Photographer Ben Huff has been dreaming of his own press since 2007, and this summer, with the help of an $18,000 grant from the Rasmuson Foundation, he has finally begun to make that dream a reality.
Ice Fog Press’ name — and its first book — come from Fairbanks, where Huff lived and worked for many years, but the fellowship allowed him to open his own space is downtown Juneau. He hopes it will be a resource for the community, with services ranging from providing digital printing services to eventually holding small classes and local events.
Ice fog, Huff explains, is an atmospheric condition unique to northern latitudes. It’s a type of cold air combustion that traps a fine mist of ice crystals close to the ground.
“It’s dense and it’s gross and it’s insane … but it’s also really beautiful,” Huff said. “That collision of nature and mankind is kind of that sweet spot where photography lives.”
Huff has lived in Juneau for six years now but he knew there could be no other name for his press.
“I’ve always had it in my head that that was what it was going to be for years I’ve been thinking about it.”
Juneau, he pointed out, is no stranger to ice or fog.
“You can kind of split those words apart if you don’t know what ice fog is,” he said.
Huff anticipates that the press will publish only a few books a year. He planned on starting with some of his own local work, as he said, “I didn’t feel comfortable asking anybody else to trust me with their work just yet,” until he began looking for a photo of ice fog for his website.
He remembered, years ago, seeing a scene of downtown Fairbanks with ice fog in a box of photos by Dennis Whitmer, someone he describes as “a mentor of sorts and a very, very close friend. A really wonderful photographer.”
Huff emailed asking if he could use the photo. To which Whitmer replied, “I’ll do you one better” and sent back what he called, “A book that I never made that I always intended to make.”
It was just a pdf, really rough as Huff describes it, with maybe 20 pictures.
“I opened it here in the computer and was like, ‘well… that’s the first book. Done.’”
Huff had always intended to print Whitmer’s work — but several years down the road and in hardcover.
“This was something that is smaller and it’s quicker and it’s something we can do in a little bit of a humbler nature. It won’t be a big full-fledged hardcover book, it’ll be a smaller affair,” Huff said.
But Huff isn’t mourning the change of plans, even if it means shelving his own book until spring.
“Now the whole thing feels more collaborative, which is what I wanted from the beginning,” he said. So far, starting the press “feels exactly the way I envisioned it.”
The collection is tentatively titled “Fairbanks in Winter. Huff is trying to persuade Whitmer to choose a more lyrical name. Whitmer’s previous book is called simply “Front Street Kotzebue.”
Huff was going over some “really early” proofs of the book, which will consist of 20—24 pictures, the day the Capital City Weekly visited. He said it’ll be ready sometime in the fall. He is planning a run of 300-500 copies and the book will cost around $25. It will also be accompanied by a smaller run, 50-100 copies, of one of the prints.
THE LAB
Suite 100 of the Triangle building is not a big space, but it’s big enough for “The Lab:” Huff’s library of photography books, a table, computer and work desk, and the giant printer that can print up to 44 inches by 100 feet.
This is Huff’s digital printer which is available, for a price, to all of Juneau. He has printed family portraits on it but also is working on more ambitious projects, such as the pen-and-ink drawing by Abe Wylie that was displayed at The Canvas in July. Originally “seven or eight feet wide, just this monster thing,” The Lab is making editioned prints about five feet in length.
“To have that outsourced and do that somewhere else, something that big, would be a lot of money and you wouldn’t know what you’re getting until you unwrapped it,” Huff said.
Digital printing is something Huff himself has been doing for a decade and has focused on, even taking a residency in Syracuse, New York in summer 2014 to build his skills.
As well as printing for others, he plans on teaching others to print — an idea for one of the many classes he plans on holding in the space starting this fall.
“When I was teaching at the University (of Alaska Southeast), it was the steepest learning curve of anything we did. Trying to translate what you were seeing in the screen: this beautiful, backlit, luminescent thing onto paper. … it’s a different language, the screen and paper, and it’s that translation that is everything,” Huff said, adding that it was a skill “built over making a lot of prints and making a lot of bad prints.”
The classes will be small, one to two weeks long and held in the evenings starting this fall or next spring. They will be “very short concentrated classes,” Huff said, each focusing on one subject like basic cameras, using Photoshop or prepping for print. More details will become available on his website, icefogpress.com.
He also hopes to eventually hold salons, gatherings where artists of different mediums — painters, printmakers and even poets — can come and share their work and engage creatively.
That’s “not something I’ve totally nailed down yet,” Huff said.
In the meantime, Huff’s library and Huff himself are available Wednesdays-Fridays 9 a.m.-4 p.m. and by appointment.
A WORKING PHOTOGRAPHER
Amidst all this, Huff is still working on his own projects. He received a grant earlier this year from the Alaska Humanities Forum to continue his work photographing the abandoned military town on Adak.
The base there was founded during World War II and was strategically important during the Cold War, housing up to 9,000 at one point. But the military moved out in 1997, leaving the town with only about 70 residents.
Images of prefab buildings abandoned in the snow, dwarfed by the overwhelming beauty of the islands, adorn The Lab’s walls, along with photos of residents looking directly at the camera as if they have something to say to the viewer. (For more, visit huffphoto.com).
Huff estimates that he has several years’ worth of work ahead of him before that series is ready to be transformed into a book. He makes his third trip to the Aleutians later this month.
He published “The Last Road North” in 2014, a collection of his photos between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay. While shopping it around to publishers, he took a copy that he “printed and bound, beginning to end, entirely handmade” to show them what he wanted.
“Books have always been a really important part of what I am up to,” he explained. “A really important part of my process, (to) my understanding of photography and my appreciation of photography. … A lot of what I love about photography is this bound object.”
“Books sort of have this life to them, when you hold them close,” Huff said. “Sitting in your favorite chair, at the library or wherever that is, and taking in this voice or this landscape … beginning to end.”
• Contact Capital City Weekly design wizard and staff writer Randi Spray at randi.spray@capweek.com.
Juneau-based Alaska photographer Ben Huff pages through proofs of Ice Fog Press’ first book, tentatively titled “Fairbanks in Winter,” at the press’ office in the Triangle Building in Juneau. “Fairbanks in Winter” will contain photos by Dennis Whitmer. Huff, the photographer and author of “The Last Road North,” received a Rasmuson fellowship this year to start Ice Fog Press, which will create art and photography books “about Alaska, by Alaskans.”
