PHOTOGRAPHY
Inquiring mind
Story by Carrie Scozzaro
Photographer Alan Barber approaches projects like an engineer
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Alan Barber shows a Mayan subject her portrait on his camera while in Palenque, Mexico. PHOTO BY JIM CLINE
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SANDPOINT MAGAZINE
hen he was a young man, Alan Barber borrowed his father’s plane, a 1947 Aeronca Chief, and flew toward Barrow from his parents’ house in Fairbanks, Alaska. He was 19, home for the summer from University of Washington where he was earning an electrical engineering degree. On his solo flight, Barber also brought along his father’s camera, not to document anything, he says, but just to explore. Fueled by curiosity, intelligence and an evolving meticulousness of mind, Barber’s lifetime pursuing knowledge for the sheer sake of it was set in motion. When he landed some 250 SUMMER 2015
miles northwest of Fairbanks in Anaktuvuk – from the Inupiaq word roughly meaning “the place of caribou droppings” – Barber was struck with the Stone Age-like quality of the village. The year was 1966, less than two decades since a handful of formerly nomadic Nunamuit families returned to the area and settled amongst the tundra. Windswept, sparsely populated, framed against the Brooks Range, the village was little more than a collection of sod houses, Quonset huts, and a makeshift landing strip with a welcome sign, onto which was mounted caribou antlers. “That was my first touch of gritty third world,” said Barber, 68.