Freeman's by John Freeman

Author:John Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2015-09-02T13:52:53+00:00

Introduction

[to Ben Huff’s The Last Road North]

Barry Lopez

Many years ago my life included some modest success as a landscape photographer. In 1981, following a benign encounter with a polar bear—in pack ice about a hundred miles off the coast of northwest Alaska—I put my cameras aside and continued down the road I’d been traveling as a writer. The short answer to why I never picked the cameras up again is that I knew, in the moments of that encounter with the bear, that I was not likely to become as articulate in both these languages as I would hope to be. And back then there was little question about which creative effort, if I were forced to choose, I would set aside.

Later, I wrote an essay called “Learning to See,” about what happened on that fall day in 1981 in the Chukchi Sea. One thing I had to learn as a photographer, I implied, was the difference between art and mere technique or simple craft. Succinctly put, I did, and now know which sets of images arriving unannounced on my doorstep should be returned and which warrant clearing some space at my worktable, those pictures that call to be examined with deliberation, the way one might cautiously raise a pair of binoculars to study a herd of wild animals grazing unaware.

A few days after receiving a handful of such worthy prints, part of Mr. Huff’s Dalton Highway project, I returned them to him with a brief note saying I was very taken with his images and wondering if he might send me more. I didn’t say that, for me, he’d not only brought that industrial thoroughfare weirdly to life, he’d reified complex human attitudes toward it. I thought his pictures conveyed something many people might be vaguely aware of but that few of us would have any ready words for. His was not a pro forma report on a socially and politically complex feat of engineering, bolstered by easy ironies and clever setups. It was a confident inquiry, based on an artistic vision.

The Dalton, a highway I’m personally more prone to recall as the Haul Road, as if to set it apart from all other highways, rears its head in Huff’s photos in a way I hadn’t imagined it could. He evokes for me the menace, the seductive allure (that “call of the open road” magic), and the alien intensity that make this Silk Road from a future century such an apt symbol of our consumptive habits. Further, in his compassionate view of the bewildered and ambivalent human beings he meets on the road, Huff fastens on something of the particular grief that afflicts the modern era. Here are our nebulous fears at the dawn of the Anthropocene, a time of overheated economic exploitation, when even the farthest corners of the earth are being industrialized.

Late in the boreal summer of the year I encountered the polar bear, I drove the Haul Road for the first time with two friends, both marine mammal biologists employed by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

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