Clyde Butcher's black and white photographs capture the light and life of the state's landscapes.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published May 15, 2003
[Courtesy of Clyde Butcher]
Clyde Butcher, Billies Bay, 1994.
Clyde Butcher, Ghost Orchid #1, 1999.
ST. PETERSBURG - American landscape artists have typically turned their eyes west or north to record the great canyons, mountains and forests of our national wilderness. Thomas Cole painted the Hudson River Valley, Albert Bierstadt the Rocky Mountains and Frederick Edwin Church Niagara Falls in the 19th century with a stirring monumentality.
Photographers, too, discovered these panoramas when, after the Civil War, they left the battlefields and joined the western migration. More recently, Ansel Adams' eloquent photographs of nature helped elevate the medium to art. Adams brought the remote beauty of wilderness areas to a wider public and photographed every national park except one: the Florida Everglades.
Florida was not unknown to artists. Painters had long enjoyed Florida's climate, and some, such as Winslow Homer, recreated scenes of its rivers and beaches. But it took a contemporary photographer who had gone bankrupt in California and brought his family to this state on a sailboat to really see the grandeur and mystery of the Florida landscape.
In the 1980s, Clyde Butcher waded into the marshes and swamps of Central and South Florida with his big box camera and found the subject of a lifetime. His black and white photographs of the Everglades, Big Cypress Preserve and the Florida Keys are timeless images and timely reminders of paradise easily lost, evoking the unique Marjorie Stoneman Douglas' River of Grass captured in words.
Almost two dozen of these photographic landscapes are on view at the St. Petersburg Museum of History, ranging from wide-angle sweeps to microcosmic closeups. All are gorgeous, but the best are those that, through long exposure times, play movement against stasis. Butcher's photographs of rivers capture life flowing within the stillness of forests. Those that take to the open, on beaches and plains, use clouds as reflective, changing counterpoints to the still waters beneath them.
Light is paramount to the drama of Butcher's work. So is the patience to wait for the right moment to open the shutter, for the second between darkness and daylight that puts the landscape in relief against the sky lit by a sunset, where cumulus clouds can look like ropes of DNA or, right before a storm, like menacing Hovercrafts.
People are never part of the world that Clyde Butcher records. Their absence makes the point that they are intruders, corruptors of habitats and ecosystems. Yet, it's people who must protect these lands so Butcher's work doesn't become, like so many paintings of the American West, nostalgic reminders of altered vistas from another time.
The tree falls in the forest, and with no one to hear it, does it make a sound? Artist and advocate Butcher is the one, waist-high in water, who finds the tree falling and records it so we all can bear witness to its beauty and meaning.
PREVIEW
"Seeing the Light: Black and White Photography by Clyde Butcher" is at the St. Petersburg Museum of History, 335 Second Ave. NE, through June 15. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5. (727) 894-1052.
