Activist Art

Robert Glenn Ketchum Uses Photography to Impact, Improve Society.

Watching environmental photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum recently at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History—mingling with guests, instructing the musicians, handling a catering snafu that set off the fire alarm—one is drawn by his infectious energy. He embodies that powerful combination of poised self-confidence and childlike wonderment of the world, more commonly known as charisma.

Ketchum is at the museum for an event featuring his exhibit, “Threads of Light: Chinese embroidery from Suzhou and the Photography of Robert Glenn Ketchum,” which continues its U.S. premier run through September 5. He uses this evening to introduce guests to these breathtaking art works—representing the pinnacle of contemporary Chinese embroidery—as well as the American Land Conservancy (ALC), an environmental group on whose board of councilors Robert sits. Although seemingly unrelated, both the embroidery and the ALC intertwine Robert’s two greatest passions: art and activism.

“(The Suzhou exhibit) isn’t environmental activism; this is social exchange activism,” he enthuses. “It’s a different kind of advocacy, and I love it for that reason.”

Called “one of the great wilderness photographers of our time” by Outdoor Photography magazine, Robert has had more than 400 one-man and group shows, and his work is represented in most major U.S. collections. In 1979, he was one of only 12 artists invited to the first photography exhibition ever held in the White House.

Throughout his impressive, 30-year career, Ketchum has used his art to challenge the prevailing attitudes toward the American environment—then to actively seek change in our society’s devastating abuse of it. Through exhibitions, lectures and direct lobbying, he has successfully affected significant environmental legislation and reform. In recognition of his efforts, Robert has received the United Nations Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award, the Chevron-Times Mirror Magazine Conservation Award, and the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography. In 1998, Audubon named him one of their Champions of Conservation who have “shaped the environmental movement of the 20th century”—a list of 100 luminaries that includes Rachel Carson and John Muir. In 1993, he received the ULCA Alumni Award for Excellence in Professional Achievement.

Ketchum sees such activism as an artist’s responsibility. “I don’t think it’s appropriate any longer to just wander around and presume to take pictures of the random landscape,” he muses. “If you’re really going to use your work and that work is chemistry rich and uses a lot of silver and takes a lot of chemicals, then there ought to be some justification for it, or else you are just victimizing the natural world as well.

“It’s really a wonderful thing to have a career as an artist,” Ketchum continues. “And it seems to me that the quid pro quo is that we should use that career to then improve life—one’s own life, everybody’s life. That’s the trade-off.”

Early in his career, Robert merged his personal and political beliefs with his creative expression. After receiving his bachelor of arts degree from UCLA, he spent time in Sun Valley, Idaho, where, he says, his work “began to change, to really reflect the environment.” He returned to Los Angeles to obtain a master of fine arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts, then went on the help start up the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (LACPS), where he served as executive director and chair of the board. His work with LACPS led to a 15-year stint as curator of photography for the National Park Foundation in Washington, D.C.

In his latter role, he organized an exhibition of environmental photographers who had directly influenced political legislation, from William Henry Jackson’s lobbying for Yellowstone to Ansel Adams’ efforts for Kings Canyon through to contemporary artists. The exhibition helped him focus his artistic energies.

“It made clear to me that photographers had been able to use their work proactively in a positive political way,” he reflects. “I knew this is what I always wanted. And instead of having my work over here and my political persuasions over there, it brought them together.”

After completing the accompanying book, American Photographers and the National Parks (1980, Viking Press), the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund offered Robert a commission to photograph the Hudson River Valley. The two years he spent there, and the resulting work, proved a watershed in his career.

“Up until that point, my photos had always been about the beauty of the natural world,” says Robert. “In the Hudson Valley, I saw not only the beauty, but I also saw our intrusion on it.” He regards the area, which had been developed as far back as the 1600s by the Dutch, as a metaphor for American history: “All of our sins and all of our accomplishments were there along the shoreline somewhere. The Hudson begins in complete wilderness and ends in Manhattan.”

Pleased with the resulting monograph, The Hudson River and the Highlands (1985, Aperture), the Wallace Fund offered Ketchum another commission. This time, they sent him to Alaska to photograph the Tongass rainforest, a project that would push Robert to the forefront of the environmental movement.

“The Tongass project accelerated into a proactive, totally confrontational situation so quickly,” he recalls. Although the Tongass Timber Reform Bill was before Congress, it had little support since few Americans even knew about the area, let alone the environmental threat. The Wilderness Society and the Natural Resources Defense Council both used Robert’s images in media campaigns and, after his book, The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest (1987 first ed., 1994 second ed., Aperture), was published, Ketchum orchestrated a huge campaign that included then-Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire, the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, and even the President’s office. After three years and three failed attempts, the bill finally passed, becoming law in 1990.

While Ketchum had offered a muted criticism of governmental clean-water policy in the Hudson book, on the Tongass piece, he says, “I opened up with both barrels” against the U.S. Forest Service. The project put him “on a roll” about federal land management, and the following year he produced another book, Overlooked in America: The Success and Failure of Federal Land Management (1991, Aperture). Soon thereafter, he was asked by the American ambassador to Brazil to represent American arts at the upcoming Earth Summit Conference and, in June 1992, was given a one-man exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro. Later that year, Cornell University organized a major traveling retrospective of his work, which resulted in the monograph, The Legacy of Wilderness: The Photographs of Robert Glenn Ketchum (1992, Aperture). He has produced a number of other books, as well, including Northwest Passage (1996, Aperture), which chronicles a private yacht crossing of the Arctic.

Robert, his wife and their two children live in a beautifully landscaped house near UCLA—the very home in which he grew up. His brother, Jack, Jr., graduated from the university in 1953, and his father, Jack Ketchum, Sr., attended the original Vermont campus and was a star basketball player in the late-1920s. In fact, the elder Ketchum was team captain when UCLA first beat USC and UC Berkeley, and Robert proudly notes that he still possesses signed basketballs from both of those historic games.

Jack also was a major contributor to both the John Wooden Center and the Kerckhoff Hall retrofitting project, and Robert continues his father’s legacy by giving of his own time and talent. He has donated works to the Jonsson Cancer Center and the medical complex’s ongoing collection, for which he serves as chair on the photography committee. He also has spoken at a number of Alumni Association events and, last year, led an Association tour to the North Pole.

Robert directly attributes his interest in photography to UCLA. He entered as a pre-law major, with a strong history background but very little exposure to the arts. The mandated art courses “completely transformed me,” he remembers. “The paintings made clearer the history or me, and everything I’d learned was so much more vivid and completely real because of them.”

Changing his major to design, a subsequent color theory class revealed his “innate sense” of how colors worked. When he took a photography course, he says, the camera “just spoke to me. It gave me an identity.”

Ketchum’s work was heavily influenced by UCLA professor emeritus Robert Heinecken, a “very nontraditional teacher” who utilized alternative processes and views of photography as sculpture on film. Such non-conventional teaching, says Ketchum, is the very reason the Suzhou work exists.

“I never left that exploring, that alternative medium interest,” Robert claims. “(I believe) the arts were originally intended to … communicate ideas, and I’ve chosen to make the images I do to communicate. Yet … I still have that alternative process interest and have always carried it with me.”

Ketchum continues to explore new mediums, including digital and glass, but has held off showing them until, he says, “I feel I have enough work so people will understand what I am doing.” The embroidery exhibit at the Fowler is one of his first thrusts into revealing these other sides of his artistic expression.

“I always recognized that my photographs had a tremendous textural value,” he says, “but the photograph itself is such an industrially finished thing.” He explored textiles throughout the 1970s, but was never satisfied with the resulting colors or details. Then, in the early 1980s, UCLA established an exchange program with China, one of the first two in the United States. It took a few years but, working in conjunction with the exchange program, he convinced the director of the Suzhou Institute to meet him. Since then, they have produced 18 pieces together. Opening these channels opened a new means of expression for Ketchum.

“It’s not my intention just to knock off my photographs,” he says of his collaboration with the Suzhou Institute. “They proved by the third piece they could reproduce a photograph verbatim. Now the whole world is opening up in terms of what we can embroider. We’re pushing the edge on some of this stuff, it’s pretty experimental,” including digitally synthesized pieces. It is, however, a slow process: the shortest piece took 180 days; the longest, three years.

Of all his many life experiences, Ketchum asserts the most exciting adventure is always the next to come. Later this summer, he will head north to the wild, mountainous Bristol Bay Watershed in southwest Alaska—a place so remote only a handful of pilots know where to land—for a two-week river journey. “It’s the preparation for the unknown,” he says, “knowing that you’re going to put yourself out there again and rise to the occasion. And,” he continues, “not just doing it and surviving, but doing it as an artist and coming back to work.

“When all is said and done, and I’m gone and people look over my career, I hope they will say not only was this guy prolific, but he really spent time out there in the wild, wild places. That’s my own private pleasure.”