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It's the Kingdom of Grass.
The Great Plains of North America is a vast expanse, stretching more than 1,800 miles from Canada to Mexico. Its rolling prairies, buttes and sand hills cover more than 1 million square miles of open country. If it were its own nation, it would be the 10th largest in the world.
Photographer Michael Forsberg has spent the past decade documenting the region. The 43-year-old Lincoln native recently published his photos in a book called “Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild.” Many of the photos are now part of a major new exhibit at the Joslyn Art Museum, where Forsberg will present a lecture Thursday.
We asked him about his project and about his ideas for preserving this disappearing wilderness.
Q. Why did you go on this amazing journey to photograph the Great Plains?
A. Two reasons. First, I wanted to put a face on the wildlife that we have here in the Great Plains. There's a misconception that there's nothing here. Many people think the Plains are just empty and flat. They believe it's just a place to fly over and drive past. But I grew up in Nebraska and have deep roots here, and I know that's not the case. I wanted to show people the extraordinary diversity of wildlife and the beauty of the land. The second reason is that I wanted to see for myself what sort of shape the ecosystem is in today.
Q. How long did it take you to compile your photos, and do you have any idea how many miles you trekked?
A. The first photo was of a burrowing owl in South Dakota, which I took in 2000. The wildness and beauty of that fierce little creature convinced me to launch this project. Once I got funding from the Nature Conservancy in 2005, I worked on the project full time for three years. During that time I covered more than 100,000 miles.
Q. What was the hardest shot to get?
A. The photo of pronghorn sheep migrating on a wintry Montana landscape was the most challenging. These animals migrate from Canada into Montana only when the winters are really severe. They don't migrate every year, and their movements are not predictable. Locating them was like finding a pod of dolphins in the middle of the ocean. It took me three years to get the shot, driving 500 miles into landscapes where the temperatures were often 20 below zero.
Q. There's an amazing photo in the exhibit of a grizzly bear that looks double exposed. How did you get that shot?
A. I set up a camera trap on a game trail. It was a remote camera that would snap a picture of anything that walked by it. The camera used a very long shutter, which is why it might have looked double exposed. A long shutter was necessary to capture the context of where the animal was walking. Photographing wildlife in the Great Plains is like capturing ghosts. These animals move quickly. Many of them live in holes in the ground. And predators like the grizzly move around a lot at night. Animals in the Great Plains are used to being hunted and know how to stay out of sight. I wanted to get up close and personal with these animals. And I wanted to take pictures that would create an emotional connection between the animals and the viewer. To do that, I had to use a lot of special equipment.
Q. What sort of equipment did you use?
A. Photography is a lot like carpentry. You need very specific tools to accomplish special tasks. So I had to learn to use a lot of new things. Most of the time I used my 35 mm Nikon camera. My widest lens was 18 mm, and I had a 500 mm telescopic lens. I also had to use some underwater equipment to photograph fish. And of course remote camera traps, which allowed me to get photos of the predators and many of the nesting birds.
Q. What was the most breathtaking vista that you saw?
A. There's a place in the Sand Hills region of Nebraska where you look out over the rolling grasslands. At sunset, looking at that blowing grass is like looking out over a vast ocean. That sight is pure heaven. The Needles, which are magnificent granite pillars, towers and spires in the Black Hills of South Dakota, are just as unforgettable.
Q. Do you have a favorite photograph?
A. They are all really my darlings, but a few of the photographs are really important to me. The photograph of a lone buffalo under a blue sky is a truly iconic image of the region. It's on the cover of my book and is a symbol of the changing ecosystem on the Great Plains. Before Europeans arrived 200 years ago there were more than 30 million of these animals in the region. By the end of the 19th century, they were almost wiped out. The burrowing owl is a favorite because it got the project started. And finally, there's a photo of a bobcat. It was the last photo that I shot, and it was taken just 15 minutes from my home in Lincoln. Taking that photo so close to home was a beautiful ending for the project.
Q. You mentioned the changing ecosystem and disappearing wildlife. How do we preserve the Great Plains?
A. The most important thing is to get people to know and care about the land. That's not something we can do from the top down. You can't create a government program to mandate it. Instead, you have to teach every new generation about the importance of taking care of the land. Kids like mine, who grow up in an urban environment, don't have the same instinctive understanding of the land since they're removed from it. They need to be reminded that if we don't take care of our air, our water and our topsoil, then we're finished. We can't survive. People who live on farms and ranches in the Great Plains understand that instinctively. I wrote my book to get the conservation message out to everybody else.
Contact the writer:
444-1076, john.pitcher@owh.com
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