© Robert Glenn Ketchum
Tikchik Lake, Grant Lake, and Grant River Falls, Wood-Tikchik State Park. Click photo for more images by Robert Glenn Ketchum and others.
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Many photographers use their work to make a political statement. Most of them leave it at that, passively hoping their pictures will simply inspire the human race to change its harmful ways. But few photographers use the medium in such a political way as Robert Glenn Ketchum. Through a series of books and exhibitions, Ketchum has put his artful images at the service of an ambitious environmental agenda -- helping push important conservation laws through Congress.
Unlike most photographers, Ketchum can measure the effectiveness of his work in acres saved -- and, if such calculus were possible, species pulled back from extinction. Collected in The Tongass: Alaska's Vanishing Rain Forest (Aperture, 1986), his photographs of Southeast Alaska's temperate woodlands convinced Congress to protect more than a million acres of old-growth trees from logging. (The book was distributed by lobbyists to Senate and House members, and prints were exhibited in the Senate Rotunda.) Other bodies of Ketchum's work have supported successful campaigns to preserve millions more acres, from New York's Hudson River Highlands to whale nurseries in the Gulf of California.
In the last few years Ketchum has had the foresight to focus on Southwest Alaska, in particular on 5.6-million-acre Bristol Bay, a pristine region now threatened by offshore drilling interests. (President Bush recently lifted a drilling ban in place since 1989's infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill.)
His Rivers of Life: Southwest Alaska, The Last Great Salmon Fishery (Aperture, 2001) offered both an environmental and an economic defense, pointing out the risks to the bay's $1.2 billion fishing industry. In a second book, Wood-Tikchik: Alaska's Largest State Park (Aperture, 2005) Ketchum shifted his focus onshore, where a shadowy investment group plans to create the world's largest open-pit copper mine. If the state has its way, this facility will drain two of Bristol Bay's salmon-spawning tributaries and incorporate a huge cyanide gold-leach mine -- one producing toxic slurry that will require a holding lagoon 20 miles square, held back by an earthen berm four times the size of China's concrete Three Gorges. If this inherently unstable dam were breached, the pond's contents would devastate the bay.
These two books have been combined to form a traveling exhibition of Ketchum's Southwest Alaska work. Together with his active schedule of public slide talks, the exhibition is being used by his conservation and legislative allies to introduce into both houses of Congress bills protecting Bristol Bay. Though the campaign to promote these bills may take years, Ketchum has learned that political activism requires as much patience as nature photography, and he is optimistic that the bills ultimately will pass.
Ketchum is quick to say he isn't the first to use photography in this way. Ansel Adams lobbied Congress, portfolio in hand, to promote the creation of King's Canyon National Park. Eliot Porter's photographs of Glen Canyon, by contrast, were published in The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado (Sierra Club, 1963) only after a massive hydroelectric dam had already flooded the canyon to create Arizona's Lake Powell. "I want my work to be political, like Porter's," says Ketchum. "But I never want to be in the position Porter was in, where it was a lament over something already lost." In Southwest Alaska, Ketchum wants to intervene before the damage is done: "I always want to be out in front of an issue, so that the work, instead of being about sorrowful regret, can be cutting-edge advocacy."
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