Western Writers

An Interview with Stephen Trimble

By Jenny Shank, 7-13-07

Utah-based writer and photographer Stephen Trimble‘s Lasting Light: 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photography (Northland Publishing) compiles dozens of the most memorable photographs of the Grand Canyon over the years, and pairs them with the stories of the photographers who took them and the history of photography in the Grand Canyon.  The book won the 2007 Western Heritage Award in the photography book category.  I recently interviewed Trimble via email about how he selected the photos for Lasting Light, how landscape photographers try to avoid clichés and “eco-porn,” and the millions of snapshots of the Grand Canyon in family photo albums across the world. 

New West: How did you select the photographers and specific photographs to include in Lasting Light?

Stephen Trimble: Lasting Light began when three people working with Grand Canyon photographers realized that the tales from the field were as compelling as the pictures themselves.  Richard Jackson, at Hance Partners in Flagstaff, Arizona, had been making large custom prints for professional Grand Canyon photographers for years.  He loved hearing the stories behind the pictures told to him by the photographers.  He realized that he even made better prints after he had heard the stories!

Richard drove up to Grand Canyon National Park and proposed a major exhibit featuring not just the Canyon, not just photos as fine art—but, rather, an exhibit featuring the passion and dedication and stories of an entire generation of Grand Canyon photographers.  The people.  The experiences.  Pamela Frazier at the Grand Canyon Association agreed, and these two began planning an exhibit to open at the historic Kolb Studio.  They then took their idea to David Jenney at Northland Publishing in Flagstaff, and these three defined the concept of the book.  They began inviting photographers to submit for the exhibit.  They chose a jury to judge the submissions.  And they began researching historic photos.  At this point, they came to me and asked me to write the text of the book, profiling the contributing photographers and placing them in the context of a narrative history of Grand Canyon photography.  And so the core of 23 contemporary photographers featured in the book and profiled in my text came from the list chosen for this juried exhibit.

As I began working on the text, I was able to lobby for adding photographers to the historic section based on the stories I wanted to tell.  Ernst Haas, for instance, hadn’t come up until I insisted that we include him (he is one of my heroes).  And I realized that our “contemporary” photographers were mostly middle-aged Boomers like myself.  Indeed, 15 of them turned out to be within three years of my own age (I was born in 1950).  If we wanted the book truly to be a history that ran right up to the present, we would need to include younger photographers, as well.  So we began soliciting work from the current generation of river runner/park ranger/photographers in love with the Canyon, and their work became the core of the section in the book called “Extending the View,” as well as adding vital life to the exhibit.  So that’s how we chose our photographers.

The specific photos themselves came from two pools: the images accepted by the jury for the exhibit; and the full submissions from each individual photographer sent to the exhibit team for consideration.  I lobbied for the photos with the best stories.  David Jenney, the designer (and publisher) at Northland, had final page-by-page say, but he was willing to listen to my opinions, as well, and was always responsive.  And he has great taste!

NW: You write that, “In the remote West, photography came into its own.” Could you explain this further?  How and why did photography come into its own in the West (as opposed to the East, say)?  Was it in part because many people didn’t have the opportunity to see the West first hand, and so photographs conveyed it to them?

ST: It’s no accident that any history of American photography begins with Civil War photos and then heads West with Jack Hillers and Timothy O’Sullivan at the Grand Canyon; Eadweard Muybridge at Yosemite; W.H. Jackson at Yellowstone.  These first great landscape photographs were the bedrock for all that followed. 

Art critics looking back find lots of complex things to analyze in O’Sullivan’s work, especially.  But the photographers regarded photographs as one more scientific tool to level at the new land; they were not self-conscious artists.  And this new tool yielded results—photographic prints—that the scientists could take East to the Congress, to the Smithsonian, to dazzle their patrons and then lobby for more funding. The scientists—not the photographers—captioned the photographs in their reports. At the same time, the returning explorers brought inexpensive stereo views of the Grand Canyon to the parlors of everyday people, who had never dreamed of such a place.

So the tradition of landscape photography grew from the West because there was government money to send photographers on the exploratory surveys.  Because the public was fascinated with these views of spectacular lands they had never dreamed could exist.  And because the photographers who came West happened to be immensely talented.

NW: Based on your interviews with photographers, much of the effort in photographing the Grand Canyon seems to be devoted to avoiding clichéd images.  What characterizes the most clichéd images, and what can photographers do to avoid this?

ST: The clichés you hope to avoid consist of that inventory of photos you carry in your memory—the compositions and locations of pretty much every photo taken in the Canyon you have ever seen!  We all have these mental inventories, and the Canyon funnels us to the same spots over and over: named viewpoints on the rim, side canyon hikes on the river, trails traveled by thousands before us.  We often set up our tripods where our mentors have unfolded their tripods.

I love the challenge of approaching such landmarks and looking for a new way to capture the soul of the place.  I look for interactions with foreground, with sky, with clouds.  I look for relationship.

Most clichéd, of course, are the straight-up mid-afternoon puffy-cloud scenics from the rim, with a gnarled tree to the side.  Josef Muench created this icon for us in the Fifties.  We begin to move beyond that by looking for more dramatic perspectives, swapping out standard lenses for big telephotos to isolate a slice of the view, going for more intense color—or more subtle color. 

And what makes every visit, every photograph distinct is the always-changing light—what I call Coyote Light in the book.  It’s as John Blaustein says: “Realtors say there’s three things about real estate: location, location, location.  For photography, it’s light, light, and light.  It’s simply the rocks and the light.”

My favorite spread, pp. 122/23 transmits this magical light: Alfredo Conde’s and Sherri Curtis’s last light on Buddha Temple with snowy trees and the shaft of light across that mossy waterfall.  The photos capture what Alfredo calls the “revelation of the ethereal only lasting a second.”

NW: How often do you visit the Grand Canyon?  Do you have a favorite spot to photograph?

ST: I spent most of my time in the Canyon in the Seventies and Eighties, when I lived in Flagstaff and worked with the Museum of Northern Arizona—and then, later, when I was a writer/editor with the Paul Winter Consort projects, as they recorded their amazing music in the Canyon.  My first love is really the southern Utah slickrock country.  But it’s all connected.  All my Utah canyons drain south and west to the Colorado at Grand Canyon.  The Canyon is the ultimate, the climax, the great abyss—sucking our awareness down into the depths toward that fluted Vishnu Schist.  I love this fact.

My favorite place has to be Havasu, a place of refuge in my emotionally turbulent twenties.  I wrote about this on page 151 in Lasting Light.  Havasu Canyon is intensely beautiful, it’s connected to the great river downstream, and it has a vital culture at Supai Village.  More recently, my significant trips to the Canyon were triggered by fieldwork for my Indian books (Our Voices, Our Land and The People), and so I have a powerful mix of memories that sift the Canyon through stories and interviews with Havasupai and Hualapai people.

NW: Is photography a solitary pursuit?  It sounds like there’s a friendly competition among professional photographers to make the best, most original images, and a mild annoyance at the swarms of amateurs who are photographing the same spots.

ST: I take my best photographs when I’m alone.  My family doesn’t have much patience for the long waits. 

There is indeed a bit of friendly competition, but it’s mostly quite warm and collegial, and lots of these photographers are dear friends with one another.  When the Lasting Light exhibit opened at the Kolb Studio on Fathers Day in 2006, we had 2/3 of the living photographers in the book together at the Canyon for the opening of the exhibit and launching of the book. There was a huge amount of affection in the gathering.  Truly a celebration.

You might look at this essay, which boils down much of what I feel about photography.

NW: Is there a place in the West that you believe offers as much beauty and as many discoveries as the Grand Canyon that perhaps hasn’t been photographed as often?

ST: Just about everywhere!  Choose a place, look hard, and make it your own.

As I said above, the slickrock country, the inner Canyonlands of southern Utah is my favorite place in the world—my spiritual home.  But the redrock canyons are well-known.  The Great Basin is the gem and the secret hidden at the heart of the West.  I’ve worked on two big book projects in this country (The Sagebrush Ocean and Earthtones), and the Basin remains empty and undiscovered, filled with space and silence and wildness.

NW: You quote the photographer Tom Till who believes that his “most successful pictures have a narrative--a simple story that could be related in a short poem.” This seems to be an unusual approach for landscape photography, most of which doesn’t include any people, animals, or signs of human development--what kinds of stories do you think landscape photos can tell?

ST: I love Tom’s line.  As a former high school English teacher, he is more literary than most photographers.  As he self-deprecatingly said to me when I praised his writing: “It’s true that I am a better writer than Terry Tempest Williams is a photographer.”

He also captures the defining genre that unites these photographers.  We are “editorial photographers.” We are photographing for print, to tell stories.  Our motivation is not to make high art.  Our motivation is not to sell products or please clients.  We are trying to capture the soul and the story of the place—and to communicate this to our viewers.  There is a lot less ego involved in this work than in “art photography.”

NW: You write about the Kolbs, who you say “were the first adventure photographers--using nineteenth century equipment but marketing themselves as personalities.” What is their legacy today, in terms of specific photographers, books or magazines that carry on in this vein?

ST: The direct line leads to Outside magazine and the more specialized magazines dealing with river running or climbing or mountain biking.  Their element of playfulness and glee and thrill is infectious.  The celebration of hard-body ego and of using the land as simply a playground are off-putting.  I’m not a huge fan of Outside; the magazine’s ethic isn’t deeply rooted in sustainability or thoughtful preservation.  I do love the modern National Geographic under Chris Johns’s editorship.  I guess that makes me an old fart.

Sure, there is plenty of ego involved in us photographers putting ourselves out there in the world, with bylines.  But both photographers and writers dealing with landscape—especially with such a grand landscape as the Canyon, one so much bigger than us—find our self-inflated egos frequently punctured.  There is plenty of humility and generosity in this group, along with passion.  Tom Bean occurs to me.  He favors photographing “Big Nature and small people.” He strives to make photographs that “anyone can project themselves into.  You don’t have to be a mountain climber.” He’s Everyman, from Iowa.

Boatmen/photographers like Geoff Gourley and Dugald Bremner carried on this tradition of adventure photography pioneered by the Kolbs.  Dugald’s pictures are spectacular and hard-won and respectful both of the place and of his protagonists.  Dugald had a fine sensitivity to the landscape.  Some photographers don’t show quite the same sensitivity.  A famous example: the photographer prosecuted for building a fire at the base of Delicate Arch to liven up his image.
I find most of the photographers in Lasting Light who are boatmen and climbers as well as photographers pretty humble about their exploits.

NW: As a native of Denver, I imagine you are familiar with the wonderful Camera Obscura Gallery, run by Hal Gould, which often features images of the West.  Are there other regional galleries that you’d recommend as good places to see the work of Western landscape and nature photographers?

ST: I can’t help you here much, Jenny.  I’m a dedicated editorial photographer both in my own work and in my taste.  Several photographers do have their own galleries: Tom Till Gallery in Moab.  And the new Flagstaff Photography Center is exciting.

This link takes you both to the Lasting Light exhibit prints and to individual websites for each photographer, whose work can generally be ordered as prints.

NW: So many people, amateurs and professionals alike, have photographed the Grand Canyon.  There must be millions of Grand Canyon snapshots in family photo albums all across the world.  Is there a greater meaning that can be derived from all those photos?

What a wonderful, amazing question!  I think of the anecdote in my intro (on page 1) describing the woman coming to the Canyon for the first time, and trying to reconcile her dreams of the place based on years of Arizona Highways. with her hazy view and lousy photo.  What is real?

All those photos surely compile a record of our communal experience here over more than a century.  We struggle to make meaning of an astonishing, humbling landscape partly by taking pictures of it.  It’s too big.  It’s too old.  Maybe we can nail it down by capturing a shard of its light on film or in pixels.  It’s a fool’s errand.  But we crave connection.  We crave relationship.  E.O. Wilson makes the case for biophilia, but there exists a strong streak of geophilia in humans.  We fall in love with landscapes—specific to our own personalities and histories.

The best photographs have 3 piers that build a relationship—connecting the viewer to the place and the photographer.  Those are the photos that move us, that last. They carry the viewer to the Grand Canyon through the emotions and imaginations and craft of the photographers.  The grand accumulation of them is the record of our communal relationship with Grand Canyon.

NW: You write of Jose Knighton’s aversion to “‘eco-porn,’ showing nature only at its prettiest--titillating urbanites with the romance of mythic wilderness,” and say that many photographers are now trying to go beyond that.  But it seems like most of the photos in your book are very pretty (I mean that in a good way!), and probably most photos that can be sold commercially have to be that way.  So what is the upshot of this?

ST: It’s a thorny paradox.  Jose is right—and the “Sierra Club”-style pristine pictures tell us little of nature under siege. But the Grand Canyon is a wild place.

I think it all boils down to the motive behind the photo.  Many photographers will first shoot the wildness, the sublime intensity of the pure landscape.  And then turn their cameras to the parking lots and trails and crowds, reporting more journalistically on the resource pressures.  The pictures have different reasons-to-be, different markets.

I love Mark Klett’s solution.  As I put it in the text: The antidote to both a mythic Grand Canyon and a purely interior image lies in the work of photographers like Mark Klett, they participate in the scene and the photo—and pull the viewer into the act of photography. 

I was quite intent on including Mark Klett’s five-panel panorama, “Around Toroweap,” repeating Jack Hillers views at far left and right, and with the modern photographer’s hat resting in the foreground of a central panel.  It’s the only true “art photography” in the book.  And it’s witty and smart and beautiful—all at the same time.

NW: A few years ago I hiked to the Delicate Arch in Moab at around sunset.  The area was so crowded with other tourists and their tripods, everyone annoyed when others moved into their shot, that I just had to laugh.  There was even a bride and groom getting ready for their wedding photos--their photographer was going to try to clear the hoards from in front of the arch for a minute so she could get a clear shot for a portrait.  I’d love to see what the German photographer Andreas Gursky (who specializes in photographing crowds and busy scenes from afar) would make of this.  Do you know of any photographers doing this kind of work, making art out of the human crowds and commotion at national parks?

ST: The aforementioned Mark Klett.  Len Jenshel takes wonderful photos of “the vernacular landscape” in wild country.  One of my favorites is a view from the Wheeler Peak road at Great Basin National Park, looking from a yellow cattle guard out over the emptiness of the valley below.

And there is a fine and fascinating new book by Mark Klett and Rebecca Solnit from Trinity University Press.

NW: When I served as a judge for the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Regional Book Award a few years ago, we chose the book Drawn to Yellowstone: Artists in America’s First National Park by Peter Hassrick and James Nottage as the winner in the art book category.  I don’t know if you happen to be familiar with this book, but it told the story of the many artists who have painted Yellowstone over the years.  Does the Grand Canyon have a similar history as an inspiration to painters and other visual artists, as well as photographers?

ST: This history is incredibly rich, and there are a number of books focusing on Thomas Moran and the rest of this wonderful cast of characters.  Most recently, Joni Kinsey has made herself something of a specialist in this.  (Her book on chromolithos by Moran won the art book category at this year’s Western Heritage Awards, where Lasting Light won the photography book category).

The Grand Canyon Association will be touring the Lasting Light photo exhibit nationally through Smithsonian/SITES, beginning next year.  Stephen Trimble will also be giving slide shows and talks on the book this fall; so far he’s scheduled to appear at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas’ Forum Lecture Series (November 29, 2007) and at the Zion Canyon Arts and Humanities Council in Springdale, Utah (November 30, 2007).

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