Grab your camera!  The Nature Conservancy is sponsoring a photography contest to help educate the public about the need for environmental conservation.

We’re looking for beautiful nature photography representing the diversity of life on Earth. Your original digital images of our lands, waters, plants, animals and people in nature are all eligible for the competition.

We are especially interested in images that showcase the wide range of habitats across our planet, including all types of forests, grasslands, lakes and rivers, deserts and arid lands, rainforests, marine habitats and coral reefs in all seasons and around the world.

The winning photo will be featured in the Nature Conservancy 2011 nature calendar and on their website.  The deadline for entry is September 30th.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

Blue Earth is hosting Seattle Greendrinks again!  If you are in the area next month, we invite all our members and supporters to join us for the August Greendrinks, Seattle’s premier green-focused networking event, at Blue Earth Board member Chase Jarvis’ studio near Gas Works Park.

Food and beverages will be available from Inferno Dogs, The Sierra Nevada Brewing Co, Full Circle Farm, Snoqaulmie Vineyards, and The Essential Baking Company.  Doors open at 5:30 p.m.  This is a green event – please bring your own mugs and wine glasses.  Compostable cups will be available for a $5 suggested donation and logo pint glasses for $10.

For all our members and supporters in other areas, don’t despair.  We’re working on additional events and exhibits elsewhere and will be making an announcement soon.

Want to keep up-to-date on our project photographers and learn about special events?  Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed!

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

Damage on Lulu Creek, after a section of the Grand Ditch blew out in 2003, sending a huge mass of debris down the mountainside. © John Trotter

The Grand Ditch © John Trotter

Well, to the handful of you out there in internet land who are following this trip, I apologize for not posting anything here over the past couple of days.  It’s not because nothing has been going on.  Quite the contrary.  I’ve just been working too hard and haven’t had enough time to sit down with my laptop, then sling said laptop over my back and pedal the ten miles down to the Blue Water Bakery Cafe here in Grand Lake, Colorado to hook up to their free wireless and eat a sandwich for dinner.

I came to Grand Lake with all my photo and video gear today to gather some images of this place, which is utterly dependent on the tourism that Colorado River water makes possible by filling Grand Lake itself.  But today has been wet and I’ve twice now been soaked to the skin out there, so I’ve decided to catch up on the last couple of days here on the Blue Water’s own PC.  If you’re a Jimmy Buffett kind of person, then the Blue Water is your kind of place.

I have much to report and not much time with which to work.  First off, I’ve been meaning to comment on the word ‘Grand’ that I’ve been tossing about.  This part of the Colorado River was actually called the Grand River until 1921, when Edward T. Taylor, a congressman from the state of Colorado, was able to get the name ‘Grand’ changed to ‘Colorado’ as a way of locating the headwaters of the West’s most notable river in his home state.  I knew that when I came here and persisted, even though I have long felt, as many others have, that the river’s headwaters could more accurately be located at the beginning of the Green River in Wyoming.  I may yet go there.  But enough of that.  I’m here in Colorado and the headwaters I’ve been photographing around definitely flow down into the river I’ve spent a lot of time these past few years exploring.

What else has been going on?  Well, I should tell you that yesterday I got busted by a couple of horse-mounted National Park Service rangers.  Perhaps the word “busted” carries connotations of devious criminal behavior, which I’m not going to cop to.  But to clarify what happened, I have to go back to my previous day, spent with Covey Potter, a graduate student at Colorado State University.  We’d met up at the campground and he’d agreed to take me out along the Colorado River, where he was sinking some monitoring wells (basically 1.5″ pvc pipes with simple electronics inside) as part of a project to restore an area near the defunct mining town of Lulu City, which was decimated when a section of the Grand Ditch (that word ‘Grand’ again… it actually was originally called the Grand River Ditch), high above on a mountainside, blew out in 2003.  Covey says that roughly 9,000 dumptruck loads of debris came rushing down the hill, wiping out about 20,000 trees along the way.  The Grand Ditch is considered the very first diversion of Colorado River waters, as it captures mountain runoff along its 8-mile length before it even reaches the river, sending it across the Continental Divide and down to agriculture on the drier eastern side of the Rocky Mountains.  It’s a perfect example of the importance of the seniority of water rights in the West, as the ditch began delivering that water in 1890, 25 years before the founding of Rocky Mountain National Park itself.

Nevertheless, the National Park Service decided to sue the Water Supply and Service Company, which owns the ditch, for damages and won a $9 million settlement for restoration.  Covey showed me the affected area a couple of days ago and I would have attached photos I took of Lulu Creek tumbling its way over the six-year-old mountain of boulders and assorted debris, but as I said, I’m not on my own laptop.  Maybe later.  Suffice it to say that he and his cohorts have a huge job on their hands and though he described a rough plan of action to me, I have no idea how they’re going to accomplish it.  I’ll be very interested to see how it all goes.

During our day hiking around in the wilderness, Covey encouraged me to go up and see the Grand Ditch for myself and meet the two men whose job it is to make sure that water flows along it without interruption.  Covey, quite the mountain biker himself, seemed duly impressed that I’d ridden my way up here with all my gear from Denver and felt that the best way for me to go up to the ditch was to push my bike up a steep, extremely rocky two-mile road.  Once I reached the ditch, he said, I’d have a very level, regularly graded road to ride, which was the road that the ditch guys themselves cruised along in their pickups during their inspections.  He felt that I’d enjoy meeting the guys and that I’d be able to see a lot of the ditch by bicycle on the way.

We’re just about back to the horse mounted rangers, I promise…

The next morning, Covey went out to check his wells and I set off for the ditch.  He gave me instructions to get to the ditch road, which went through the Holzwarth Historic Site, a defunct dude ranch.  At the entrance to the site I was met by an elderly NPS volunteer, who pointed out the sign, forbidding bicycles along the trail (actually a wide, flat path).  I asked him what harm would be done if I walked the bike along the trail and he just shook his head and told me that it wasn’t allowed and it was not his to question why.  I told him that a Park Service employee had told me I could take it through there (Covey is partially employed by the Park Service in his research) and went ahead.  The encounter left me with a funny feeling, unexpected as it was, though I had no problems besides some rain all the way up to the ditch camp.

When I got there, I saw a sign on the door that the guys were gone, working “down ditch.”  I pulled out the video camera and made a minute of footage of a ragged little American flag flapping in the wind next to the ditch, then turned the camera on the ditch itself, as it flowed down toward the other side of the Divide.  That’s when I saw the two rangers on their horses, riding in my direction.  I even filmed them for 15 or 20 seconds, then stopped to change lenses on my Mamiya to photograph their arrival.  I’d just got the camera ready when they rode up, but could immediately tell from their faces that they were in no mood to be amiable.  They were a man and a woman.

“Is that your bicycle?” asked the man.

When I said it was, he asked how I’d arrived with it here, so I told him.  “I don’t believe you!” he said and climbed off his horse.

I knew I was in trouble then.  He explained to me that the roads I’d been on were considered trails by the park and that since bicycles were not allowed on trails, I was in violation of the law.  I told him that I’d been encouraged by a researcher to come up there in that way and he angrily told me, “He has no authority to tell you that!”

And alas, my time here at the cafe is up and I have to go without finishing the story.  But isn’t that how Dickens himself used to do it when his novels were being serialized in the newspapers?  Well, I’m no Dickens, but I promise to give you the conclusion to the story when I next have an opportunity to write, which might be a couple of days from now.  Tomorrow morning I have to ride over Trail Ridge Road (the second highest paved road in the lower 48 states) to the other side of the park and then down to Denver.  I’ve got to get back to New York, as I’ve only been there four days since the end of May.

Thanks for reading and I hope I haven’t rambled too much for you.

John Trotter

Lake Granby © John Trotter

Timber Creek Campground-Rocky Mountain National Park
© John Trotter

The screen on the laptop computer resting on my knees, where I am sitting up in my sleeping; bag tells me that it is now 5:04 am.  But I’m sure that fact is absolutely immaterial to the solitary house wren chirping purposefully away nearby in the slowly gathering light that is beginning to permeate the walls of this tent.  I’ve been awake longer than the bird: long enough to have experienced the pre-dawn of this new day when the sound of it still meant only the gentlest breeze whispering through the branches of the beetle-eaten lodge pole pine forest across the road.

But since I’ve powered up this Mac fourteen minutes ago, already a second vehicle has rattled by on Trail Ridge Road, scraped down to gravel for re-paving and soon to be what it was when I rode in on it yesterday afternoon: a morass of idling vacation vehicles and heavy trucks, laden with asphalt from some aggregate plant outside the National Park.  Little did I know when those trucks began to pass my left shoulder after I pedaled onto Trail Ridge off U.S. Highway 40 that my evening’s destination would be directly adjacent to the current epicenter of road re-surfacing activity in Rocky Mountain National Park.

I should pause to note the presence of a herd of elk at the edge my campsite, whose browsing I interrupted when I paused from my typing moments ago to step into the brisk mountain air.  All nine of them raised their heads in my direction, chewing on whatever tender grass they’d just found, then calmly moved a little farther away in unison.

The day’s third vehicle has now passed.

After I’d arrived, found this campsite and set up my tent, I remarked to a woman in a site nearby about the dearth of trees here, as almost all of them had been felled and bulldozed into large, utterly dead, umber piles throughout the campground.  She said she thought that the park service had cut them all down as a public safety measure last year, after the trees, all lodge pole pines, had succumbed to the bark beetle infestation.  Or was it the year before?  Anyway, they had once defined why anyone would feel the urge to spend a night in this meadow and their absence now made this place look a bit ridiculous and random and us campers a bit like refugees, with no better place to lay our heads.

And as serendipity would have it, Kristin (Kristen?), the woman I spoke to, is a PhD student from Colorado State University, who is trying to determine how to save the willows nearby, which are losing the battle with resident moose population, as well as from a fungus, which until a couple of months ago, she said, has only been known to attack aspens.

Willows, of course, are found primarily in riparian areas and the riparian area adjacent to this very campground is the Colorado River’s.  And so, just like that, as has happened many times before since beginning work on this project, I’ve stumbled upon another pathway into a part of the river I’ve yet to explore.  To tell the story of something so large, which makes its course across so much varied territory, I’ve found that it is necessary to tell many smaller stories along the way.

I’m attaching a picture of Lake Granby about fifteen miles below here, which I passed en route: Colorado River water behind a dam.  And just so you’ll see evidence of the pine bark beetle devastation I’ve been describing for the past two days: a picture of my campsite here in Rocky Mountain National Park.

John Trotter

Trotter’s current project at Blue Earth is No Agua, No Vida: The Thirsty Colorado River Delta.

© John Trotter

I’d hoped to get on the road early Tuesday, knowing that I’d have a long, grinding climb over Berthoud Pass.  Last night, I even had designs on making it to Granby.  But as tired as I was, I slept terribly in my tent at the Indian Spring campground and by morning I felt as though I’d been awake more than I’d been asleep.  Any cyclist riding the Tour de France could count on being shelled by the competition after such a night.

Nevertheless, I rolled out of my sleeping bag, got on my bike and rode down Main Street in Idaho Falls for some coffee and a little breakfast.  But it was after 9am before I hit the road and I lamented the loss my best laid plans from the night before.  And I hadn’t been riding for an hour before I ran across a Starbucks, with wireless internet access, where I stopped to check my email and update this blog.

Before noon, I left the Interstate 70 access roads I’d been following and turned onto U.S. Highway 40 and the approach to Berthoud Pass in earnest.  As I settled into the climb, I saw a gash of brown trees scarring a mountain to my left and realized that I was riding into the elevation where the Mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) were laying waste to the alpine evergreen forest across the Western United States.  The higher I rode, the more the mountainsides reminded me of piles of discarded Christmas trees in February.

This vast scourge across an entire region is yet another symptom of global warming.  The larvae deposited in the bark of pine trees by adult beetles have not been frozen to death during winters that are trending warmer in the higher altitudes.  As the pine forests are already stressed by the protracted drought that has gripped the West for a decade, the perfect storm has arrived.  Millions of acres of pines are dying or dead and we may very soon not recognize a part of our country that has long fired our collective imagination and shaped our identity.

But mostly today, I’ve been focused on moving myself closer to the Colorado River headwaters and frankly, the suitcase trailer I’m towing up these mountains behind my folding Bike Friday is overloaded with camping and photography gear.  Turning the pedals, even in my very lowest gear, is hard labor.  For the curious, I’m hauling: Two Mamiya 7 cameras, with three lenses; two flashes (one of which is a backup); a Sekonic meter; about 50 rolls of Tri-X 220 film; an old Leitz Tiltall monopod; a Canon Vixia HV30 video camera, with a Sennheiser mic and four tapes; an Edirol R9 digital audio recorder and of course, the 15” MacBook Pro on which I write these words.  The laptop alone must weigh over six pounds.

I’m sitting tonight in a lightweight one person tent on a featherweight ¾ length sleeping pad, with only a wisp of a sleeping bag to keep out the chill of the mountain night (I’m generally a warm sleeper, but I’m not as hardy as a pine bark beetle).  I guess I’ll know in the morning if leaving the heavier sleeping bag at home was worth it.

At the top of Berthoud Pass is a sign marking the Continental Divide.  East of there, all the rivers flow to the mighty Mississippi.  To the west, everything flows into the Colorado.

John Trotter

The Photographic Center Northwest is hosting a legal workshop “Model & Property Releases For Photographers & Videographers” on Wednesday, August 19, 2009 from Noon - 1:30 p.m.

Privacy and publicity laws determine when it is permissible to take photos or videos of others, and what uses can be made of those photos and videos.  Similarly, certain intellectual property laws govern the use of photos and videos of certain buildings and copyrighted or trademarked works.  Release of liability agreements are the common means employed to deal with these issues.  Consequently, laws pertaining to contracts need to be considered when entering into such agreements.  Lisa Willmer, Yoko Miyashita, and Heather Cameron from Getty Images will be your guides on this exploration of the issues surrounding releases of liability.  This Brown Bag will discuss when releases are needed, identify key terms to be aware of or included in release agreements, and provide other practical advice.  You will also have the opportunity to have your questions answered, so come prepared!

Register online or call (800) 838-3006.  To pay at the door, RSVP to Washington Lawyers for the Arts at (206) 328-7053.  Tickets are $35 in advance for attorneys and paralegals ($10 artists and students) and $40 at the door for attorneys and paralegals ($15 artists and students).  Please note that the event is subject to cancellation; visit thewla.org for more information.  1.5 CLE credits pending.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

© John Trotter

I had a friend back in Sacramento who told me that she’d decided to choose gravity as her religion because gravity was something everybody could believe in.

Here in Idaho Springs, Colorado, an old mining town along tumbling Clear Creek and rumbling Interstate 70, my appreciation of gravity has been refreshed by pedaling up here yesterday from Denver, pulling my gear behind me in my trailer.  Moving a one-ton automobile up the same stretch with the air conditioning and the radio blasting, courtesy of some ancient fossilized forest, we tend to disconnect from what gravity really means in our lives.

The beginning of the industrial revolution was powered by gravity and evidence can still be seen in old New England mill towns, sited along rivers where falling water turned the early wheels of industry.  Here in Idaho Springs, the now-dormant Argo Gold Mine turned its processing mill, producing electricity with Clear Creek, which falls a long way down the Rockies before it flows through here.  But I’m still on the Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains and the water in Clear Creek will eventually end up in the Mississippi.  I have more climbing ahead of me today before I’m in the Colorado River watershed.

And I’d better get to it.

John Trotter

Trotter’s current project at Blue Earth is No Agua, No Vida: The Thirsty Colorado River Delta.

Aboard the Amtrak California Zephyr eastbound out of Sacramento the Sierra Nevada Mountains have suddenly disappeared from view, as we have now entered one of them. One minute… two minutes… a pair of middle-aged women inch cautiously past my seat in the subterranean darkness. “Are we still in a tunnel or is this a blackout?” asks one to the other, who responds with nicotine-stained laughter.

After almost five minutes, we emerge from beneath the mountain next to a long, alpine lake. I learn that it is, in fact, Donner Lake and realize that the mountain we’ve just passed through is the same one that trapped the now famous party of emigrants for the entire long, hungry winter of 1844. And as it has for many years, that geographic designation reminds me of my old friend Martin, a brilliant sportswriter from my first newspaper job, who liked to leave the unlucky group’s name with restaurant hostesses whenever he was told that there would be a wait for a table, just so that later, he could hear them call out, “Donner… the Donner party… your table is ready.”

Seeing Donner Lake reminds me that in California, as it is in much of the intermountain West, the vast majority of the water being used is coming out of the mountains as stored snow melt. As our planet continues to warm up, snow pack in those mountains should inevitably decrease and the systems constructed for water delivery, like the ones along the Colorado River, where I’m going, will not be able to function as they were designed to.

The next time I write will likely be from the Rocky Mountains themselves. Time now to enjoy a nice, microwaved Amtrak veggie burger.

John Trotter

The female’’s role is to produce offspring and participate in the care of the infants.  Poppy, the female shown here, is one of the grandes dames of Rwandan mountain gorillas having produced babies for many years.  Poppy and her infant Ishyaka Laurentine are members of the Susa Group.  As young females grow to maturity, they may and generally do leave their birth or natal group to join another social unit.  It is not abnormal for a female to transition between groups more than once in her life.  Parc National des Volcans, Rwanda. © Gene Eckhart

We are very pleased to announce the acceptance of Gene Eckhart’s Mountain Gorillas… and People: Understanding the Connections and Why They Matter in the summer 2009 round. Everyone at Blue Earth wishes to congratulate Gene, and we very much look forward to working together furthering his work to promote mountain gorilla conservation.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

The Colorado River Aqueduct passes through the desert of Southern California east of Joshua Tree National Park. © John Trotter

For anyone out there interested in the working process of a Blue Earth photographer, I’ve decided to blog as often as possible about my current trip for my ongoing Colorado River project.  From wherever I can find internet access out in the field, I’ll send updates to my esteemed colleague Bart J. Cannon, at Mission Control in the great Pacific Northwest, and he’ll post them here for you (since you’re are in fact reading this) to see.  We each work in our own ways and we each describe those ways uniquely, as well.  I guess I don’t exactly want to demystify the undertaking for you because it would be a shame to eliminate all of the inherent magic that photography has always offered us, but I’ll try my best to make it interesting.

What are the origins of this trip?

When I decided to attend the July 11 opening of a two-person exhibition I was a part of at the Viewpoint Photographic Art Center in Sacramento, California, it was a natural opportunity to double up and work on my Colorado River project, since I was already going to be in the West.  Originally, I’d intended to re-visit San Diego and other cities nearby that are heavily dependent on the river for their survival.  But a proposal from a French magazine to photograph in Monument Valley that materialized in mid-June made me decide to photograph my way up the river from Lake Powell instead.  And though sadly, the job fell through in the end, I’d made too many plans in that direction and have resolved to follow through with them.

So, I’m taking the Amtrak California Zephyr to Denver, where I’ve got a couple of cousins and thus a free place to stay.  From there I’m going to re-visit the Colorado River headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, where I’d spent a few hours kicking around with my father late last year in the snow.

Did I mention that I’m going to be working from my bicycle?  It’s true.  It won’t be the first time.  Last fall I spent a week each in San Diego and Las Vegas, car-free, carrying my Mamiya 7, a couple of lenses and a bunch of film in my Lowe Pro sling bag all day long.  Why?  I guess I prefer to ask, why not?  I’ve been a cyclist most of my life, even racing on a French amateur team in my late teens and riding across the United States alone in my mid-30’s.  As the evidence of carbon-induced global warming and petroleum production collapse only continue to become more compelling I’ve begun to feel that it’s somewhat disingenuous to flit around the world with very carbon intensive propulsion to photograph the results of flitting around the world with very carbon intensive propulsion.

So, I take the train or the bus (preferably public transportation) or my bike, whenever possible instead of an airplane or a car.  I ride a Bike Friday a very ingenious folder, built in Eugene, Oregon, which fits into a Samsonite suitcase, for which I’ve never paid an oversize charge when I have had to fly with it.  Once I get where I’m going, I unfold it from the case, then pop a couple of small wheels onto an axle that attaches very quickly to the bottom of the suitcase to turn it into a trailer.  Shocked, unsuspecting bystanders have watched me do this as though I were some movie villain screwing a few disparate pipes together into a sniper rifle.  And then, to their continued surprise, I attach the suitcase/trailer to the bike, throw my other bag inside it and ride away from the airport/train station.  People: believe me - get rid of the gym membership because this is the future.  I’ve more than paid for the bike with the money I haven’t spent on rental cars.

And the thing is, I can see a lot better from a bike than I can from a car.

You might enjoy a photo Kevin German took of me assembling the bike in Charlottesville, Virginia.  The reason it took a half hour to put everything together while he was watching was because I’d left a R-pin for attaching a trailer wheel at my previous destination and took a few minutes to improvise my key ring as a temporary replacement.

Anyway, if you’ve read this far, check back.  I’ll let you know how the trip unfolds and though I’ve been shooting this project in film since its beginning, I’ll try to upload some snapshots from my compact digital Ricoh, as well.

All the best to you,

John Trotter

Trotter’s current project at Blue Earth is No Agua, No Vida: The Thirsty Colorado River Delta.

I’m pleased to report that popular clothing company Nau has just launched their first annual Grant for Change “supporting those who instigate lasting, positive change in their communities.”  This is a somewhat unique grant in that the $10,000 award recipient is selected by popular vote.  Blue Earth project photographer Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele have been nominated for their Facing Climate Change project for the award, and we encourage your support of their project!  Check out Benj & Sara’s blog for more information about the project and how the grant could help their work.

Visit the Grant for Change program page to cast your vote for Facing Climate Change today!

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

Three women at Fiesta. © Judy Blankenship

Blue Earth currently sponsors about 30 photographic projects.  Over the years, different projects have run their course and moved forward on their own.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less important today than they were when Blue Earth first sponsored them.

This week, I’d like to highlight Judy Blankenship’s project on The Canari Of Southern Ecuador.  Her project emerged as the result of many trips to the region documenting indigenous culture and resulted in a book, Canar: A Year in the Highlands of Ecuador that was published in 2005.  She has gone on to work with the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

Today we begin a new series on the blog featuring selected articles from Shooting From The Heart: Photography That Makes A Difference, our highly regarded handbook for photographers developing documentary projects.  Over time this series will include most of the articles from the handbook, but if you can’t wait for the full series to be published, feel free to download a free PDF version of Shooting From The Heart and have a copy to keep as your own!

Beginning The Process

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

You have an idea for a documentary project.  You find yourself thinking about it all the time.  It is a story that has to be told.  One that no one is telling.  One that you want to communicate through your photographs.  You decide that you have to act on your convictions.

Now the hard work begins.  Decisions have to be made: how best to photograph the story, who to talk with, where to go, when to go, how to fund it.  You are overwhelmed.

I know the feeling.  I’ve been there.  In 1983 I had a burning desire to tell the stories of salmon and the cultures that depend on the salmon around the Pacific Rim.  Sure, there were plenty of stories in the newspapers about salmon.  But they were stories about one small aspect—such as the closure of sport fishing seasons for lack of fish.  No one was looking at the story in its entirety.

For the next year I researched the story and requested all news-paper assignments relating to salmon. I knew this would be a good project for the Alicia Patterson Foundation.  I had heard about this nonprofit when I first started in photography.  Each year six to eight journalists, including photographers, are selected for these fellowships.  In 1986 I received one.  The grant allowed me to take 14 months off from my newspaper photography job to pursue the story.  I was ecstatic.  But I soon realized that, although most people make a plan and then look for money, I had the money and no plan.

The story was huge, and complicated by the fact that salmon return to the rivers of their births just once a year. How was I ever going to cover it all?

After a month of sleepless nights and anxious days, I realized that it just couldn’t be done. I had to find situations that would rep-resent different aspects of the story.  I took a week to concentrate on writing the general theme of the project.  Then I divided it into different categories, such as life cycle, logging impact on streams, gillnetting, and marine mammal interception.  In those days before computers, I wrote everything I knew on index cards according to subject and organized the cards in piles on the floor of my bed-room-turned-office.

As the piles grew, the project seemed to divide itself into five main areas: the incredible life cycle of the salmon and the creatures that feed on the fish; commercial and sport fishing; Indian fishing and ceremonies; salmon farms and ranches; and habitat destruction.  I examined each set of index cards to determine what situation would make the best photographs and when the best time to photograph was.  I then made hard decisions about what not to photograph.

For example, I could have photographed Indians fishing anywhere in the Northwest, Canada, or Alaska.  I decided that the dip-net fishery on the Klickitat River in Washington would exemplify not only the current dependence on salmon of the Yakama Indians, but also the traditional fishing that members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition wrote about in the early 1800s.  As they did in the old days, the fishermen stood on platforms hung from the walls of the river’s canyon.  Using nets on long poles, they caressed the bottom to find the hidey-holes where the salmon rested. Most important, the Yakama Indians had agreed to give me access, the spring chinook fishing was just beginning, and the Klickitat was only a five-hour drive from my Seattle home.

After I had decided what and where to photograph, I transferred each subject onto Post-it notes.  I placed those on a 12-month calendar.  I then had a visual outline that could be adjusted as my plans changed.  (Today many software programs make this organizational task even simpler.)

As soon as I made these hard decisions, I felt a weight lift from my chest.  Although I did not have every single decision, trip, or con-tact finalized, I did have enough to begin doing what I love: photographing real people living their lives.

I had discovered that by dividing the overall story into smaller stories I could get my arms around it.  Instead of planning my whole year, I took one month at a time.  My 10-year project began with a theme, piles of index cards, a calendar, and one small step.

Natalie Fobes

ArtCorps
Deadline: August 30, 2009

ArtCorps’ mission is to advance social change initiatives by promoting arts and culture as powerful tools to generate cooperative and sustainable work between development organizations and the communities they serve.   We send artists to Central America to work with environmental, health and human rights organizations.   During one-year residencies, artists use every imaginable art form including theater, mime, puppetry, mural painting, sculpture and poetry to bring the organizations’ environmental and social messages to life and engage the local community in their activities.  ArtCorps is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.

Apply now for opportunities in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.  Contact Marta Oslin at info@artcorp.org or +1 (978) 927-2404 x4 with questions.

One of our newest project photographers, Asim Rafiqui has an article and an impressive series of photos in latest issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review.  The summer issue features some of his recent work in Gaza after fighting broke out once again in December 2008:

[W]hen I again found myself crossing the border, the circumstances felt all too familiar, and I carried with me the fear that there was nothing new I could document. … This is the challenge of coming to Gaza: how to shed new light on one of the world’s most thoroughly photographed human tragedies?

The series of photos does not highlight the conflict per se - there are no images of tanks, burned out buildings, or rubble.  Instead, his focus is on creating intimate portraits of the people living in the wake of this ongoing disaster.

The Virginia Quarterly Review is available in print at your local newsstand as well as online.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager

We have been pleased to report on the progress this spring of Bert Teunissen with his Blue Earth sponsored project Domestic Landscapes: Eastern Europe highlighting changing domestic interiors across Europe.  Now we are able to report that Teunissen has just added a new series from his recent work in the Czech Republic.  The new work is a collection of compelling photos, many of which were taken inside what might be called “traditional” homes, which capture a lifestyle slowly disappearing from an aggressively modernizing Europe.

These new images are from only one of several series he will be completing during the next two years for the project, including trips to the Ukraine, Russia, and Moldavia.

- Bart J. Cannon, Program Manager