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