The following feature on international conservation photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum is the first in a series highlighting the work of the members of the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP).  The ICCF would like to thank the ILCP and its members for their generous support. Click on any photo below to see a larger version.

For over 40 years, Robert Glenn Ketchum has inspired generations of Americans to protect and conserve our country’s environmental heritage. He is acknowledged by Audubon Magazine as one of the 100 people “who shaped the environmental movement of the 20th Century.” A recipient of the United Nations Environmental Achievement Award, the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography, and the Robert O. Easton Award for Environmental Stewardship, Ketchum is widely regarded as one of the nation’s most outspoken and most effective conservation photographers.

He was influential in helping to launch the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP), alongside ILCP founder and President Cristina Mittermeier, at the 8th World Wilderness Congress in Anchorage, Alaska.

ICCF staff sat down with Mr. Ketchum recently to talk about his 40-year career and his plans for the future.

Q: You’re one of the world’s most influential natural history photographers in the world today. How did you get started? Who do you see as your main influences?

A: I came out of an academic photography background, much more fine arts structured. I studied undergraduate work at UCLA with two very non-traditional photographic teachers, Edmund Teske and Robert Heinecken. Then I went on and did graduate work at the California Institute for the Arts, right when it opened its doors with Disney’s help. [CALArts was established in 1961 by Walt and Roy Disney through the merger of two professional schools, the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, founded in 1883, and the Chouinard Art Institute, founded in 1921.]

In the beginning, I approached photography from the art end, but I also saw and appreciated the Ansel Adams technical end of it... and the way in particular Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter—and, to some degree, many photographers before them like William Henry Jackson (who was a part of the survey that took photographs of the Yellowstone Basin) and also Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge (who were the first to photograph Yosemite)—were able to use their images to bring environmental issues to the nation’s attention.

You know, there’s a history of photography relating to the conservation movement in America, and with the establishment of parks in fact. I think now, currently, photographers like myself and others in the ILCP are pushing that agenda forward and becoming much more proactive.

Q: What was your first big break starting out?

A: The first big opportunity I got to work on was a book for Harry Abrams on sea farming around the world. That really opened my eyes about where things were going and what the impact of population was going to be…what America had and, really, what everybody looked like. I went to Russia, China, and India... it was just an amazing trip and a wonderful opportunity for a young photographer.

When I came back, I decided that I wanted to see my pictures work, much like Eliot and Ansel’s did. But, I wanted to have them rather in sort of a non-praising, non-lamenting role... which tended to be the role in which Eliot and Ansel portrayed environmental issues. Eliot wrote Glen Canyon, which was a very powerful book, but it was about a place that was already lost. Ansel lobbied to create national parks and created beautiful pictures about parks.

But, I always wanted to be out in front of an issue, so that the work, instead of being about regret over what was lost, can be cutting edge advocacy. It just seemed like [after Eliot and Ansel] I was the next generation, and there was a much more rigorous war going on between consumption and demand…and what might be left wild, and that sort of stuff.

So, the first opportunity I got to publish a book was a commission from the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund in New York to photograph the Hudson River Valley. And, in that book I put (certainly) the beautiful pictures of the Hudson River Valley, but I also included architecture—both historic and also not so attractive. I included industrial sites and sort of abandoned things along with those beautiful images. It was the first time a coffee table book had ever been constructed like that.

That was in the 1980's.

Q: How did you get involved with environmental advocacy? What do you consider as one of your greatest success stories?

A: In the mid-1980’s, I got brought into the Tongass Rain Forest Battle, with funds from the Wallace Foundation, the McIntosh Foundation, and the Wilderness Society—who were drafting legislation to protect some of the areas of the Tongass that were at-risk from industrial clear-cutting.

They sent me up to do a book and I spent ‘84 and ‘85 working on it, most of the year in Alaska living in the Tongass and traveling inexpensively by staying in people’s homes and that sort of thing...

I finished the book in 1986 and immediately, everybody had it... the book was handed out in Congress—it was being given away by all the tour groups in the region and all over Alaska. Even, the Garden Club of America was handing it out.

When we made the issues publicly clear—with open lobbying, using the book, using public pressure, using stories in the media—we transformed, in four years, opinion in the House and the Senate. In the end, there was a bill introduced. It went through three different versions, three years in a row, and in 1990, it finally passed in the Senate and in the House, with wide appeal.

Then George H. W. Bush. signed it into law. That was a huge moment for me. I went to the White House and was honored by the President and the First Lady. But, I actually have a picture of me giving them my next book... which was a critique of federal land, in any case.

And then I went on to get the United Nations Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award. Senator William Proxmire put that up as an exhibit in the Senate Rotunda and we brought in salmon from Alaska, and all that other stuff, and we really just put [the Tongass] on the map.

Q: What’s the current project you are working on?

A: The intention of our newest body of work, which amounts to two huge beautiful picture books, one called Rivers of Life: Southwest Alaska, the Last Great Salmon Fishery and the other called Wood-Tikchik: America’s Largest State Park. Then there’s a traveling exhibit called Southwest Alaska: A World of Parks and Wildlife Refuges At the Crossroads.

So, in essence there are three parts: the two books—introduced and spread out over a couple of years to keep the media momentum up—and then the exhibit, which is now touring. It was the AOL Exhibit of the Month last month. It will be in the Jimmy Carter Library & Museum from December 22, 2007 – April 13, 2008. It’s coming to the American Museum of Natural History soon. It’s already been to some very big venues like the Houston Museum of Natural History, where thousands of people were able to see it.

And what we are doing with this is raising awareness about what’s going on in Southwest Alaska, which is the largest and most productive salmon fishery in the world. It’s very well-run, it’s still in good shape, and last year, it had one of the biggest years it ever had.

We’re talking about the collective habitat of two national parks, four national wildlife refuges, and four state parks. It’s remarkable.

Links
Robert Glenn Ketchum's Website
Robert Glenn Ketchum to Exhibit at Jimmy Carter Museum
Robert Glenn Ketchum Books on Amazon.com
Robert Glenn Ketchum Biography
International League of Conservation Photographers
 

	All Photos Courtesy of the International League of Conservation Photographers and copyright Robert Glenn Ketchum