Seeing With Heart

[Applause]

the benefit of seeing

can come only if you pause a while

extricate yourself from the maddening

mob of quick impressions ceaselessly

battering our lives

and look thoughtfully at a quiet image

dorothea lang was a great depression-era

documentary photographer

and this quote has inspired many of my

images

such as this one

of l anderson

elle is five years old and she is

playing outside her home on a ranch in

the centennial valley of southwest

montana

elle has grown up in the freedom of wide

open spaces

when i made this photograph in 2015

i did not realize how symbolic it would

be in my life and my work

i see myself in this photograph

when i was a little older than l i took

a trip with my father to the prior

mountains of montana

my father was a staff photographer for

national geographic magazine and at age

10 i joined him on his last assignment

for the magazine as a photographer

we left our home in virginia and made it

to sheridan wyoming in two days

my father and his assistant needed to

camp in the prior mountains to

photograph wild horses

now the wild horses were particularly

challenging to get close enough to to

photograph

one day my father had set up his camera

on a tripod out in the field and told me

to just hang out and watch the horses as

they grazed quite a distance away

he went off to do something else

i walked up to his camera and i started

looking at the horses through the

viewfinder

i don’t remember how long i was there

but by the time my father came back to

check on me

i was surrounded by wild horses

i had no idea at the time that this

moment in my childhood would have such

an impact on my life

it’s the first time i remember looking

through a camera and feeling in touch

with something outside of myself

in an environment that i loved

ten years later in my early twenties i

found myself working as a horse wrangler

on a ranch in the centennial valley the

same ranch where i later made that

photograph of l

i had enrolled in journalism school at

the university of montana

thinking maybe i wanted to be a writer

it didn’t take long for me to decide

that news reporting was not exactly my

calling

but photojournalism

unlocked something that allowed me to

communicate with the world

and documentary photography in

particular

was a way i could explore the things i

love and care about in a way that i

could not express through words

what i knew of photojournalism was what

i saw on the pages of national

geographic magazine throughout my

childhood

what i knew was how i watched my father

work

living for months on end in a place to

work on one story

photography had shaped my life but i did

not truly discover this until i picked

up a camera for the first time with the

intention of telling a story

as i lived in the centennial valley i

photographed moments of my life there

those photographs will always be

meaningful records of my life and my

story

living in this ranching community and

photographing my life here

has also been the foundation for how i

learned to see

the kind of quiet seeing that dorothea

lang was talking about

i began to find my own sense of place

within myself in the freedom of that

wide open montana landscape

and my camera was a way to express my

relationship to place

i began to see how people can shape

landscapes

and landscapes can shape people

i wanted to get closer to the issues i

was learning about in the centennial

valley so i went to tom miner basin

a ranching community on the northern

border of yellowstone national park

where people live with grizzly bears and

wolves

tom miner has one of the most densely

populated grizzly bear habitats in the

west

i followed my friend hilary anderson to

her husband’s multi-generational family

ranch where she was experimenting with

solutions that could help people ranch

alongside these carnivores

in tom miner i was welcomed into the

lives of a family

who does not view themselves as the

center of their environment

but as one small piece of a much larger

environment within a wild ecosystem

what i found in tau miner was a story

much more lyrical

and nuanced than human wildlife conflict

what i was actually seeing and

documenting was an intimate relationship

between people and place

i learned that the roots of this land

ethic go back generations to 1955 when

virginia anderson and her husband andy

settled in tom miner basin

virginia felt such a strong connection

to this place that she stayed there for

the rest of her life and raised her

children there

now her great grandchildren are being

raised there

i had the honor of knowing virginia the

last few years of her life and seeing

her just days before she passed away

surrounded by family on the ranch

as i continued to photograph i received

funding for my work in tom miner which

allowed me the time to live there for a

full summer with the family

through this work i’ve met my fiance

daniel anderson who is elle’s uncle

so now i am part of their family

this project has evolved in ways i never

could have imagined

it has become a very personal reflection

of my relationship to this family and

this place

this is what i learned through the

process of photographing

being present

and listening

both with and without my camera

it allows me to enter the children’s

worlds

a world where imagination

and curiosity are endless

our mainstream culture in america can

have an extractive nature to it

for example in tom miner basin a growing

number of tourists come to look for

grizzly bears

their presence is having a profound

impact on the community of both humans

and wildlife

even well-intentioned curious people can

have an impact they’re not aware of

especially as their numbers increase

photojournalism can be the same way

we often arrive with the stories we want

to tell we are trained to come in get

what we need for our stories and then

move on to the next assignment

this is often called parachute

journalism and it is why some people

have felt marginalized and used by the

media when we do this we risk playing

into the extractive and oftentimes

oppressive parts of our culture

how can we even begin to understand

something until we have spent

time if we are asking to be led into

people’s lives we should be willing to

put our agendas aside for a moment and

listen

maybe even let people into our own lives

as buddhist monk titanathan said

the most precious gift we can offer

others is our presence

my camera has awakened me to the power

of presence

my camera is my bridge to the outside

world

it is a pathway to experience cherished

aspects of life beyond what you see in

my images

it teaches me to listen deeply to the

voices of others

it gives me access to my own voice

it awakens my creativity

being present allows me to see the

essence of who someone is

and with my camera i can reflect it back

to them

living in the west has challenged me to

contemplate the impact that i have and

we have on the places we call home

this curiosity leads me to some of the

richest cultures in the world and takes

me across borders

for the past few years i have been

working on a story that i started in

graduate school

about the blackfoot people in montana

and canada and their relationship with

bison the animal their ancestors evolved

with for thousands of years

the bison is a potent symbol of plains

indian culture

culture that is so deeply rooted in

place that the english language does not

have words to describe it

bison and native people are intertwined

and it is well known that the

annihilation of bison in the 19th

century was integral to the systematic

removal of native people from their

homelands and ways of life

the mass slaughtering of buffalo

depleted their food source their culture

and their identity

it was a forced separation from the

essence of who they are the impact is

still being felt today

i have met people who are trying to

straddle two worlds

finding their place in the modern world

and the culture of their ancestors which

is inextricably tied to nature

in my travels i visited with a bison

rancher in the kainai first nation in

alberta canada this is dan fox

dan said to me

the only way the native people are going

to start gaining ground again their ways

of life

is when the bison come back

so as people like dan work to return

bison to parts of their historic range

it is a remarkable step towards healing

for his people and the land

i wanted to learn what this relationship

between the blackfoot people and bison

looks like today

a big part of it has to do with the

ritual of hunting butchering and using

every part of the animal

the bison are also a way to teach the

next generation about these timeless

rituals that are grounded in respect and

gratitude for life

over the course of my time with dan’s

family his brother charlie who is an

elder

performed a ceremony to give me a

blackfoot name

the name he gave me is asanaki

or picture woman

and he told me it comes from writing on

stone which is a sacred place in alberta

where ancient pictographs depict

blackfoot life

their family has allowed me in to

photograph these rituals

here amanda is draining the blood from a

bison the first step in butchering the

animal that will feed and nourish their

people

in a blending of two worlds amanda then

turns to document herself in the midst

of this ritual with her cell phone

in a blending of ranching and native

culture shane bird rattler rides a bronc

at north american indian days in

browning montana

working on this story i have realized

that one of the greatest social

injustices

is disconnecting people from their

native culture and their homeland

and promoting the myth that humans can

eternally dominate nature

there’s an intimacy between people and

the natural world

there’s great pleasure in it when you

pursue it

and see it

and feel it

we often talk about giving people a

voice but what about also giving a voice

to the landscape and all that’s in it

the last story i will share with you is

about an experience that very quickly

forced me into presence

at first light on a chilly september

morning in tom miner basin

i was going to set up a camera trap

and i came across a mother grizzly bear

much like the one you see in this

photograph

a series of events occurred which forced

me to use bear spray

i stood six feet from her

and through a cloud of spray our eyes

met for a brief moment before she took

off in the other direction with her cubs

in her eyes i saw fear which was perhaps

a reflection of my own fear

but since this experience i have

deciphered a profound message from her

that will stick with me for the rest of

my life

we live in a world of boundaries

we as humans usually decide the terms of

these boundaries and we cross them when

we want to

that grizzly bear

america’s largest carnivore

woke me up

to the fact that this place is not

and cannot be

ruled by our terms only

the experiences i have had with my

camera

the extraordinary and the difficult

have taught me something about life

and a few are as touching as the stories

i’ve shared with you today

photographs can transcend boundaries

they can evoke visceral feelings

the act of photographing

and the photograph itself

can be a small step in helping us

understand each other better

in both the human and the non-human

world

each photograph you see here today is a

labor of love

thank you

[Applause]

you