, no coursing waterways–it remains untrammeled. And perhaps that is why I have always felt that something spiritual lives there, something slightly dark and old.
Not that beauty isn’t abundant when you learn to look for it. Green pillows of ankle-deep moss rise above the forest floor. Bent grasses hint at the passing of unseen winds and spirits. Spires of black spruce, limbless to beyond the height of a moose, rise out of the moss and point toward the sky, their broken branches draped with a haunting, thin gauze of lichens. Poisonous red-capped mushrooms stand like miniature tables and chairs that on some secret night might have hosted the “little people” who are so much a part of the folklore of the native Ojibwa and my Norwegian ancestors.
I passed up some tempting photographs that morning–a row of juvenile grouse sitting at attention on a log, some energetic gray jays willing to pose comically. Instead, I waited to make a photograph of moss, mushrooms, and trees. Although the subjects could not move, I saw, as I set up my tripod and framed the scene, that their essence was fleeting. They were as elusive to capture as the image of a white wolf in a snowfall. My shutter opened and then closed. My journey had begun.
Like Henry David Thoreau, who went to the woods because he “wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life” and to “transact some private business with the fewest obstacles,” I went to see if I could find what had drawn me so long ago to my art and to see if I had become as perceptive of nature as I hoped. “To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself,” as Thoreau wrote.
I become dizzy if I think too deeply about how people relate to the land today compared with earlier cultures. Not long ago, while walking through the woods near my home, I came upon a stone artifact excavated by a black bear while preparing a den for its long sleep though the coming winter. “This stone knife could be nearly ten thousand years old,” said the government archaeologist, and he proceeded to tell me what life might have been like that long ago. Besides an occasional arrowhead found on the lakeshore, the only sign of human presence here in the last ten thousand years is the rare and scattered rock paintings called pictographs, said to be visual prayers to the spirits.
That flint knife revealed by the sleepy bear haunts me now as an omen of what we carry within us. Are we on a slippery slope since we broke away from our brethren, the wild creatures, distancing ourselves with invented technology that keeps leading us farther away from our original spiritual home?
For me, this photographic journal was an attempt to go home, to rediscover my own primal connection with the forest world. I felt I had to break out of the pattern my photography was stuck in, felt compelled to let go of life’s clutter and a world lit by computer screens instead of the sun. I wanted to wander the forest again, to see what was over the next rise, to follow animal tracks in the snow with eyes of a boy. I hoped each photograph would be a true original, like a painting–not the best, clinically selected from rolls and rolls of similar frames. I sensed there would be lessons learned.
There were, and they were not always those I had imagined. Some were merely lessons remembered, reminders of things I had forgotten–such as remaining open to chance and recognizing that in nature not all beauty is giant in scale.
One such lesson occurred on day 25. Although I tried to devote my full attention to the project, business and ordinary life kept intruding. On this day I was forced to find a subject without the luxury of allowing enough time to lead me to it. Walking to a granite ridge not far from home, I searched for a scene “worthy” of my one photograph. I was tense and more than a little irritable. And then a breeze blew.
If you have been in a paper birch forest far from roads and manmade noise, you know that tattered birch bark rattles in the breeze like parchment scrolls clattering to the floor. Hearing that sound, I turned toward a tree just behind me. Torn and hanging from it was a sheet of chalky white bark, revealing the apricot-colored underlayer. Pressed for time, I “settled” for this subject, composing the shot and tripping the shutter almost in haste. But when I later viewed the printed image, I was pleased to be reminded of something I had learned long ago: sometimes less truly is more.
If the birch-bark photograph spoke of haste, many others spoke of patience, even frustration. One of my favorites was made late on day 23, when I despaired of capturing anything of value. The day was dark and gloomy, and my mood reflected the weather. I had slogged through the dripping forest all day long. Tired, hungry, and wet, I was near tears and mentally beating myself for having passed up several deer portraits and a playful otter. But none of those scenes spoke to me at the time.
Then–perhaps because I had been patient and without comfort, like Native Americans on a vision quest–I became open to a new possibility. This was revealed by a single red maple leaf floating on a dark-water pond. My spirits rose the instant I saw it. Although what little light there was fleeting rapidly, I studied the scene from every angle. Finally, unsure of my choice, I made the shot anyway, thankful at least that the long day had ended.
Once more I was surprised by the result. The image seems to have a lyrical quality: reflected rhythms of spiky grass and brooding sky play against the warm stillness of the leaf. For me this photograph is a lesson in patience and diligence. It speaks to me of intimacy as well and reminds me to look closely at the world.
If some scenes asked me to turn inward, many demanded that I look outward to embrace nature viscerally, even to participate. While I wandered through the woodland, the land’s wild residents engaged in their daily struggle for existence.
On day 57 I made a picture of a dead doe’s lost gaze. I had heard a gunshot at midnight, and at dawn the fussing of ravens and eagles led me to the scene of the crime. A deer had been wantonly killed by a poacher. I later photographed another lifeless deer, but this one brought down by wolves in an old and necessary drama. When I arrived, the body had just been opened and was still steaming in the below-zero air.
The photograph of day 10: a young loon dances at sunrise–a loon that only moments before was struggling in the water, its neck and bill entangled in fishline. I paddled my canoe to it, took the loon in hand, and removed an embedded fishhook and the attached line. I placed the loon back in the water and watched as it swam off to a nervous and protective parent. Then the young one stopped, turned toward me, and, as I released the shutter, flapped its wings as if in gratitude. All around me I witnessed cycles of life and death–deer becoming wolves, bones becoming soil, lichens eating rocks, herons stalking fish. Irate wolves chased ravens, which in turn teased indifferent eagles, while I wandered in trust that my every sense would lead me to them so that I might paint them on film.
These experiences rekindled in me a deep primordial feeling, one that I first experienced as a boy tracking foxes across the snow-covered prairie where I was raised. Perhaps it’s akin to what ancient hunters felt, stalking their prey. Haven’t we all had an experience that triggered a distant and foggy memory of ancestral times, when humans lived close to the land? We must not lose sight of that flickering flame. Paying homage to our natural heritage by protecting and cherishing open, free spaces is a small gesture that yields us quiet but profound rewards.
Like my animal neighbors, I struggled with the pace of those ever-shortening days. More often than not I ended up capturing the day’s image under its waning light. The last two photographs happened at the winter solstice–the sun hovering at low noon on the year’s shortest day and the moonlit forest just after midnight during the longest night. They mark the end of my project and of an ancient measure of time, a season when this wild forest grows tenuous, melancholy, and sometimes brutal.
In the end this project changed me. I now expose far less film than I did before my experiment. In fact, often I don’t make any exposures at all when sizing up a potential subject. I hold the process of photographing nature in very high regard and choose not to squander my affection. I feel aftershocks of memory when I revisit the scenes where these photographs were made, and the emotions experienced at the instant of the shutter’s click well up anew.
Land & People, Fall, 2000
Award-winning Minnesota photographer Jim Brandenburg has traveled the world for National Geographic for more than 20 years. His books include Chased by the Light, Brother Wolf, and White Wolf, as well as four books for children. He resides in the canoe country of the Northwoods, where he writes, photographs, and makes fine-art photographic prints.
