11 June 2008

Darius Kinsey, Photographer


Ansel Adams of the Pacific Northwest

You have to wonder what drove Darius Kinsey to sojourn away from the comforts of his stately 12-room Seattle home to enter the dripping, dark primeval forests of the Pacific Northwest so incessantly. Over the course of two decades, he was frequently finding excuses to jump a train or motor coach north out of the city to return to the logging camps, shantytowns, deep groves and snowy summits of the Cascadian back-of-beyond. Of course, he always packed along his large-format camera and crates of negatives with him. The tools of his art lent purpose to his wanderings.

Traveling through the untamed Northwest undergrowth, with its thickets of devil's club, vine maples and salal and ankle-twisting maze of downed and decomposing old-growth trees, was seldom an easy affair, and Kinsey didn't travel light. His 11x14 Eastman View camera weighed around 15 pounds and the large 20x24 inch glass negative plates were both fragile and unwieldy. The Skagit Courier reports in 1902 that Kinsey traveled with over 250 pounds of photographic gear to shoot one remarkable Doug Fir.

Even though his Eastman View was advertised as "an excellent camera of strong and substantial construction," it is doubtful that many Kodak customers pushed their equipment to the extremes that Kinsey did: shooting in all vagrancies of weather, crawling up and down fern-choked gorges, teetering across the goat trails of hard rock miners.

"For Kinsey," explains the Whatcom Museum of History and Art website, "finding the perfect shot sometimes meant dodging avalanches, crossing crevasses and jumping over rattlesnakes."

If he wasn't lugging around his camera, which occasionally was an even-heavier 20x24 model, he could be found next to waterfalls or a cedar shake cabin experimenting in the improvised arts of taking stereo-camera shots, making glass lantern slide images and capturing panoramic perspectives with his "Cirkut" camera, a self-revolving 50-pound behemoth that spooled out negatives 10 inches wide and 20 feet long.

The breadth of Kinsey's work gives off a sense of restlessness matched by an insatiable curiosity. I imagine a man who, so in awe of the raw landscape around him, couldn't sit still. The Whatcom Museum notes that even on family trips to the wood, Kinsey "was known to jump out of the car on a moment’s notice, set up his equipment on the shoulder of the road or disappear up a trail."



Kinsey is most well known for the record he created of the Pacific Northwest logging culture. His photos immortalize tableaus of mustachioed men in tin pants and suspenders, buckers crosscutting fallen cedars, horses slipping down skid roads, shake-splitters retiring to their smoldering stump huts and steam engines traversing massive trestles.

"Through a fifty-year career in photography," museum archivist Jeff Jewell recently explained to me, "Kinsey captured the monumental interaction between men, machinery and mammoth trees that defined early logging in northwest Washington."

Though he created a visual history of our corner of the continent majestic in scope, Kinsey's work isn’t simply about quantity or the dry assemblage of a historical record. There is a majestic, bold and original artistic quality to the prints he produced that calls to mind the similarly stunning work of Ansel Adams. Both share the same palette of rich inky blackness and the thousand subtle shades of grey, the shockingly sharp detail and eye for dramatic composition. Much like Adams and his beloved Yosemite Valley, Kinsey’s work presents the Northwest woods as a cathedral. There is a sense of architecture, space and depth, and a somber, serious light in many of his prints of the forest.

The Whatcom Museum, which holds and tends the world's largest Kinsey archive, has recently put on display 38 Kinsey prints, 21 of which have never been displayed in public before. Many of the “new” images are donations from locals who have found Kinsey pieces among their family possessions – large format negatives, photographs and an extremely rare custom album of 11x14 original prints.

“The real star of the exhibit is a four piece panoramic of a lumber mill with workers and their families, circa 1910,” says Jewell. “It's from four original photographs that revealed how Kinsey shot a series of 11" x 14" negatives that, once printed, (his wife) Tabitha could match and glue together as a panoramic image. It was an aspect of the Kinseys' work that was unknown until the donation of these photographs to the Whatcom Museum in 2003.”



“Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit,” Adams once remarked. “Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.” Kinsey, as revealed in his sensitive body of work, falls in the later camp. Those of us fascinated by the history of the Pacific Northwest – and in love with the forest -- are all the more fortunate for it.

photos copyright Whatcom Museum of History and Art.

04 June 2008

"And it still surprises me the number of longtime Northwesterners who have never heard of this plant."


Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory
By Laurie Ricou
Reviewed by Christian Martin


Human beings have evolved in concert with the natural world for tens of thousands of years. Our complex relationships with the plant world have been particularly crucial in the development of our cultures. These interconnections between people and the varied green world are rich places for examination and mediation; one can learn more about ourselves by studying the plant life that surrounds us. Gary Paul Nabhan comes to mind as a leading thinker in these thickets, and Michael Pollan was fruitful in this realm of exploration with his best-selling book The Botany of Desire.

Laurie Ricou, a literature professor at the University of British Columbia, is the latest writer to look at the human-plant alliance, and his exploration is especially rewarding for local readers because he has chosen to take a deep, long look at salal and the corresponding cultures, both indigenous and modern, of the Pacific Northwest.

His new book Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory is a sustained cogitation on this one common native species. It brings together a wide variety of disciplines including natural history, sociology, global economics, poetry, botany, biogeography and forest ecology. The multi-layered prose features a rich panoply of voices that Ricou gathers together from field interviews, excerpts from other authors and poets, native myths, historical archives and elsewhere, so that Ricou serves as a conductor of voices from across the ages, everybody with their own take on this ubiquitous, glossy-green shrub.

Ricou is a playful writer not afraid to bend the rules of writing, to take risks with language and look for illumination in surprising juxtapositions. He has an exhaustive sense of curiosity as well, and a voluminous familiarity with the literature of our region. All of these gifts were on display in his last book The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest, a thought-provoking survey of Pacific Northwest literature from both sides of the border.

I recently had a chance to converse with Ricou about his interest in all-things-salal and what he learned in the process of writing this book.

Q: Why write a book about salal?

Laurie Ricou: The book began with my asking my literature students to do little projects on the region's flora and fauna. They loved the discoveries they were making. Then, one of my students told me I should really contemplate salal--because it was a gorgeous plant, with an important connection to the female economy--women could make a modest independent living harvesting it.

Q: How is your book different from a botanic field guide?

LR: Well, it is maybe a very ample field guide, but to just one species, and the "fields" are much wider, more varied, than in the usual guide--extending from gardens and nurseries to painting and poetry and symphonic music.

Q: What surprised you in your salal research?

LR: The most surprising thing is the sheer volume and dollar value of salal that is "harvested" entirely in the wild and shipped around the world (for use in floral displays). And it still surprises me the number of longtime Northwesterners who have never heard of this plant.

Q: What can one learn about a culture by studying a plant?

LR: That it is continually growing and endlessly interconnecting.

Q: You write, "What if I tried to listen to 'the animate earth'? To the ways in which salal speaks? What would I hear?" Well, what did you hear?

LR: I held my breath and heard small creatures rustle under the salal. I think it speaks sea rhythms.

Q: What larger truths are possible to discover by focusing in and drilling down on the often-mundane particulars?

LR: I suppose that we need to pay attention to what we don't pay attention to....

Q: Does salal serve as a metaphor for the Pacific Northwest?

LR: By the time you finish my book, you will be tempted to think so.

© 2008 roadside cafe productions