Ice: a passage through time by Hal Gage

Ice : a passage through time

Photographs by

Hal Gage

Introduction by Bruce Farnsworth Afterword by Professor Glenn Albrecht

Hal Gage

Ice

: passage through time

Photographs by Hal Gage Introduction by Bruce Farnsworth Afterword by Professor Glenn Albrecht

Ampersand Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewer who may quote brief passages in a published review.

ISBN 978-0-557-00920-6

Design by Hal Gage, Gage Photo Graphic, Anchorage, Alaska Printed and Bound in U.S.A. Cover photograph: “Supporting Column, Ice Cave, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska” Title page photograph: “Three Pebbles, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska”

For my grand nephew and grand niece, Nicholas and Hannah Gage and for their children to come.

vii

Introduction

Bruce Farnsworth

Art is hard. Hard to make, hard to approach, hard to interpret. So probably none of those things should be left to amateurs. I approach the material in this collection of Hal Gage’s photographs untrained and uncredentialled, an amateur if ever there was one. I knew, though, when I first encountered examples of this body of work in 2004 hanging on the walls of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, that I was looking at art. That’s something I don’t say very often about photographs. What was different about these photos? Power. The best thing about an absence of training in art history and criticism is that it provides one the freedom to oversimplify. For example, this definition of art: Any image or object claiming to be art (as opposed to just artifact) has to have power. Power to move a viewer, power to stir, power to shock, power to repel, power to cause awe, power to sadden, gladden, frighten. It’s the same for a poem, symphony, dance, or photograph. Photographers have it hardest. They have to start with something everyone can see, a subject that exists in the physical world (practitioners of digital gimmickry excepted). Then they have to make us see it their way. Hal Gage, with this ice work, made his own job even harder by picking a subject that virtually surrounds his main audience most of the time. Ice is everywhere here in Alaska. Even in the summer we encounter it regularly. It is clear that the difficulty of this challenge is in part responsible for the power of its results. Like a chef reduces a sauce down to its essence, where the true value of its flavors coagulate, Gage has had to search out everything that isn’t of the core nature in our concept and experience of ice and recuse it. This is a process familiar to me as a poet and might account, in part, for why these images resonated right away and continue to disclose their attributes long after I first saw them. They have both the sharpness/hardness of something distilled down (like whiskey) and the evidence of a mood. There is another way this work is like poetry: it exposes the wonder of everydayness. Something simple, ubiquitous, one of nature’s plainest effluvia, becomes grand. Gage has managed to stay honest while glorifying his subject—no mean trick. Art crashes and sinks against these dangerous shoals more than almost any others. Plying the shores of drama just this side of melodrama takes a firm hand on the tiller. This is where an expert should probably take over, someone to explain the elements of shading and composition and all those technical skills that allow the artist to pull off this feat. But here’s what strikes one poet’s eye: Hal Gage’s Spartan scheme, played out along the monochromatic scale, creates an enveloping mood around and within the images. The severity of the winnowing process discloses what is both grand and melancholy about ice. Reminds us that something in our daily lives as ordinary as this substance deserves a second chance, a closer look. But looking again is just the beginning. Then comes the revelatory moment as you stare at the pictures and sense that there is life in them. It might be something about the paradoxical nature of ice as solid

and monumental and simultaneously impermanent. Recognizing lifelike characteristics—the existence of a process of coming in and out of being, the stark contrast of authority and vulnerability—connects us to the rest of nature. Gaiaists, Animists, and other spiritualists might take it much further but I’m good with that. I imagine that when the camera was invented around the middle of the 19th century it was embraced for its ability to capture the objective truth of the world as our eye tends to record its surfaces. Hal Gage has turned the exploration of surfaces into a life’s work. The surface of the paper the images are printed on, the surface of the ice itself, and the surface of the earth, smoothed or cragged by its frozen crust. The images in this book show the camera also has the ability, when in the right hands, to illuminate a subjective truth just below the surface. They cause you to look at them and then to look in them. There is one other relevant matter for the viewer of these pictures to contemplate. Between first seeing images from Gage’s ice series years ago and looking at them again now in these pages, something has changed. A new dimension has opened up on his subject. At that time three quarters of all the fresh water on the planet was locked up in ice. A great unlocking appears underway. This collection, without any conscious intention on the part of the artist who created it, may have morphed from paean to elegy.

Preface

Hal Gage

My Life in Alaska has been intimately affected by ice and snow, the cold, and winter in general. Because of that familiarity I may have ignored the very thing that has so powerfully shaped my life. As a person living in the north I have voiced my share of expletives at the extended winters. Long before there was a name for it, I experienced all the symptoms of SADs (Seasonal Affected Disorder). I always chalked it up to a curmudgeonly disdain for the holiday season (since it falls near the longest night of the year—and in the north that’s one long night). I also thought that it might just be a bad case of cabin fever, especially once I started photographing nature as my art form. Alaskans (as I suppose most people of the northern latitudes) live for the summers. The long days of the midnight sun feel like a time to soak up the light as if we are trying to store those golden rays in anticipation of the long winter nights. But winter has always been a time to hunker down and endure. As a species, if we could hibernate, I am sure that many would opt for a slumbering catatonia instead of having to slog through another winter. That described me, at least until I made the conscious decision to embrace winter and explore just what it was that I had been avoiding half (actually with seven month long winters, nearly three quarters) of my life. Extreme cold (defined in my estimation as anything below -20 degrees Fahrenheit) leaves the familiar world around us almost completely unfamiliar. The alien landscape—if it weren’t for its obligatory mountains, sky, clouds, winnowed brush and trees—would pass for some extraterrestrial fantasy. This novelty can be a challenge for the artist. Being seduced by the novel encourages only a surface look at things. As we all know, it takes time to understand and appreciate a person or a place. I think this even extends to a thing; an object, the inanimate. Living with and photographing ice as my subject for nearly two decades has given me an appreciation for it much like an acquaintance, even a friend. As an artist, I allow myself to indulge in the notion of hylozoism (the belief that all matter has life) when dealing with my subjects, whether they be a place or a thing. You can call it a “spirit” or “essence,” but whatever name you apply to the feeling, I experience it as if it were a communion with another sentient being. In hindsight, after years of accumulating images of ice, it is completely coincidental that my personal exploration coincided with the publics revelation of humankind’s impact as a species on the planet. What scientists are now calling the Anthropocene (the age of human kind as a force over nature) has snuck up on us while we toiled away in a miasma of selfish exploitation of this fragile planet’s resources. It wasn’t my original intent to use ice as a metaphor for our reckless abandon and alteration of the climate. But, ice is the perfect barometer for changes in the delicate balance built up over eons. The north and its reservoir of ice is the canary in the coal mine. As it disappears so does the environment in which we know and thrive. In my work I have not made any effort to document or chronicle the changes in ice nor its disappearance. My goal was to bring to others what I have discovered about ice as a entity. I offer to the viewer an emotional, even spiritual, portrait of ice. These images are my efforts to document the face and personality of something, that if lost through our own carelessness, may in some small way be immortalized in this body of work.

Acknowledgments

I would like to extend my gratitude to the two very fine writers that agreed to collaborate with me on this book with such wonderful prose. Their contributions broadened the concept and message of my work. Thank you Bruce and Glenn. I would also like to thank my colleague and mentor, Barry McWayne for his friendship, support and guidance through the making of this body of work and this book, and Dennis Witmer for his contribution of the back cover text. I would also like to acknowledge the help and support of the Rasmuson Foundation, the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts a Federal Agency for their monitory support and belief in my work. Thanks to all who have collected my work over the years and the showing of their support.

xiii

Fresh Water

Frozen Over Pond Opening, Turnagain Arm, Alaska

Ice Roses, Turnagain Arm, Alaska

Ice Thorns on River Ice, Portage River, Alaska

Layered Frozen Bubble Patterns, Chattanika River, Alaska

Ice Bubble Patterns, Potterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Marsh, Alaska

Ice Patterns, Otis Lake, Alaska

Ice Falls, Turnagain Arm, Alaska

Waterfall Icicles, McHugh Creek, Alaska

Overflow Ice and Scrubs, Portage River, Alaska

Spring Ice Melt, Foothills of the Alaska Range, Broad Pass, Alaska

Fragmented Break-up Ice, Chattanika Dredge Pond

Salt Water

Stranded Ice Floe, Kenai Mountain Range, Turnagain Arm, Alaska

Ice-Coated Tidal Rocks, Bird Point, Alaska

Ice Cliffs and Pancake Ice Floes, Turnagain Arm, Alaska

Amorphous Silt Forms at Low Tide, Turnagain Arm, Alaska

Icy Shores, Turnagain Arm, Alaska

Fragmented Ice Sheets, Turnagain Arm, Alaska

Stranded Ice Floes, Turnagain Arm, Alaska

Egg Shell (Grease) Ice, Turnagain Arm, Alaska

Conglomerated Ice and Rising Steam, Turnagain Arm, Alaska

Perennial: Glaciers

Supporting Column, Ice Cave, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

Tumbling Seracs, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

Glacial Stream Silt Patterns, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

Ice Stream and Glacial Erratic, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

Hidden Lake and Glacial Silt Deposits, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

Glacial Melt Stream, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

Ice Patterns, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

Scalloped Ice Patterns, Ice Cave, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

Jumbled Ice Shapes, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

Layers, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

Dirt Cone, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

Puddles

Ice Spire Patterns, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska

Angular Ice Patterns, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska

Untitled, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska

Conglomerated Ice Patterns, Chattanika Dredge Pond, Alaska

Segmented Ice Formations, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska

Bulbous Shapes in Ice, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska

Anointed, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska

Broken Ice Patterns, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska

Shattered Ice Patterns, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska

Pebbles Trapped in Figured Ice Patterns, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska

Pebbles Frozen in Ice, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska

Afterword Glenn Albrecht

Associate Professor in Environmental Studies University of Newcastle, Australia

Solastalgia One of the most powerful relationships in life is the one we have to our home environment. Our sense of place is the outcome of the intersecting ecologies of home, head and heart. Our physical and mental health is tied to this vital relationship and when it is threatened, we can become anxious and distressed; when it is broken, we can become dis-eased. Cultures all over the world have concepts in their language that relate psychological states to states of the environment. The Hopi have the word ko yaa nis qatsi to describe conditions where life is in turmoil, disintegrating and out of balance. The North Baffin Inuit of the Arctic have applied the word, uggianaqtuq, (pronounced OOG-gi-a-nak-took) to the climate and weather. The word’s cultural meaning is to describe a situation where a friend is “acting strangely” or in an unpredictable way.1 Nostalgia

We have one word in the English language that very closely connects human distress to the loss of the home environment. The idea of nostalgia was created in 1688 by the Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, to diagnose and describe a form of serious distress in solders whose military duties had taken them away from home soil. Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos—return to home or native land—and the New Latin suffix algia—pain or sickness from the Greek root algos) or literally, the sickness caused by the intense desire to return home, was considered to be a medically diagnosable disease right up to the middle of the C20. Found in the English language from 1757, nostalgia was initially defined as a serious psychosomatic disorder, manifest as melancholia or ‘homesickness’, that could lead to physical sickness or even death by wasting or suicide. The simple cure for nostalgia was to repatriate afflicted soldiers so that their home environment could restore their health and well-being. From Nostalgia to Solastalgia

Dispossession of home land and forced relocation are triggers for place-based distress in people, particularly Indigenous people, but distress directly related to the home environment also occurs in people who are not relocated or displaced. Although the people concerned are at home, they feel melancholia similar to that caused by nostalgia at the breakdown of a healthy relationship between their psychic identity and their home. When forces such as climate change and large-scale development impact on people who are powerless to stop

them, they lose the sense of solace or comfort that is usually derived from their relationship to place. I created the term solastalgia in 2003 to give expression to the pain or distress caused by the inability to derive solace or comfort from the present state of one’s home environment.2 Solastalgia builds on the connection to ‘home’ in nostalgia but in addition has two Latin roots, ‘solace’ (solari to console) and ‘desolation’ (desolare to devastate) and the same New Latin suffix, algia or pain, to complete its meaning. As with nostalgia, solastalgia makes a connection between states of the home environment and mental health as solace and desolation have meanings in both psychological and physical contexts. A person or a landscape can be desolated, likewise, a person or a landscape can give comfort or solace. The melancholia of solastalgia is similar to that of nostalgia, however, solastalgia is the existential or lived experience of the diminution of the value of the present and ongoing relationship to home. In brief, and in contrast to ‘old’ nostalgia, solastalgia is a form of melancholia and a type of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home. A Case Study in Solastalgia

My realization that solastalgia existed and was different to nostalgia occurred when I was confronted by an example of distressed people in the region where I live. The Hunter Valley of New South Wales in Australia is in the middle of a resources boom based on its abundant reserves of black coal. Some of the largest mining companies in the world, using the largest equipment available to transform the earth, are producing 100 million tonnes of coal per annum for export to the world’s markets and millions more for regional electricity generation. Humans in this bioregion have not always welcomed the ‘black gold’. A Dreaming Story3 of the Indigenous Awabakal people at the mouth of the Hunter River tells that coal was originally on the surface of the earth but that the ancestors covered and buried it. The Awabakal say that there was a time when a great darkness came over the land and blotted out the sun. The darkness originated from a fire burning from coal deep within the earth. The elders decided that, to bring back the light, the darkness had to be stopped escaping from the hole. All the people gathered rocks, trees and plants, covered the hole and put out the fire. They also covered coal with leaves and branches wherever they found it on the surface of the earth. Then, as thousands of generations of people walked over their country, the coal was rendered safe as it was compressed and buried below the ground. The abundance of plant fossils embedded in the coal and the local rocks must have been seen as evidence that the ancestors had effectively managed the threat and averted an environmental disaster. Perhaps the ancestors also had a glimpse of the link between burning coal, loss of health and climate change? Today, there are over 500 square kilometres of open pit or open cut mining in the Hunter Region. From the air, the ‘open cuts’ leave a disturbed terrain that looks like the distressing convolutions of a burn victim’s scar tissue. The sheer size of the industry is transforming the landscape to such an extent that people are expressing their feelings about being displaced by mining or having to live next door to these unwelcome

new neighbours. When asked for his reaction to the mined landscape, an Indigenous man expressed his disgust about the massive changes to his traditional lands. He explained that he drives hundreds of unnecessary miles to avoid directly witnessing the mined areas because it upset him so much to see the desecration and the desolation. He exclaimed that seeing the mined area “makes him wild”. Many of the early settler families escaped the brutality and pollution of the industrial revolution of Britain, only to find it reappearing generations later in the dust, noise and pollution of contemporary coal mines and power stations. An exasperated farmer told about his battle with a coal mine close to his property: “the industrial revolution has caught us again; we’ve got the same trouble. Where do we go? Patagonia or somewhere?” A female grazier fought the mine next door to her property for some time, but the relentless assault on her quality of life finally became too much for her. She described her state of being as “a real mess” and that her physical and mental health was seriously affected by the mining. Another woman exclaimed that when the mining is finished in the region nothing will be left but a “final void”. It was these types of reactions that first led me to consider the relationship between ecosystem distress and human distress expressed as solastalgia. In addition to the impacts of mining, from 2002 to the present day a severe drought has affected the Upper Hunter region. When asked about the impact of drought on their sense of well-being, farmers revealed that it is not only large scale landscape changes that upset them. In addition, smaller scale events, like the loss of a much loved farmhouse garden when the water is no longer available cause individuals to suffer from solastalgia. The loss of the house garden, a final source of solace in distressing circumstances, becomes the tipping point into profound distress.4 The irony could not be greater…here is a part of the world responsible for a massive contribution to greenhouse gas emissions experiencing one of the negative impacts of climate change. The drying of the climate and the increase in heat stress is superimposed on the landscape desolation wrought by the coal and power industries. Other environments, far removed from the Hunter Valley, are being transformed by global climate change, driven in part by the very coal mined from its fossil legacy. In the high Arctic, the warming is affecting the cryosphere or the world of ice and snow. For the Inuit and many other peoples of the Arctic, a fossil fuelfired darkness called global warming is invading their white home of ice and snow and turning what was once reliable into something alien, unpredictable and uggianaqtug. They have a lived experience of negative transformation of their home environment. Defeating Solastalgia

In Australia we are losing fresh water as the continent dries up and burns in the worst drought in living history while in the Arctic too much water is cascading out of the melting of the ice. All over the world, home environments are changing and moving as the warming continues. For people occupying the front line of such change, there is solastalgia for environments in a state of negative transition and nostalgia for environments

that have already gone, leaving their human residents feeling homeless and without a sense of place. Many people sense that something is wrong with our current relationship with our home, the earth. Desolation of a loved environment is an emotional experience, one that affects our psychic well-being. Sensitive people can hear the crying in the cryosphere as the ice and glaciers crack and melt. They can feel the burning of the biosphere as heat and smoke invade lungs and desiccate life. In the Australian drought and the Arctic meltdown there is potential for solidarity as we see a common cause in overcoming unwelcome change. The cure for solastalgia is to re-integrate locally and globally with our home environment, the whole earth, and work creatively to restore its health.

When the Weather is Uggianaqtuq: Inuit Observations of Environmental Change http://nsidc.org/data/arcss122.html, see also: http://www.nunatfor the Inuit perspective. 2 For more detail, see Glenn Albrecht (2005) Solastalgia: A New Concept in Human Health and Identity, in PAN (Philosophy, Activism, Nature) 2005 Issue 3, 41-55. 3 John Maynard (2004) Awabakal Word Finder and Dreaming Stories Companion, Keeaira Press, Southport Queensland. 4 Glenn Albrecht et al (2007) Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change, Australasian Psychiatry, Vol. 15, Supplement, 2007, 95-98. 1

siaq.com/archives/40528/news/nunavut/40528_06.htm

List of Photographs page

title

ii. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 63.

Three Pebbles, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska Frozen Over Pond Opening, Turnagain Arm, Alaska Ice Roses, Turnagain Arm, Alaska Ice Thorns on River Ice, Portage River, Alaska Layered Frozen Bubble Patterns, Chattanika River, Alaska Ice Bubble Patterns, Potterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Marsh, Alaska Ice Patterns, Otis Lake, Alaska Ice Falls, Turnagain Arm, Alaska Waterfall Icicles, McHugh Creek, Alaska Overflow Ice and Scrubs, Portage River, Alaska Spring Ice Melt, Foothills of the Alaska Range, Broad Pass, Alaska Fragmented Break-up Ice, Chattanika Dredge Pond Stranded Ice Floe, Kenai Mountain Range, Turnagain Arm, Alaska Ice-Coated Tidal Rocks, Bird Point, Alaska Ice Cliffs and Pancake Ice Floes, Turnagain Arm, Alaska Amorphous Silt Forms at Low Tide, Turnagain Arm, Alaska Icy Shores, Turnagain Arm, Alaska Fragmented Ice Sheets, Turnagain Arm, Alaska Stranded Ice Floes, Turnagain Arm, Alaska Egg Shell (Grease) Ice, Turnagain Arm, Alaska Conglomerated Ice and Rising Steam, Turnagain Arm, Alaska Supporting Column, Ice Cave, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska Tumbling Seracs, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska Glacial Stream Silt Patterns, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska Ice Stream and Glacial Erratic, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska Hidden Lake and Glacial Silt Deposits, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska Glacial Melt Stream, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska Ice Patterns, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska Scalloped Ice Patterns, Ice Cave, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska Jumbled Ice Shapes, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska Layers, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska Dirt Cone, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska Ice Spire Patterns, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska Angular Ice Patterns, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska Untitled, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska Conglomerated Ice Patterns, Chattanika Dredge Pond, Alaska Segmented Ice Formations, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska Bulbous Shapes in Ice, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska Anointed, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska Broken Ice Patterns, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska Shattered Ice Patterns, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska Pebbles Trapped in Figured Ice Patterns, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska Pebbles Frozen in Ice, Puddle Ice, Anchorage, Alaska Exposed Dirt Cone, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

catalogue no.

1400-11 1126-12 0621-11 1266-02 0170-10 1212-10 1039-03 1132-08 1328-08 1138-05 1347-05 0409-12 0935-06 1128-02 0096-04 0544-02 0620-05 1458-01 1138-01 1457-07 1455-10 1220-12 1181-03 1292-07 1183-10 1204-07 1183-12 1107-11 1302-11 1411-08 1181-10 1207-02 1404-11 1470-07 1470-04 1477-08 1403-07 1472-02 1471-06 1401-12 1403-09 1403-12 1401-09 1526-01

Colophon

Original negatives were made with a Hasselblad 501 cxi and 501 cw on Kodak TMax 100 120 film and scanned using a Nikon 8000 Super Cool Scan. Adjustments to the digital files were made in Adobe Photoshop CS3 where the split-toned effects were added. The text and photos were placed in book form using Adobe InDesign CS3. Type was set in Adobe Optima and Adobe Garamond Pro. The body of this book was printed Xerographically on Digital Color 80# uncoated stock. The cover was printed on Digital Color Silk - C2S 100# Ultra Gloss Cover Stock laminated one side and perfect bound by Lulu.com. All photographs were made between 1989 and 2007 in south central Alaska.

Exposed Dirt Cone, Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

summer in alaska is only a small part of the story, they

say. If you want to know Alaska, you need to be there in winter. Winter in Alaska is the time of ice, when the sun slips to the south and the darkness grows, and the earth freezes. But those who live here know that there are moments of great beauty in the cold of winter; that ice can glow like diamonds when lit by the sun. Photographer Hal Gage has lived in Alaska his whole life, the son of a jeweler, now showing his own collection of gems discovered in the ice. But unlike diamonds, which we are told are forever, ice is ephemeralâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;growing in the cold and darkness, then slumping and melting in the sun. In Ice: a passage through time Gage has found photographs of ice in many places close to his home; in the flats of Turnagain Arm, where fridgid winter bore tides sweep sheets of ice into muddy blocks; in the glaciers which offer their icy beauty even in the light of summerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s midnight sun; and in the spring puddles quietly hiding behind his home in Anchorage. For the last 15 years Gage has worked on this extensive project exploring ice on an emotional and spiritual level. An appropriate subject for his subarctic home both for its abundance and because of the alarming trends in global warming. To call these photographs beautiful is to understate their power. They are evidence of forces of nature forming, bending and destroying realities. Dennis Witmer Photographer/Publisher

Hal Gage is a visual artist living and working in Anchorage, Alaska where he was born and raised. Starting out in drawing as a child he later studied painting at university where he was introduced to photography. Gage spent his post-college years as a nightclub musiphoto by Zhanna Lukyanova cian playing drums and guitar. During these years he composed and recorded his own original songs and instrumentals. Later, tiring of the musicianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life he focused his interests on his career as a visual artist. Over the past 25 years Gage has focused his attention on the natural world. He has traveled to five continents around the world, but his main interests lay primarily in Alaska. Over this time he has garnered recognition and awards for his photographic projects and has exhibited extensively in Alaska, and also in the lower 48, Russia, England and Europe. In 2004 he was awarded the first Rasmuson Foundation Fellowship for distinguished achievement of a mid-career artist in fine art photography. Gage has mounted over 25 one person exhibitions. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Anchorage Museum; University of Alaska Museum of the North; Alaska State Museum; Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska; Alaska State Council on the Arts; Kenai Cultural Center Museum, Alaska; Intuit Corporation, Nevada; Russian Union of Art Photographers and numerous private collections. Today Gage continues to work in his home studio in Anchorage, Alaska photographing, printing and cataloging over 30 years of images.

ISBN 978-0-557-00920-6

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