Travel Reference
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fitting, a roll of fat hangs over a narrow belt, the large beads on her string of fake pearls
pulled to the side of her neck. She stares directly into the lens and at first she looks bitter,
and angry, as if life has passed her by and she knows it. I'm a little afraid of her, if you
want to know the truth, but my second time around the exhibit her expression has
softened. Now she looks wounded, and sad, and lonely. I notice for the first time that the
brooch pinned to the vee of her collar is of a three-masted schooner.
Another portrait and everyone's favorite is what Sam called “Untitled” (“He almost
never titled his pictures,” Chris says, “he figured he said everything he had to say in the
print”) and what I call “Mr. Mischief.” It was taken on a 1952 trip to Barrow and features
a very young Inupiat man with his nose mashed up against a small window. His black hair
is trimmed into a neat bowl cut, his eyebrows are perfect impish arches and his eyes are
creased in a wide grin that's just short of wicked. He is nothing short of adorable, and if I
were his mother I'd watch him like a hawk.
I look back over this column and despair. I haven't touched on even a tenth of the work
in the exhibit—where are the anaconda tree trunks, and the little diva at the microphone,
and Kenai Lake at breakup, when God loaded a paintbrush with glitter and let loose? I'm
not a photographer, for that matter I'm not all that interested in photography as art. I went
to the exhibit because it was a retrospective of the lifework of an Alaskan legend.
The curators have named the exhibit after Sam's personal favorite photograph,
“Tenacity.” “He always said that if we did a show, that photograph was the star,” says
Chris. It is a deceptively simple photograph, just some tufts of grass poking up through
mud dried to a hard, shiny finish. The more you look at it, though, the more obstinate, the
more determined, the more, yes, tenacious the grass seems, and the more questionable the
power of the cement-like layer of mud to hold it back. “It's calligraphy,” Chris says. “Sam
was definitely conscious of a Japanese esthetic in his work.”
“He never said why it was his favorite,” Chris says, “but Joan thinks it stands as a meta-
phor for his life,” his comeback from his family's internment Outside during World War
II, his determination to succeed as a commercial photographer, and his equally determined
quest in search of art on the other side of the lens.
Myself, I think “Tenacity” is no mean metaphor for Alaska itself. The ancestors of
Alaska Natives crossed the Bering Sea land bridge thirteen thousand years ago and fought
