Introduction: Creative Collaboration

As you look at the photographs in this book, you may say to yourself, “I’ve been there, too,” and you may have your own photos of some of these places: Amnicon Falls, Copper Falls, Lost Creek Falls, Morgan Falls and St. Peter’s Dome, Houghton Falls, Little Girl Beach, and the Ashland shore and Oredock. You may have written poems about these places. If so, you’ll understand wanting to capture something of your own experience of being in these places where water is moving.

Impetus for the project

Both Catherine Lange and Michael Ruth have been photographers for over 50 years. They met in the spring of 2021, and both, feeling the burden of the pandemic and its limiting of creative motivation, set out to explore northern Wisconsin together. “The impetus for this project,” says Mike, “was to get outside and fire up our right brains. Just getting outside in nature is healing and freeing. The more places we visited and the more photos we took, the more interesting it became to realize how we see differently.”

Showing movement

Mike began in his college days looking at the illusions and shapes you get in photographic images when you take long exposures. “Taking photographs of cars traveling along a downtown street at night, moving trains, or marathon runners at extreme slow shutter speeds creates incredible shapes and mystery—never truly knowing what you are getting until the photo is viewed,” says Mike.

“Long exposures of water crashing along a lakeshore or a flowing river conjures up delicate ribbons of movement.” Mike continues, “Many of my photographic images center around water. Why is that? Water is important to us, as the giver of life, sustenance, soothing to the soul, all those heady things. To me it is all that, but there is something else. The visual stimulation I receive from the movement of water is one thing that draws me to the edge of the shore. Much of my work deals with movement of objects. And water is constantly in motion and therefore is always changing. Like a Zen saying I once read: ‘You can’t step in the same river twice.’”

Mike’s works in Same Location, Multiple Perspectives result from images shot with long exposures or combinations of multiple time-lapse exposures of the same scene and using various computer-based enhancements.

“These pieces are not your standard snapshot of a river,” says Mike. The equipment used: Nikon 200 DSLR and Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX85 Mirrorless cameras. The software for photo editing is Photoshop, Lightroom, and Affinity Photo on a Mac Book Pro and Mac Mini.

Creating still lifes in nature

Cathy has often taken a documentary approach to photography. In 2016 she self-published a book called Why This Place? She interviewed 16 people about why they live and work in the Chequamegon Bay area in northern Wisconsin and created a photographic environmental portrait of each person in his or her most-loved place in nature. She also photographed each person at home and at work and created photo essays incorporating stories that each person shared.

Cathy’s photos in this exhibit provide both straightforward documents as well as more interpretive renderings of places. “In 2014 I began taking photographs of places of natural beauty and bringing delicate objects to place within the landscapes, says Cathy. “I’ve chosen objects like glass or metal vases, a dancing ceramic figure, a pewter creamer, a golden teapot, Red Wing pottery, and other things that not only fascinate me with their appearance but also carry memories of particular people important to me.” She suggests that adding these unexpected household objects to such outdoor settings may provide the viewer with “a sense of dreamlike perception.”

The influences of collaboration

“As we got to know each other’s styles of imagery,” Mike explains, “I experimented with adding objects to the settings and Cathy began to depart from stopping action to showing motion.” She also began to experiment with multiple exposures merged using Affinity Photo.

Mike and Cathy agree: “Finding a fellow photographer to explore the beauty of the Chequamegon Bay area has produced what we believe are beautiful, exciting images. When one photographer explores a location with someone who’s not a photographer, often the photographer feels they are neglecting the person with them. When two photographers explore a location, each finds a freedom to be lost in their own work.”

Involving regional poets

As they organized photographs for their September 2022 exhibit and this book, Cathy sought to define an approach to introducing each section. Being acquainted with several area poets, they decided to invite poets to contribute poems to the project. Those initial poets suggested others who might be interested. Some shared previously published work, and others wrote new poems inspired by photographs presented here.

So, the project, which began as work resulting from two shared perspectives, evolved collaboratively into a presentation of multiple visual and poetic perspectives on these places.

“Sharing the photos in this book,” says Cathy, “is sharing the beauty we saw and captured. We hope the people looking at this book enjoy the images and the poems and get to explore beautiful places of their own.”

Catherine Lange and Michael L. Ruth August 2022