The Influence of Place

Lauren Anderson, Senior Research Project

Introduction

 

“A ‘singing wilderness’ is what naturalist Sigurd Olson found when he wandered the Boundary Waters region… Here was a land quiet enough that he could hear the natural world speak, a place that offered the renewing moments of peace ‘when we feel and are awake with our entire beings rather than our senses.’” (Brandenburg, 2003, p. 38).

Map of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness courtesy of National Geographic.

From the moment of inception, the project that began with Chased by the Light and Looking for the Summer was an endeavor firmly grounded in a sense of place within the North Woods and the neighboring Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). In captions and notes for each photograph, Brandenburg encompasses the natural history, from habits and life cycles of deer, wolves, turtles, loons, bears, raven to geological trends, as well as the human history, from Ojibwa legends, human actions and impacts, of the places he studies. Brandenburg tells us, “I find that developing a grounded sense of context of where you live, knowing your subject better than a far-off, exotic place over a period of years… and telling that story [is] a much richer experience” (Shepard & Foucault, 2003).

Science vs. Art in E.S.

A Brief History of Nature Photography in the U.S.

Modern Functions of Nature Photography

The Photography of Jim Brandenburg
Noteworthy Images
The Influence of Place in Brandenburg photography
Brandenburg's Impact on Conservation
Conclusion
Resources and Methods
Home

Brandenburg began Chased by the Light in a black spruce forest, a place he describes as “...not so overtly beautiful – no vistas, no magnificent, towering trees, no coursing waterways – it remains untrammeled. And perhaps that is why I have always felt that something spiritual lives there…” (1997, p. 96) There is also a “… feeling of being humbled by a place that is much older than you, much bigger than you, and there’s so much mystery [you] don’t even try to figure it out” (Shepard & Foucault, 2003).

But, even a place that feels as spiritually timeless as the Boundary Waters can be subject to dramatic change. As mentioned in other sections, one year after Chased by the Light was published the North Woods suffered an immense storm whose straight-line winds blew at speeds of up to 120 miles an hour. As writer Jeff Forester (2004) describes it: “The wind did not gust but remained steady, wavering only slightly in direction but not in intensity… For twelve long seconds the sharp wind screamed, and then it relents. In its passing, 40 million trees had been snapped off or uprooted and toppled” (p. 168). Decades of forest management that had suppressed fires, clear cut acres and then planted vulnerable single-aged stands of trees, and the invasive white pine blister rust enabled the straight-line winds to cause the catastrophe now know as “The Big Blowdown.”

A U.S. Forest Service photograph of the Big Blowdown near Gunflint Trail.

Brandenburg’s favorite image from Chased by the Light, taken early in the morning of Day 10 on Moose Lake, is a record of a landscape that no longer exists. Brandenburg writes in the introduction of Looking for the Summer, “It was truly strange to be responding to people contacted me about Chased by the Light, knowing that the photographs that moved them were of places that, in many instances, no longer existed in that form” (2003, p. 11). One is reminded that the forests are not in fact timeless. Even through protection and more effective management, no landscape can be truly preserved nor should it be. Disturbances such as fire, wind, disease, herbivory have their rightful place in a natural area such as the BWCAW. Occurrences like the Big Blow Down act as a reminder that the landscapes of places we love are dynamic and cannot be frozen in time.