Landscape photography has a lot of rules. The better jokes are mostly about desert landscapes... must be first or last light, must be an object of interest in the foreground, must be the one week a year that flowers are in bloom... but it's true of any landscape photography. I've just this past week had a fresh reminder of that, at the LSI (Leica Society International) spring shoot/meeting in Tucson. Being a desert meeting venue, I of course got to see lots of desert landscape photos. Many of them were exquisite, in a traditional sense.

It was kind of summed up by a presentation on Lightroom editing. Lightroom is a powerful tool, and with modern digital cameras and as another speaker said, with Leica providing "the best glass in the world" the results in a. technical sense often rival or even exceed what was one possible only with medium format or larger film cameras. When I looked at the prints on the table at the break, the same images we'd just seen in the Lightroom presentation, it struck me that they were, technically, too sharp, too HD-like with crisp tonal separation, too everything. In the quest for perfection, all the character had been edited out. It's one reason many of us prefer older classic lenses over the latest and technically more nearly "perfect" glass.

The other issue is that many of the very talented folks in that room were in essence all pursuing the same thing. That makes it harder to stand out from the crowd. It quickly brought me back to the old question: Why is it that we're photographing the landscape? 

An article some years back (in Aperture #150) broke landscape photography into four genres:

1. Documentary. These are the images of Carleton Watkins and the like, accompanying the early explorations of the U.S. West. Although useful as snapshots in time for us ecologists and habitat restorationists, this genre is by definition a thing of the past.

2. Transcendental. This genre includes to images of Ansel Adams and numerous other modernist and modernist-inspired photographers. It's often referred to as romantic or spiritual, and emphasizes purity of form and tends to the peaceful and tranquil. These images can be very impressive, especially original prints; I often recommend to young photographers that they jump at any chance to see original Ansel Adams prints which can seem to glow, to give off a light of their own. It's a benchmark of what it possible, or. was when print paper had higher silver content. This genre is alive and well, and I saw a lot of it last week in Tucson up to and including references to the zone system.

If I may be irreverent for a moment though. Modernist landscape photos, and the ideas related to them and perpetuated by the preserve it and leave it alone crowd, collectively represent to me what I sometimes refer to as "the myth of the pristine landscape." That's because, as an ecologist, I look at a typical Ansel Adams photo of say, Yosemite and I see that he got there just in time to photograph the results of 100 years of fire suppression. Places that had been managed with cultural burning for millennia, had quickly grown in when Smoky the Bear put a sudden stop to that. Look at those older expiration expedition pictures, and the trees are much more widely spaced, more open grown. Admittedly Adams could not have understood this, it was another 40 years til we started to figure it out. However having stood where some of his photos were taken, I know that he did consciously crop out some things that didn't fit the preconceived notions of the time. Let's come back to this in a bit.

3. Social/Political. This genre is described as emphasizing the encroachment on, and disregard for,  the natural world characteristic of modern western culture. It can cast a pretty wide net, a good example though is the work of another Adams... Robert Adams, including his photos of suburban sprawl around Denver and so much more. This genre can be a little more nuanced that the ones above, and it can take a lot of looks to keep seeing more things in the images. Another good example is the later and less. well known work of Edward Weston, the California and the West years when he was feeling his mortality and including disturbance and ruin in some images. Quite a contrast to his earlier semi-abstract form and line.

4. Postmodern. I'm not sure this is a real genre, it's a catch all for images where the artist has intervened, altered, or manipulated the image. It's been a thing since the 1960s but really I view it as just the artist elevating their own ego above the art. I don't have a lot of interest in this, it's something most young photographers dabble in and then discard. There are better media for this approach. Enough said.

So where do my Kalmiopsis images fit in this admittedly over-simplified hierarchy? I guess a little of #2 and a little of #3 and a little of something else. 

Photographing the landscape with grainy 35mm film would have horrified many old-school landscape photographers. Today, I could have used a digital camera and in a strictly technical sense, generated higher image quality. This time, I chose not to do so.

The social/political aspect is equally squishy. I'm not trying to make any overt statement here. Fire-altered landscapes are simply what they are. True, they're the product of decades of fire suppression and the results are predictable. However the destruction matters only on the very short time. scale of a human lifetime. As an ecologist taking a longer--term view, perhaps this is the start of a re-set, an eventual return to equilibrium. I'm photographing it mostly because hardly anyone else is, and because it needs to be photographed, and because I'm easily bored by predictable postcard pictures. Also, because if I'm going to spend days at a time hiking the wilderness, I may as well. bring back some photos and the view is certainly better than the typical PNW dense conifer forest.

I'll be watching as viewers react to the images. This exhibit, I'm pretty sure most will get it. The trick will be to get them out there to a more average audience and see what happens. Assuming anyone has an attention span left in the modern era.

2. Chetco Lake I was perhaps a bit over-eager to get started in 2023. it was mid-May, and two-thirds of the way up the forest roads I began to encounter fallen trees half across the road, freshly cut with just barely enough space to get my pickup truck past. Near the top was a fresh fall, which I had to cut myself. There were several small landslides, none severe enough to be more than a minor inconvenience to navigate. The last mile of road was deeply rutted from recent runoff. I didn't need to kick in the 4x4, but ground clearance was essential. There were a few lingering patches of snow as I reached the Vulcan Peak-Chetco Divide Trailhead.

The plan was simple: Hike into Chetco Lake, spend the night to see what the evening and morning light did, and hike back out. Although the lake is in the interior of the wilderness, the trail is fairly direct and it's normally only a few hours walk each way without too much elevation change, pretty consistently near 4,000 feet. Not one of the more difficult hikes in this area, the only sketchy part is a section where in some years fallen scree from Red Mountain tends to turn the trail into a not-flat path. Slowing down a little and watching foot placement and it's usually not too bad. The first part of the trail was in good condition. Then, the snow. About a third of the hike ended up being on not yet melted snow, some of it still over five feet deep. Breaking trail... there was one other set of foot prints, already indistinct although they turned out to be from just hours earlier... was strenuous, and I discovered calf muscles I hadn't known were there. A little beyond Fresno Camp I encountered the maker of the footprints, headed back out. A young fellow, he said that where the trail climbed over a pass beyondChetco Lake it was still entirely covered by deep snow and he'd found it to be too risky to try.

The lake was full, and the ring of boulders I'd seen there several summers ago was fully submerged and not visible at all. I set up camp at the east end of the lake. Periodically I photographed from various angles, watching the light and the shadows change. As the sun set I moved quickly, the light changing every few minutes.

The process was repeated at first light. Once the sun was fully up I broke camp and walked back out. The vistas were very different from the day before, with the morning sun lighting mountain slopes all the way to the coastal fog bank in the far distance.

The second trip was just two weeks later, but by then the snow was gone. This time I shared a base camp with a Siskiyou Mountain Club group of staff and volunteers. We set up at Onion Camp, and they began to clear brush with loppers as I pressed ahead to Eagle Mountain and back, bringing a trails condition report. The second day I headed south on the Kalmiopsis Rim Trail, to a little beyond Canyon Peak. Day three was a short day, with short excursions close to camp. 

A number of photographs from those first two trips are included in the current exhibit, and year one was a success. That summer was busy though. And the next year was frustrating. Starting with a SMC workday where we learned to cut trail tread (and I learned how to run a McLeod, a skill that would later become very useful), the next day I started off from the back side of Babyfoot Lake, picking up the Kalmiopsis Rim Trail to the south again but this time going a little down the Bailey Cabin Trail. Intended as a recon to follow up on at a later date, time got away from me and it was 2025 til I found time to return. I wasn't as happy with the 2024 photos either.

For 2025, the goal was to get all the way down to the Chetco River. With a plan to photograph intensively, I blocked out five days in late May. Starting from the Babyfoot Lake Trailhead, the out-and-back route included the Babyfoot Rim, Kalmiopsis Rim, Bailey Cabin, and Bailey Mountain trails down to Blake's Bar deep in the Chetco Canyon. The first day included a prolonged off-trail excursion in the upper Carter Creek watershed where Kalmiopsis leachiana was in bloom, and an overnight at the Bailey Cabin Site clearing where carnivorous plants grow along a spring run which also provides a water source. Day two was down to Blake's Bar, where I encountered the SMC crew in the midst of their annual trans-Kalmiopsis hike. I backtracked a little after photographing the river, and camped at the Carter Creek-Chetco River confluence. A young couple I'd seen near there in the early afternoon came back the other way, they'd given up on the plans to hire the entire loop. Way behind schedule and already worn out, they were wise to not push it too hard.

Day three was back up the hill, perhaps a little too quickly. trying to time the light for late in the day at a particular serpentine barrens, I stopped for a two hour rest at Bailey Cabin site. As the sun sank, it was back up the hill again and then a prolonged off-trail circuit through that particularly stark barrens above the Bailey Cabin Trail. Several of those images are included in the exhibit. It was the third time I'd seen that spot, but the light had been bad the first two times. This time it was perfect. Finally with last light approaching I selected a less than optimal campsite near the Bailey Cabin-Kalmiopsis Rim junction, within the remnant dense conifer stand there. It turned out to be a lucky choice, because I woke to dense fog covering the Chetco Canyon below. Quickly I hiked clear of the trees and ran through most of a roll of film as the fog quickly thinned. One of those images is at the top of this post. 

From there it was only a few miles back to the trailhead. I'd needed only four of the potential five day window, and had plenty of good images to work with. The next months involved processing, scanning, post-production, editing, and image selection. The final edits and some adjustments to tonal range happened in early 2026, followed by printing and framing 25 images.