Editor’s note: The following is an edited excerpt from the new book “Big River: Resilience and Renewal in the Columbia Basin,” by Eileen Delehanty Pearkes and David Moskowitz (June 2024, $39.95, Braided River/Mountaineers Books).
THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN the most ambitious and complicated of my photographic career.
My aim as a documentary photographer is to present the world to viewers as I encounter it. For this project, however, several elements moved away from simple documentation of the world as we humans typically see it walking around during the daylight hours. Camera traps offered me the opportunity to capture the secret lives of wildlife at night, while flash photography similarly let me document the world of gillnet fishermen plying their trade in the darkness on the mainstem of the river.
Flights, generously donated by LightHawk Conservation Flying and others, along with the use of a photography drone (DJI Mavic 2 Pro), allowed me the opportunity to share an aerial view of the watershed I believe is critical to appreciate the scale of the geography and the ways water shapes the landscape.
To get down to eye level with fish required underwater photography on a scale I previously had not endeavored to create. Finally, producing a series of portraits of individual people with vastly different relationships to the Big River required careful coordination and staging to create a cohesive series of images in contexts that were relevant to them and that showed the connections they all have to this one collective watershed.
I used a variety of mirrorless and DSLR Canon bodies and lenses for the majority of the images. I toned images in Adobe Lightroom. My love of strong contrast in landscape images means several involved layering multiple exposures of the same image to capture the full range of light. For some underwater images, I used denoising software as part of image processing to balance low light and turbid water.
In the end, I wanted a series of images that gave the viewer as wide a variety of unique perspectives as possible. I wanted to let the many voices of this watershed, from salmon in the river, to humans on the banks, to glaciers on the mountaintops, have the opportunity to share their perspective with you.
I worked very hard to listen to and watch the people, creatures and places and take my cues from them about what stories they wanted to share.
