Fishermen pick fish. Pollock gasp for air. A lobster trap rises to the light-filled sea surface like a treasure chest long-hidden.<\/p>\n
Juneau photographer Chris Miller\u2019s current show, on view through the end of the month at The Rookery Caf\u00e9, is a watery world filled with fish, boats, and the people that make their living from them.<\/p>\n
\u201cFishing is kind of my niche,\u201d Miller said. \u201cThere\u2019s not a lot of us out there that do it (photograph fisheries) consistently. Every fishery has its own story.\u201d<\/p>\n
With a background in photojournalism, it\u2019s those stories Miller\u2019s interested in telling.<\/p>\n
Miller is one of Alaska\u2019s preeminent fishing photographers. He\u2019s hung off the sides of boats in Southeast Alaska, Bristol Bay and the Bering Sea. He\u2019s stayed up long hours along with scallop fishermen, walked the pack ice off Nome, and for good measure, he recently completed a project documenting a fishery in France, a body of work that makes up half of his show at The Rookery. (The other half of the photos are from Alaska.)<\/p>\n
Local snow enthusiasts are also familiar with his photos of airborne skiers and snowboarders; he spends most of his winter taking photos of backcountry skiing and snowboarding, though he also photographs some winter fisheries.<\/p>\n
\u201c(That) kind of connects me back to my roots as a sports photographer, and it\u2019s a great excuse to be outside,\u201d he said. \u201cThose are the two things I gravitate around.\u201d<\/p>\n
He bought his first camera at a state surplus auction as a teenager, and though it remained a hobby for a number of years, \u201cI was hooked,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He began seriously taking photos when he lived with members of Clark University\u2019s baseball team in college, but it was a summer working at a Massachusetts newspaper that most influenced him.<\/p>\n
Between his junior and senior year of college, he took photos for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. Among them was an affecting essay about Michael Zlody, a man with Downs Syndrome that Miller worked with a few times a week. The funding of the Mercy Centre, the school the man attended, was threatened. That photo essay is on his blog, along with others.<\/p>\n
\u201cA photo, to me, should reflect a story if possible,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
After graduating with a degree in international relations and studio art with an emphasis on photography, he decided to try and make it as a photojournalist in Alaska. He returned to Juneau and started taking photos during the legislative session for the Associated Press.<\/p>\n
After school, he began fishing \u2014 and photographing \u2014 in Bristol Bay; he\u2019d gotten his start fishing in Taku Inlet after high school. Later, he got support to photograph some fisheries, like Bering Sea trawling and king crab fishing, from the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.<\/p>\n
Cameras and salt water aren\u2019t an intuitive mix.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt (salt water) wants to destroy everything,\u201d he said. \u201cMy cameras are constantly in a state of working and not working. I\u2019m trying to keep them dry, keep them clean, keep water off the lens.\u201d<\/p>\n
In small boats, he almost always has a climbing harness and ropes, he said. He hangs himself over the side to try and get different angles. The first time he did that was with fishermen longlining for cod in the Bering Sea.<\/p>\n
His job isn\u2019t over once he\u2019s taken a photo, though \u2014 he spends just as much or more time editing his shots.<\/p>\n
\u201cI take three to ten thousand photos in a week-long shoot,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of deleting. I take a lot of bad photos. That\u2019s the secret.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among his other experiences, trawling for pollock in the Bering Sea was \u201cjust a neat fishery in terms of the sheer mass and size of it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Some of the boats are bigger than 300 feet, have a hundred people working on them, and pull in 80 tons of pollock every three to four hours, he said. Many of them use more than 90 percent of the fish, including using oil from inedible parts of the fish as a source of energy on board.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are boats with a hundred people working on board,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like something out of the Starship Enterprise.\u201d<\/p>\n
When he\u2019s out on a boat photographing, his schedule revolves around the crew, he said. He tries to \u201climit\u201d himself to 12 or 14 hour days, something that didn\u2019t initially come naturally when crews are working around the clock.<\/p>\n
For those who want another secret to photographing fisheries: \u201cAll fishing is repetitive,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I\u2019m usually trying to build a mental list of shots\u2026 I can wait until the light is right, and the position of the boat.\u201d<\/p>\n
Patience, he said, is key.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of my work is more documentary-based in some regards, so I don\u2019t necessarily think of it as art,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of more what it\u2019s about for me versus more traditional fine art photography.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s also taken a number of photos of the Taku River, and the Tulsequah (a tributary to the Taku) \u2014 notably where acid mine drainage from the Tulsequah Chief, a closed British Columbia mine, enters the river.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was trying to help bring to light what was going on upriver,\u201d he said. \u201cI think a lot of people didn\u2019t know about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the future, he\u2019d like to put together a book on commercial fishing in Bristol Bay, he said. 2016 will be his tenth season in the fishery.<\/p>\n
He\u2019d like to portray his experience there, but also \u201cthe experience of thousands of other Alaskans and Americans that make a living on those river systems,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In the long term, he\u2019d like to photograph every fishery in the state.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s as good an excuse as any to explore the state,\u201d he said. \u201cAlaska is so huge and so diverse. There are little niches from Chignik all the way up to the Kuskokwim River.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fishing, he said, draws him in in part because of its nature.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a very honest job,\u201d he said. \u201cThese guys are working long, hard hours to not only put food on their family\u2019s table, but they\u2019re feeding the world. (And,) at least in the state of Alaska, we do so in a very sustainable fashion that\u2019s very well managed. That\u2019s a big part of why I enjoy what I do.\u201d<\/p>\n
It saddens him to think of the fisheries, and the fish, that once existed in other parts of the world \u2014 salmon, for example, swimming up the Thames River in London.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe sad thing is it\u2019s unique now, but only because we\u2019ve messed it up so many places,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The need to protect the resource, he said, is something fishermen are \u201ckeenly aware of.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a big part of what I hope to accomplish with my work,\u201d he said. \u201cTo highlight what we have here, and what we\u2019re doing as a state and as a population.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
See more of Miller\u2019s photos, and read his blog, at http:\/\/www.csmphotos.com\/.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u2022 Contact Capital City Weekly staff writer Mary Catharine Martin at maryc.martin@capweek.com.<\/p>\n
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Fishermen pick fish. Pollock gasp for air. A lobster trap rises to the light-filled sea surface like a treasure chest long-hidden. Juneau photographer Chris Miller\u2019s current show, on view through the end of the month at The Rookery Caf\u00e9, is a watery world filled with fish, boats, and the people that make their living from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":29741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-29740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-arts-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29740"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=29740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}