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Facing Climate Change and other news
New prison work featured in TED Talk
Show opening at the Confluence Gallery
Weathering Change opens Saturday, July 31 at the Confluence Gallery in Twisp, Washington. The show explores how society and the arts adapts to an evolving, changing world. A number of images from our Sámi and wildfire climate change work are on display. These are new prints made with Tyler Boley that were in the Ansel Adams Gallery last fall. As we enter the peak of fire season, we’re particularly excited to bring our wildfire images back to the valley from which they came.
We’ll be giving a talk at the gallery on September 9, at 7 p.m. Weathering Change runs through September 18, 2010.
Sagebrush, potatoes and wind farms
It seems like we are spending a lot of time in windy places for our new Facing Climate Change stories. We recently visited 25,000 acres of abandoned farmland above the Snake River to learn about how and why it went from sagebrush to potatoes to wind farms in one generation. The agricultural development is called Bell Rapids and one farm owner told me he’s seen the wind blow sugar beets up out of the ground.
In 35 years the State of Idaho went from selling this land for around $1/acre, basically begging farmers to make the desert bloom, to buying the water rights back for almost $1,000/acre. What’s left is a sort of post-apocalyptic landscape of sheet metal barns with telephone numbers still scrawled on the doors, houses with boots under beds and paystubs in kitchens, four million pounds of dry steel pipe that used to carry Snake River water, and some enormous new wind turbines.
Benj and I worked long days, photographing at sunrise and sunset and interviewing farmers in between. We spent nights in the back of our truck up on the plateau, just us, the wheatgrass and wind. Except for the first night, when we woke up to find a pair of tiny headlights making their way across the empty space. As the vehicle got closer, the driver flipped on a spotlight and we knew someone had called the police. After a few minutes of questioning, a second officer arrived on the crime scene. Once we convinced them that we were taking pictures, not old farm equipment, they turned into the friendliest cops we’ve ever met.
We spent a lot of time chasing light down straight dusty roads laid out in a one-mile grid. (Bell Rapids Road becomes the 400 road. If you follow that to the 5600 road over to the 300 and up to the 5700, the light will inevitably be better back down the 400 to the 5500.) 25,000 acres is a lot of ground to cover — for us and for the Snake River water that once made these fields green.
Gathering bitterroot
We’ve been out in the field a lot lately, collecting stories for our new series. Most recently, we’ve been gathering roots with some friends from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
One of the places we visited was near a new wind farm and we all had to wear hardhats, which made it difficult to bend over to dig roots. It also made it tough to wear headphones, though that was only one of the many challenges with trying to record audio in 35 mile-an-hour winds. We were mostly looking for bitterroot, or Lewisia rediviva (think green sea urchine meets pink kleenex), and digging for it beneath towering wind turbines was like walking the ridge between ancient practice and modern technology.
After you dig bitterroot you have to prepare them for eating, and it takes three times as much effort to peel one as it does to pull it out of the ground. In that sense, gathering roots is like making a good story. Once you have all the pieces, the hard work begins. In the coming months we will edit Benj’s images, log my wind-blown audio and shape these nuggets into a story about how climate change impacts traditional foods.
Benj joins Aurora Select
Benj has joined the multimedia roster at Aurora Select. A division of Aurora Photos, Select represents a high caliber network of editorial and commercial photographers working in still, video and multimedia.
View the multimedia work or the full network listings. For assignments contact David Laidler or Chris Dinon.
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