ZOOM0007_TrLR

Dennis, a photographer and artist, discusses his passion for photography, particularly capturing the recent salmon migration in Klamath Falls. He reflects on his identity, experiences, and excitement for photography, influenced by renowned photographer Imogene Cunningham. He also describes the region's landscape, the town of Klamath Falls, and his personal journey to the area due to his love for nature and photography despite physical challenges. Visiting the river to witness the salmon migration was a profound experience for him. Okay, we're going to go ahead and we're rolling now. We can, you don't need to worry about stopping or starting, you know, just conversationally. If you want to restart an answer because you're like, oh, I didn't like the way I worded that, that's fine, really we want to get to a tempo of just a conversation. Yeah, all right, I'm working, I'm trying. Yep, and then we'll have, if you can try to remember to rephrase the question, that way we can contextualize what you're talking about. Okay? Because you're figuring you're not, your voice won't be in it. My voice won't be in it. Okay, fine, that explains it. Yeah. Okay, who are you? Yeah, well, my name's Dennis and I'm a photographer and an artist. As far as like who I am, that's what I identify with being. I get a tremendous charge out of making pictures and finding things that I've never seen before and it's all a big thrill and it's managed to stay exciting for a number of years. And the most recent new exciting thing we found is that because the salmon are migrating back up here to Klamath Falls, we're all having an opportunity to go out and see them. And I just wasn't prepared for the number of salmon that we would see in a little creek called Spencer Creek. Stop. Okay, you can go cut when you want. Yeah, okay. Just, I'm off track, you don't like it. No, no, you're good. I was just taking a look at what I've got coming up. Well. I'm sorry to kind of bridge into it. I'm sure. Well, I was going to know what to, what to go through. That's great. That was wonderful. I'm going to ask you a question again. Yep. And then give me a different answer. Okay. Okay. Who are you? Geez, when you think about who you are, especially when you're getting near 80 years. Hold on. Let's try that again. There was a big thing. Okay. Who are you? Gosh, when you think about who you are, that's quite the question. And I had almost 80 years old. It's probably a different, different answer that I would have given at earlier phases of my life. But right now I'm an artist and I'm a photographer. Photography has been my passion for about 60 years now probably. And it reminds me of a story I'd like to tell since we're talking about photography and art and all that. I got to study with a woman named Imogene Cunningham when I was at the Art Institute back way back in 19 whatever, 69 I think. So Imogene was a friend of Ansel Adams and Minor White and Edward Weston as well. She was a contemporary of theirs and also personal friends with them all. And I remember her coming into class one day and she was 83 at the time. And she said, oh, you know, I found a new garden to take pictures in it. And it's got some very interesting light and I've never shot there before. I've never taken pictures there before. And we're going to go over there on Saturday and I can't wait to see what happens. And that whole thing of I can't wait to see what happens just stuck with me. And I decided that if at 83 years old she could be excited about what might happen in three days that photography was the thing I was going to put my energy into as well. And hopefully I'd get some of the same results. Thank you. I want to make an adjustment to our background real quick. That wasn't very good. Yeah, that was probably more than we were looking for. We'll keep this interview kind of like the idea of it is we're making a shorter cut with the potential that we'll have. Well, that just came to mind. So yeah, we're going to do a lot of back and forth and throwaways and whatever. Exactly. No, it was great. Okay. Let's see. Let's move on to another question. Are you doing good? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm good. Oh, okay. Let's talk about, here's a question. Yeah. Can you tell me about the region and its locality? Well, the region that we're in now where all this activity is happening with the fish is referred to as the high desert Great Basin. It's central Oregon, southern and central Oregon. And it's right on the cusp of being evergreen forests if you go to the west and high, dry desert plateaus on the east. Okay, great. Let's go ahead and do that again. There was a little stutter in there. I think that was well said. So if you don't mind, I'll go ahead and read the question again. Can you tell me about the region and its locality? Yeah, the region we're living in now is very interesting to me because it's sort of a combination of evergreen forests if you go to the west, and if you go all the way to the east, you're up on a high plateau, which is very dry, sagebrush, antelope, that kind of thing. Now, in the middle of all of this, even though I'm saying that it's high desert, there's this wandering sort of network of marsh. And I call it the marsh. It's the lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge, whatever. It's a network of rivers and their tributaries that's formed marshland and been a home to migratory waterfowl for generations. Right now we're celebrating that same kind of an area because the famine are migrating up into it again after the removal of four dams, which had been blocking the flow of the Klamath River. So a lot of people got together. Oh, good. We're going to get there. I'm not going to talk about all these things. I'm going to ask you again, and then let's talk about Klamath Falls, like metropolitan, the city. I think this is good. I mean, potentially we'll do something in there. Can you tell me about the region and its locality? Are we doing the high desert again? No. Oh, fine. No, we can talk about Klamath Falls. Yeah, yeah, all right. So I'll define it. I mean, that describes the physical location of wildlife and the mountains and trees and all of that, which is really why a lot of people come here. But as a town, it's kind of adventurous too. It's a small working class town. Maybe 20,000 people, something like that. I might be off on those numbers. But it's working class. I don't know how else to describe it with a couple of little pockets of a pretty sophisticated college called OIT, and we do have a hospital complex called Sky Lake that's got some world class people in it. So mixed in with all of that working class stuff, which is kind of tapering off now as the mills close, we do have some highlights of a good community college, a good college college, and also a lot of activity in the medical community. Okay. Side question. How long have you been in Klamath Falls? Well, so I've been in Klamath Falls now, gosh, for 20 years, longer than I expected to be. I guess I came up in 2005. I started migrating up myself from the Bay Area. I had a photo studio that was closing down, and I lived on a boat in that particular location for many years, 10 or 12 years, I guess. It was the best place I ever lived. But anyway, as the marina was, the plans for developing the marina were getting boring, I realized it was time to probably move on. And I'd always wanted to live in the woods. So I came up to Klamath Falls, and it had enough of a community. I felt it had a band, and there's a performing arts theater. It was enough to keep me going. And it had this whole aspect of being able to live in the woods. Excellent. Okay, let's see. Let's talk about, here's a softball. Why do you go to the river and see the fish? Well, I went to the river finally to see the fish after hearing about them for a number of times. And I don't know why I never made the connection between the river water and seawater, but I've been addicted to seawater and the ocean and wanting to scuba dive. And I've gone all over the world and done underwater photography and written articles and all of that kind of stuff. But I sort of felt like I was retiring up here, plus my back has been a wreck. I'm in a lot of pain when I move around. And I just hadn't put it together. I thought my hiking days were done. But anyway, several people kept talking about how miraculous it was that there were salmon in the river all of a sudden after, what, 100 years, and that they had migrated 300 miles up from the Pacific Ocean where the Klamath River flows into the ocean. So I finally decided I had to go see this. And it wasn't as hard to get to the creek as I thought. It was a bit of a walk. But in all actuality, the little dirt road hits a bridge, and the bridge crosses the creek, and you could see salmon from the bridge. It was near the end of the ride, so they weren't in the numbers that they had been, say, a month earlier. But for sure there were salmon, and there were dead salmon that were at the end of their life cycle. They had spawned and died, and they were washed up on the bank or twirling down the creek, you know, upside down, as well as still some ones that were relatively fresh that were trying to make their way upstream to spawn, you know, find a place to lay eggs and start a new generation. Okay, excellent. I'm going to ask you that question again, and just give me a different answer. If we can broach into your relationship to the fish, like your commonality with the fish, the session you talked about them falling apart and age and all that. I kind of want to unlock a little bit of that. Okay, I think we need to get there first, get me there to see the fish, and then get me there with a camera, which was not the same day. Yeah, so again, I'm going to ask you a question again, and you can take it however you'd like. Take two. Why did you go to the river and see the fish? Well, I finally went to the river after hearing about how magical it was to see these salmon swimming upstream, having come 300 miles from the ocean for the first time in 100 years. It's something I wanted to see. You know, I had my doubts about being able to do any more photography in the water because my back is such a wreck. I'm in pain a lot and whatnot. But at any rate, I got it together and went out there and drove across this little bridge and did a look down in the creek, and there were salmon, a couple swimming upstream, a couple floating downstream that had died after they finished their life cycle. So I decided I'd come back the next day with a camera. I had a little underwater camera that was similar to a GoPro, and I got that rigged up and was able to get some photographs of the fish. I noticed how it almost seemed there was this commonality between this life cycle that the fish were going through and my life cycle. I was getting near the end of my life cycle, and I get carbuncles and I bruise easily, as a lot of older people do and all that. And it's exactly what the salmon were going through. After they spawned and put their energy out into the world again for starting a next generation or two, then they fell apart. Their bodies weren't useful anymore for anything, and they could just go join the earth and merge with the forest flora and fauna and be fertilizer and help the trees grow. So that's pretty cool. That's something I would wish for anybody to be able to merge back with the great universe and the great spirit that we all came from. Excellent. I'm going to ask you a variation of the question. Why do you go back? Why do you go back, and how many times have you been back to see the fish? Well, actually, before I got this little underwater camera, I went back with the big Sony camera or whatever that has all the resolution and tried to catch pictures of them from above water. So I got some interesting sort of abstracts of them swimming, and I posted them on Facebook, and they were intriguing, and I got great responses. I got a bunch of hits. People liked the abstract as much more than I would have thought. But what I really wanted was pictures from underwater, just like I had done when I was using scuba gear and diving in the Cayman Islands and in Indonesia. But making that adjustment to wanting to shoot underwater, but yet the water is only three feet deep, it took a little imagination. So anyway, I rushed back and had a camera FedExed out to me that was similar to a GoPro, and I've got a long pole that I used in my studio days in photography and strapped it to the end of the pole, and I could reach out about eight feet into the water with that and then drop it down when it was running and hopefully get pictures of the fish because we couldn't see any. Occasionally I'd see a fin, and I'd have an idea, okay, there's probably some around that curve or there's some in that bend, but we really couldn't see that much through the water because of glare and this, that, and the other thing. Well, anyway, I came back after that first shoot, trying 10 or 15 times to take a 15-second plunge and then let the camera run and hopefully move it around and maybe tip it towards the surface to get the surface of the water. And anyway, I started looking at those images, and I was blown away. So not only had I caught fish, which are just gorgeous, the way they move I think is beautiful. Their tails just undulate, and they move really fast when they want to scoot. These guys were slow, but every once in a while they'd give a little burst of speed, they'd just disappear up into a riffle and be gone. So that was something I didn't expect to see. It was awesome, even if it was only two or three seconds of it, it's great. The other thing that became very intriguing was, well, two other things was the surface of the water. So I photographed the top in the ocean, I photographed the surface of the water one time in the Cayman Islands when it was raining. Of course, my goal down there was to photograph fish and the reef, and the camera was always pointed down or pointed at something or at other people. But I do remember one time since it was raining and I could see these raindrops hitting the water, I just took a couple still pictures with my Nikon S. I looked at those. I probably looked at them for 30 years before I went back, which was probably to the creek to photograph the surface of the water. Well, it's this whole magical textural thing. It's like a liquid plastic or an amoeba or something that's alive. It's just incredible. Then it turns out the other thing that amazed me was it didn't require walking 100 feet to get a new view. You just had to wait 10 seconds and the water would change or move the camera a foot, and it became a whole new location. It's like being in an amphitheater. So it's like an amphitheater covered with bubbles, which might be the clouds, and then there's water rolling over rocks, and the water tends to compress when it rolls, so it's reflecting the light differently from other kinds of water, and it became a moving three-dimensional kind of thing. I'm still entranced by it and have now set off for some more gear and different ways to get in the water and different kinds of cameras. So even before the salmon come back, which they're going to do in the spring, I know I'm going to be back at that creek and maybe many other creeks many times photographing the underwater environment, this amphitheater look, and the boulders and the rocks that make up the stream and the water and the moving bubbles and configurations of currents that are on the surface. That's excellent. That was a really good answer. Thank you. Okay. Are you ready for another question? Mm-hmm. Okay. When did you first hear about the fish in Spencer Creek? So let me put some thoughts in there. Feel free, if you would like to have any kind of political call to action, feel free to use this as your platform. This piece is going to be an opportunity for you to weigh in on your thoughts, or not. I just wanted to see if you do want to. Well, I don't know it all well enough. I could mention the tribe and fish and game and the fishermen and outdoor lovers, but beyond that I don't know the names of the organizations or their particular agendas. I meant yours. In the past you've discussed about the fact that the fish are in the river and that this is vital and important for nature and it ties into kind of your whole mantra of protecting and doing your part ecologically. Yeah, I didn't really talk about that yet. Right. All right, so hit a question. Did you hit me with a question again? When did you first hear about the fish at Spencer Creek? Gosh, that's a hard question to answer. When did I first hear about the fish? Well, it sort of dawned on me gradually, that's all I can say, and that's why I didn't leap right off here the minute I heard about it. I've been involved in photographing nature and conservation issues for really all of my career, a good part of it at any rate. I think the first time I heard about salmon was at more the mouth of the Klamath River where I had gone to see a town called Klamath, and that's where the river comes in from the sea. And at the head of the river is the Uruk tribe and it's spread all up and down the mouth of the river. I met a guy there that was running a sort of a rehab center and a tribal consciousness center, learn the old crafts kinds of a center, and I was able to photograph him and the big project for his center, which is a series of little houses on the side of the river, which was their natural home anyway, was building this giant canoe. So there was a whole redwood canoe that he and all of the staff and all the workers and all the people that lived there had all put a lot of time and effort into building. So I guess that was the first thing that weighed in on my consciousness. Plus, of course, there was great smoked salmon all over, and you could still get it from whether or not it got up the river wasn't an issue there because it was the salmon that were coming in from the ocean just into the first couple miles of the river, so they were still moving in there even though they couldn't get all the way upstream. So I lost the track. No, no, you're fine, you're fine. Well, that's more colorful than what Greg told me when I was sitting at the Klamath Art Association. He kind of tipped the bucket if you want to know. Yeah. If you want me to say that. No, I don't. I'm not looking for anything specific. I'm letting you rephrase and see what story kind of emerges. You know, that's kind of how this works. I don't think it's all that interesting. All right. Well, fine. Let's see. But there was something. I think the question is when did you first hear about the fish in Spencer Creek? I think it's as simple as to say something to the extent of like, holy shit, these fish are actually like within minutes of where I'm living. Yeah, that's good. I never really had that reaction because I had the same feeling. You were so close. I popped in Spencer Creek, I looked on a map, it was 20 minutes from where I was sitting, and I couldn't believe I hadn't already been. So I immediately made haste and went to the river without anybody by myself and looked at it for myself and was forever changed. I had never seen something so impressive in the valley in my entire life. I don't know. To me it seems like a pretty easy conversation that a lot of people can relate to. Or it's an easy answer that everybody can relate to. All right. Let me answer that again. Let me run the question to you. When did you first hear about the fish in Spencer Creek, and how did you feel about it? Well, the first time I heard about the fish in Spencer Creek, and I've already told you about salmon coming in the mouth of the river down where the root trough was hanging out. Let me stop you there. Don't worry about throwbacks or tie-ins. Just go ahead and answer the question like I've never asked you the question before. When did you first hear about the fish in Spencer Creek, and how did you feel about it? Well, I guess the first time I heard about the fish and was able to get any detailed information was with the Herald and Newsletter, a local newspaper. It was a guy named Lee Jenneret that writes for them, and he had done a really interesting article. Then I saw something on the news, and then it became a subject of conversation. So I was down at our local art gallery with a friend down there named Greg, and he said, oh, he'd been out to see them, and I was really interested. I said, well, did you actually see any fish? He said, yeah, we did. We thought it was too late in the season to go. But my wife and I went down, and, yeah, we saw a couple of fish swimming and some dead fish that were at the end of their life cycle. He said, but I don't know. It's kind of muddy down there. I don't know if you'd be able to make it, but maybe I could arrange to go with you. We can go down together sometime. I'll show it to you. Well, at that particular time I didn't follow through, but I think a couple of weeks later the energy was building to get me and my ass down to the creek to look at this amazing happening that was going on. So I just elected to go on my own one day and got a map to more or less know where the old dam had been. It was past a town called Keno, and you had to go past Keno and cross the dam, and Spencer Creek would be along there somewhere. So I stopped at a gas station on the way down and asked about it, and the gal says, oh, are you going to go fishing? She didn't know very much about the salmon, but she heard a little something, and she kind of thought you could fish them. I said, well, no, not really, not yet. It'll probably be a couple of years before anybody can really fish, but can you tell me how to get them, how to get there? She said, yes, if you give me good instructions, right, left, 1.2 miles, and so on. That's how I got to the creek the first time, and it was completely worthwhile. Seeing these things in reality, that's what everybody needs to do. That's what makes it real. You can hear about it all you want, but you have to really see it yourself. I've read that since in another article about showing some people from Mongolia that were being hosted by the Oregon Fish and Game Department, and they did work on fish wherever their native ground was, but she took them down, and everybody was awed and amazed that here were these salmon that hadn't been seen for 100 years in that spot, and there they are, trying to continue the life force. That was great. Fantastic. Okay, I'm going to move on to another question. What do you hope to achieve in your efforts documenting the fish? Well, if I were to think about actually achieving something, it's not so much there's a – I mean, the outer motivation would be to add energy to salmon and fish preservation. I've always been in love with salmon. They have an amazing life cycle. They feed the forest. They can show up in trace elements in forests in Idaho, you know, hundreds or thousands of miles from the sea. Many different runs and many kinds of salmon. It's been something that's sustained the Native Americans for thousands of years, and it's just an amazing fish. It's high nutrient, great oil, and all of that. So there's a number of reasons to want it to still be as part of our universe. But, you know, I wouldn't just go do it just because I thought it was a good thing to do. What it is at the moment is a door opening up again to some magical place that I've never been before, and it happens to be populated by salmon. But I'm almost as intrigued by photographing the background or photographing the – I'm using the word arena, but for want of a better term, this environment of icy water and hard rock and flowing, you know, flowing stream filled with bubbles and branches. And it's almost like it's alive. It's alive regardless whether there's fish in it or not. And then you add the fish, and you just have this sort of a miracle kind of – it's like a vein to a heart that's pumping energy and life out into the forest and into the world that we live in. And anything that we can all do to help keep that system going, we are really obligated to do. Nurturing the planet is an incredibly important thing for, you know, humans to be involved in. It's a little payback. It's been nurturing us for, you know, 100,000 years, our species. We're using it up, and we've got to start putting some energy back. So anyway, if I can use the hook of it being an art experience and then the byproduct of that is some of these pictures get out and inspire other people, and that's really the goal of a photographer is, one, to make discoveries, find visual things that are exciting for him or her to see, and then to show them to other people. It's not just to exist in a vacuum. We all want to show other people something new and exciting that we've never seen before. And if it hooks in that it happens to be about salmon, which are very much in need of nurturing and supporting, all the better. It's great. It's a wonderful thing. It's given me a new lease on life here, and I will be doing that for years to come, I hope. At least a couple. Thanks. That was a really good answer. I'm going to switch to another question, and then I'm going to come back to that one again and give it a little rest. When did you first take action? Oh, also I wanted to mention the kind of camera you used isn't important for the interview take. So, like, for instance, you referenced a GoPro-like camera. It's just a camera. It's an underwater video camera. I think it's nitpicking, though, because GoPro is pretty ubiquitous. It's a name brand, and so you're putting a video out, and they're going to want you to pay them to say their name. Oh, well, maybe that's the case then. The other term is a sports camera, which I hadn't heard much before. Yeah, that's fine, too. I mean, underwater video camera is just as sufficient. Name brands, I'll just stay away from generally. Okay, when did you first take action? And what was that action? And the context on this question is when you actually, instead of thinking about it, when did you become active in it? I think we've addressed that. It was after talking to Greg and him telling me, well, you won't be able to do this without help, and then I just decided, fuck it, I'll just go do it. Okay, that's good. See, that was good. The first part really wasn't very helpful, but if you could give me an instance. Just say that again. And we're just kind of figuring out. So when did you first take action? Well, this is the first time I actually did anything. I mean, you can sit and think about things forever, and, you know, doing something is a whole different story. The camera is shut down. I really hope that we didn't lose it. Do you want me to turn this one off? Yeah, please. I don't know how long it can run for. It's not turning off. So it might already be off. Whoops. I think it's a little bit off.