Minute Montana: Kathe LeSage’s “One Woman’s Montana”

By Jenny Shank, 2-08-08

One Woman’s Montana: Photographs
By Kathe LeSage
Riverbend Publishing
80 pages, $24.95

Photographer Kathe LeSage grew up in Great Falls and Bozeman, currently lives near Wolf Creek, and for her first book she stuck close to home, capturing intimate, contemplative images of the landscape, people, flora, and fauna of Montana.  LeSage, who has been taking photos professionally for over three decades, writes in the preface to One Woman’s Montana that early on she came to understand “that where attention is placed, creation occurs.”

She decided to place her attention on “beauty, harmony, joy, balance—love,” and her photographs bear this philosophy out, as they are often tightly focused on small details that could have been overlooked in a more traditional emphasis on Montana’s vastness as its chief beauty.  From a glimpse inside a robin’s nest, to a peek at a mountaintop through a barn window, to a study of penned sheep awaiting shearing, LeSage’s images are close and personal.

In the section entitled “Nature Meditations,” LeSage includes a photo of an animal’s jawbone buried in a pile of vivid fall leaves.  While some famous images of animal bones depict them as bleached, LeSage’s bones blush with color, mirroring the reds, greens, and yellows of the leaves that surround them.

There is often a feminine quality to the images, even when what they capture has no gender.  I don’t mean to suggest that women take photos one way and men another, but Lesage has highlighted this aspect in the title of her book, that it’s a “woman’s” perspective, and her photos often read like invitations to share a secret.  In “Swimming Duck,” she presents a tight shot of the white breast of a duck as seen from below.  In “Heron Dance,” it looks like she’s captured a bird in its private bath.  “Long Grass Path” is a landscape detail focused on blurred, windblown wheat that is warm and inviting, and it echoes the horse tails blowing in the breeze in the section entitled “Horse Nudes.”

“Horse Nudes” is a funny, yet accurate title—there are a lot of gorgeous horse rumps on display here.  You never see a full horse, just its sun-struck back like a rolling hill, or a strong neck curving down.  In “Two Colts,” a pair of colts stands cheek to neck, and they are hidden in shadow except for the eye of one that peeks out into the sun.  It’s an image that manages to be sweet without cloying.

In some of her photographs, LeSage has hand painted the images.  I’ve grown wary of such manipulation, after seeing one too many black-and-white images of precious children clutching deep red roses, and I think the trick has become a cliché in many hands.  But LeSage has redeemed the technique for me, especially in photos called “Boulder Hill Window” and “Boulder Hill Truck,” which I believe she has tinted (there’s no indication of exactly which ones she’s altered), rendering them a sort of iridescent sepia that enhances their storytelling quality.  I couldn’t look at these details of a window and a truck without wondering about the history of these objects.

LeSage has also tacked some traditional Montana subjects, such as a group of white teepees below a mountain, and images of cowboy life in the section entitled “Ranching.” Her “Land Views,” a selection of landscapes that are some of the few photos in the book in which she has broadened the focus, have a hushed quality, and are often blurred with fog or rendered grainy.  There’s no bright blue sky, just cloud cover or haze, all the better to preserve the land’s mystery.