At Home in the West: The Lure of Public Land

About

About the Author
William S. Sutton was born in 1956 in Toledo, Ohio, and was raised in New York State, Scottsdale, Arizona, and the western suburbs of Chicago. He began his academic journey at Arizona State University, completed his B.F.A. and M.F.A. in photography at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Photography in 1981. His photographs have been exhibited widely and are in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Amoco Collection, Arizona State University, Bellevue Art Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Center for the Study of Place, Chase Manhattan Bank, Colorado Historical Society, Denver Art Museum, Joslyn Art Museum, Library of Congress, Museum of Modern Art, Phoenix Arts Commission, Princeton University Art Museum, Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University, University of Chicago, University of Colorado Special Collections, University of Wyoming Art Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others. Mr. Sutton is an associate professor of art at Regis College in Denver, and he lives in the mountains west of Boulder, Colorado. His website is www.williamsuttonphotographs.com.

About the Contributors
Toby Jurovics was born in 1965 in Pacoima, California, and was raised in the San Fernando Valley. He completed his B.A. in art history and English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and his M.A. in art history at the University of Delaware. He is Chief Curator and Richard and Mary Holland Curator of American Western Art at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. Previously, he was Curator of Photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Associate Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum. He has organized exhibitions on Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Barbara Bosworth, and Emmet Gowin, among many other artists, and he has written seminal essays on Thomas Joshua Cooper, John Gossage, and the New Topographics. He is the author of Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan (Yale University Press, 2010).

Susan B. Moldenhauer was born in 1951 in Chicago, Illinois, and was raised there. She completed her B.F.A. in printmaking and drawing at Northern Illinois University and her M.F.A. in photography at the Pennsylvania State University. A museum curator for more than twenty- five years, she has served since 2002 as Director and Chief Curator at the University of Wyoming Art Museum. She has curated more than 130 exhibitions, overseen more than 200 exhibitions, and produced more than thirty exhibition publications. She is also a practicing photographer whose work, inspired by the landscape and human presence, has been exhibited throughout Canada and the United States, including images from the series “Desert Varnish,” “Place/Mind/Spirit,” and “Compositions from the Land.”

Slide Show

Praise

“This finely-produced book showcases the black-and-white landscape photographs of contemporary photographer William S. Sutton. Most of the book is comprised of images offset by plenty of white space, but there are two essays on the artist’s work by Toby Jurovics and Susan B. Moldenhauer. Sutton specializes in photographing landscapes in the American West. The book focuses on high mountain, short-grass prairie, and desert environments in the Four Corners states, vast stretches of difficult country empty of human presence. A few photographs in the Southwest show pictographs or ruins. All of the photos were taken on public lands; they document BLM and National Forest Service areas, which are simultaneously the most wild and the least protected of all public lands. Save for the very rare appearance of a truck in the distance, these images could have been taken a century ago. Sutton thinks like a field geologist, with a serious disinterest in anything covering up the good rocks. His photos show asphalt roads past towers of bare rock, thin desert cover worn to dust by the patterns of animal trails. He works at specific locations and seasons to avoid attention to flowers, soft herbs, insects, or animals. (In one or two pictures, distant bison appear as black spots on the geology.) The total effect is remarkable, an anti-romanticism as lushly romantic as a Clint Eastwood film.”
—Eithne O’Leyne, Editor, ProtoView, Ringgold, Inc.

“Dramatic monochromes of public lands in the American West are almost automatically associated with artists like Timothy O’Sullivan or Ansel Adams. But there are equally talented contemporary photographers, and William Sutton is one of them. His evocative images of Western public lands range from close-ups of frothing mountain streams to vast, sweeping landscapes that seemingly cover as much territory as do small Eastern states. The wonderfully wrought plates in Sutton’s book—imagery from 46 public lands in 13 Western states—are accompanied by a text that is as lively as it is thoughtful. The critical essays by Toby Jurovics and Susan Moldenhauer, both curators of major art museums, lend an interpretive depth to Sutton’s text and images. This is a book that is not just the first of its kind. It is one in which we can immerse ourselves for hours, letting our imaginations run as free as a desert wind or a mountain breeze.”
—John Logan Allen, Emeritus Professor of Geography, University of Wyoming, Honorary Life Member of the Western History Association, and Fellow of the Society for the History of Discoveries

“Here’s a test: open this book and look at Willy Sutton’s superb pictures and then try not to fall even more deeply in love with our magnificent western continent. I bet you can’t. I couldn’t. It made me want to grab some gear, hit the road, and see more of this magnificence first-hand.”
—William deBuys, author of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest and The Walk

“Sutton surveys the vast public lands of the West as they are, showing mountain peaks, saguaro forests, pictographs, and sand dunes, as well as roads, bison, people, fences, mining, and foresting. The signs of habitation and development neither mar nor overwhelm Sutton’s West but rather lend a reassuring authenticity to his depiction of the place he calls home.”
—Rebecca Senf, Norton Family Curator of Photography, Center for Creative Photography and Phoenix Art Museum, and author of Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe

“Sutton’s resonant photographs evoke the deep silence and seemingly endless spaces of the American West as it must have been 200—or 2,000—years ago. That sense of continuity offers reassurance in an era of constant, sometimes drastic, environmental change and gives us something to stand on as we shape the future of the places that belong to every one of us. At Home in the West is an important artistic contribution to the ongoing conversation about our environmental attitudes, perceptions, and values.”
—Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography and Media Arts, Denver Art Museum, and author of Belonging to the West

“It is all too easy, when looking at photographs of Western landscapes created in glorious Kodachrome or, more recently, digital images, to forget what this place, the West, really looks like, what it actually is. Here, in William Sutton’s striking black-and-white photography, is the reality of the West, where the softening hues so evident in the generic coffee-table book are stripped away to reveal a powerful landscape region. Here is not mere surface but the geology of the place, its very bone and sinew, where thrusting peaks and steep declivities, valleys and cliffs, and meadows and rangeland are revealed in a kind of primordial way—a way that helps the reader understand the meaning of what really lies beyond the 100th meridian. Surely, William Sutton deserves all the praise he will receive for giving us a most unusual book that will find a place among other classics of Western landscape photography.”
—Charles E. Little, author of Discover America: The Smithsonian Book of the National Parks and Greenways for America

“At Home in the West is a compelling reexamination of the landscapes of emotion found in our public lands. With this work Sutton assumes the front rank of photographers exploring the meaning of place. What a terrific book!”
—William E. Tydeman, Archivist and Former Director of the Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University

“This remarkable visual survey of public lands by William Sutton reveals the vast and exquisite terrain across the United States that is available to anyone, citizen or visitor. Sutton’s photographs—powerful, raw, and passionate though not always picturesque—emerge from a true place: the American West. The essays by Sutton and leading curators, in addition to the extensive notes on the public lands that are featured, only enhance the experience and knowledge of this artistic legacy. At Home in the West is a thoughtful, intelligent, and timely book that expresses well both the challenges and opportunities that these immense lands, entrusted to our collective care, offer to us all.”
—Karen Sinsheimer, Curator of Photography, Santa Barbara Museum of Art

“A sojourn is a passing fancy, a contemplative engagement that is in the here and now. William Sutton’s lure of the land is a magical walk through public lands. At Home in the West could be the motto of the Bureau of Land Management as much as it is ‘opportunity and challenge.’ Therein lay the truth, as the photographs emerge with reverence for what once was or might still be.”
—Peter Goin, Foundation Professor of Art, University of Nevada, Reno, and author of Humanature and co-author of Changing Mines in America

“In the essay that kicks off his beautiful black-and-white photography book, At Home in the West: The Lure of Public Land, William S. Sutton says he began taking pictures “to investigate notions about living in a place.” Over the last 30 years, his rambling investigations have led him to public lands from the Nebraska Sandhills to the Pacific Coast. Sutton’s images are not always the pristine nature-scapes we might imagine; he doesn’t shy from documenting man’s imprint on the land, from ancient stairsteps carved in rock to stacks of cut trees ready for the sawmill. He prompts readers to ask themselves: How can we use this land for the greatest good?

Sutton doesn’t provide an easy answer, but his photographs remind us that we are not the first to ask. With additional essays by art curators Toby Jurovics and Susan B. Moldenhauer, At Home in the West offers a sweeping, timeless look at the land that shapes us.”
—Katie Mast, High Country News

My Place

“We are uniquely fire creatures on a uniquely fire planet.”¹―Stephen Pyne

In 1982, when I was looking for land in the Colorado Front Range on which to build a home and create a family, the possibility of a forest fire affecting my life was not among my concerns. At the top of my list was finding a relatively remote and private place that included a south-facing slope to harvest the energy of the sun. My goal was to build a small, earth-sheltered, passive-solar home that would blend with the landscape, integrating the forces of the earth and sky. I told myself that an extra investment in quality land was worthwhile because, although I someday could build a larger house, the land would not change.

The Black Tiger Gulch Fire began early on a Sunday afternoon, July 9, 1989, probably from a discarded cigarette. The weather had been extremely hot and dry for several weeks. The wind was blowing hard to the northwest and would thrust the fire from the edge of Boulder Canyon up the steep slopes of Black Tiger Gulch through my meadow and homestead to the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain.

I smelled the fire before I understood what was happening. I was painting some cabinets in the kitchen and wondered if something was burning in the house as a result of what I was doing, if perhaps the newspaper I was using as a drop cloth had come in contact with the pilot light of the stove. Then I saw the smoke emerging from behind the mountain southeast from my small house. I hiked the quarter of a mile down to the edge of the gulch to see what was going on and met a fireman talking on a radio. We had no idea of how precarious the situation was.

By the time I got back to the house the entire mountain to the south, Mount Pisgah, was in flames as tall as the mountain itself. I closed the windows, grabbed my photographic negatives and dirty clothes bag, and got into the truck. Already the grass adjacent to the house was on fire. A short way from the driveway the road was choked with smoke and flames. I slammed on the brakes and considered going the other way around but then imagined the possibility that the fire might be raging even more intensely there. I plowed ahead through the smoke to join my neighbors in tears at the bottom of the road.

After the fire, the hillsides were populated with charred, shiny-black remains of pine and fir trees. The earth’s surface was blanketed with a pale-white powder of ash. There were small, tunnel-like holes in the ground where the fire had burned out the roots of trees. The land had become, in effect, sanitized. Litter, old shacks, and squatters’ cabins were scrubbed from the land in the flames of the fire. Heavy rains caused flooding, erosion, and silting of Middle Boulder Creek. During one storm, a mudslide crushed a home in Boulder Canyon and left a Volkswagen-sized boulder in the middle of the roadway awash in mud several feet deep. With high winds the dead trees would tumble out of the ground or break in half, leaving tall, exaggerated stumps. For a long time, the air was filled with the smell of smoke and ash.

Almost all of my neighbors lost their homes and possessions in the fire. Some sold their land and moved on. Some built new homes. One person built a new house identical to the one she lost in the fire. Another woman built a house that included an elaborate, decorative garden with an automatic watering system and a wall that separated her lush garden space from the charred landscape beyond. A group of neighbors donated materials and time and rebuilt a home for a young family. Some people rebuilt homes but then, failing to adjust to the new landscape created by the fire, moved on.

In the months following the Black Tiger Gulch Fire, people expressed the desire to have all the burnt trees cut down. They found the dead trees to be a depressing reminder of the tragedy, as if the dead trees were the only remains of the fire. Sometimes we appear to be oblivious of the dynamics of the place in which we live and have difficulty seeing time beyond our own lives.

Fire has always been a major factor in the development of species and ecosystems not only in the Colorado Front Range, but throughout the West. Through the process of evolution, forests have adapted their biology to periodic fires. A healthy ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir forest requires a forest fire every three to ten years to process underbrush and thin weaker trees. Some species, such as lodgepole pine, even require fire for their seeds to germinate. Classic Front Range forests are composed of open stands of large trees that can withstand regular fires that burn slowly on the ground. The thick bark of mature trees protects them from the heat of the fire. But humanity has interrupted the natural balance and regulating effect of fire. During the past century, the Colorado foothills became home to increasing numbers of people, who rigorously suppressed forest fires to protect their property and the value of forests for lumber and recreation. As a result, the forests are overpopulated with undernourished trees and cluttered with standing dead and dry timber killed by insects; when fire inevitably happens, it is intense and severely destructive.

In the summer of 1989, the Black Tiger Gulch fire came right up to and around my little house, but the meadow slowed it down, cooled it, and the stucco surface of the house did not burn. Since then, I have lived here almost four times as long after the fire as before the fire. My wife and I got married in the meadow four years after the fire with 120 friends and family witnessing our commitment beneath the burnt hills. I have expanded our house six times over, and we raised two children here. The neighbors I have lived among are some of the most amazing people I have ever known. Each year I watch the spring plants grow and the winter snow matt down the vegetation. So much of my life is invested in this place that I cannot imagine living anywhere else.

Fire causes great tragedy. Lives are traumatized, the landscape disrupted, and wildlife scattered. As more forests burn across the West, will we come to think that we live in a spoiled and ruined landscape? Will our spirits be burdened with the belief that what was once beautiful has been destroyed in our lifetime? Or can we learn to face the tragedies of our inhabitance and, at the same time, see the richness of our place within the dynamics of nature? If we desire to live honestly and fully, we cannot pretend to live in a personally pristine wilderness and not see the effects of our collective actions or the greater wonders of the world. We have a place within nature to discover. From a south-facing meadow at the top of Black Tiger Gulch, the land is not what it was before the fire, but it is also not what it was the day of the fire. The land constantly changes and yet remains the same.

1. Pyne, Stephen J., “Sky of Ash, Earth of Ash: A Brief History of Fire in the United States,” in Joel S. Levine, Global Biomass Burning: Atmospheric, Climatic, and Biospheric Implications (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 61.

Copyright © 2013 William Sutton. All rights reserved.