Interview with Robert Glenn Ketchum: Conservation, Photographic Activism, and Visual Literacy

I thought it might be appropriate to post this interview on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen.


Robert Glenn Ketchum’s formal background in photography includes study as an undergraduate at UCLA with two of the most respected non-traditional photographic image-makers on the West Coast Edmund Teske and Robert Heinecken. Ketchum was also one of the first photography M.F.A.’s to graduate from California Institute of the Arts, where he later taught for several semesters.

However, it is his interests in color and the natural world enhanced by letter exchanges and visits with Eliot Porter that have defined his career. Ketchum has always felt “compelled” as an American artist to use his imagery, exhibitions, lectures and issue-directed book published to address the political realities of habitat protection, natural resource management, and the preservation of wild lands, which he has done with extraordinary success.

Often supported by major foundations and individuals as diverse as actor, Robert Redford, and William E. Simon, former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Ketchum has used his art to effectively assist the passage of legislation and broaden public perception, while at the same time contributing a distinctive body of fine print work to contemporary color photography.

Since the early 1980’s, Ketchum has also been visiting China on a yearly basis as part of the UCLA-China Exchange Program, collaborating with the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute to translate his photographs into silk hand embroidered wall hangings, table pieces, and standing screens. This completely unique reinterpretation of his imagery in a textile form merges Eastern and Western concepts in art, and the modern process of photography with the 2,500 year old Chinese tradition of silk embroidery. (From his blog)

Can you please first tell a bit about yourself? How did you become interested in (1) photography (2) (what can be only called) environmental activism and (3) China and did those three strands meet independently or together? Which first?

I suppose it started off in a very academic high school being exposed to some important environmental literature – Aldo Leopold wrote “Sand County Almanac” and Rachael Carson wrote “Silent Spring.” Those were really important books to me. When Carson wrote, “if we put chemicals and poisons into the environment, eventually it would poison that environment,” I believed her. At some intuitive level, I knew she was right. In the case of Leopold, he used the word “environment” – it was the first time I saw it in print. He basically said that human beings had a moral responsibility to take care of the environment, and if they didn’t, the environment would ultimately collapse and the humans would go with them. So the “moral responsibility” stuck with me.

And then I got into college and I got into photography. I started with rock and roll bands, but increasingly I saw myself taking my camera out on hikes and backpacks because some friends did that kind of stuff. Right after college, I moved to a fairly rural area – central Idaho – for the reasons of job opportunities and the fact that I knew some local kids. That took me into a very different, wild environment. I found myself taking more pictures of wild places as subject matter. Within 10 years, I had achieved some success and was getting published, but I began to feel that my pictures of the land were just victimizing the very environment I wanted to protect. My work was resource consumptive and was not giving back anything to the environment it was exploiting through sales for my benefit. So I wanted to find some moral way of resolving that problem.

One of the things to keep myself gainfully employed while struggling as an artist to become discovered was doing curatorial work in photography. I could do it pretty well, so I did a bunch of stuff: I was lucky and organized several group exhibitions, as well as discovering some significant vintage private collections. One of those exhibits in the late 70’s was a book and national traveling exhibition about the relationship between photography and the American public’s consciousness with regard TO the environment. Specifically, it detailed a clear history linking photographer’s and the influence of their work on the legislative advancement of the national park concept, the most obvious example of that being the first images of Yellowstone by William Henry Jackson that have been credited with helping pass the National Park Act. As I developed this project, I began to see that throughout history – many times – photographers and their photographs influenced legislative decisions. So, after seeing that history, I became empowered by it: I began to see ways of using my work in a similar fashion. Now, while I still do take pictures of the landscape in a very traditional sense, I have learned combine them with words and media use to drive advocacy issues, in my case, specifically about conservation.

So, that takes care of your first 2 questions. The third one – about China – came more for me as an artist than a conservationist. When I studied photography, I studied with nontraditional teachers and I retained my interest in non-traditional photography, even though I was also doing the more traditional work on behalf of conservation.

So I went to Mexico and did some loom-weaving and Europe and did some rug-making with electronic weavers. And then I found myself in Japan in the mid-80s when the first digital scanner came out. But none of those things could produce the richness of a photograph. The looms were too simple and rectilinear. Electronic rug making was much too coarse. And the scanner just printed on cloth. That wasn’t what I wanted at all – I wanted different textures on different surfaces. But while I was in Japan – I was looking at some embroidered ceremonial robes in a shop and one of the embroideries was clearly from a photograph. It was a crane and I knew it wasn’t rendered from a drawing – it had to be from a photograph.

So I began some research and found out about the various regions in China where embroidery was done. Through an article in the LA Times, I discovered the Suzhou National Embroidery Research Institute (SERI) – which had been created during the Mao era. And in a weird way – and I think you’ll appreciate this as a ‘real world politics’ thing – back in the day during the humble administrators and where the embroidery guilds fought with each other to have clients, it was kind of like arch-rivalry. It was a beautiful peasant craft back in the day: you didn’t’ have to go to college; it was all craft-based. And when Mao came into power and purged the intellectuals, he saw the embroidery as a peasant craft, a working class craft, not as an intellectual craft. So, instead of purging them, he elevated them: he called it the “National Research” and provided government money and housing. And so a lot of the embroiderers were rather well off.

And, when I arrived in 1984, that’s what I found. There was certainly a lot of controversy about working with me [at the Institute] because I was the first non-Chinese to ever ask for such an opportunity. Fortunately, I came through one of the only 3 China-exchange programs that had been created thus far in the U.S.: Harvard had one, Columbia had one and UCLA had one. I came from the UCLA.

You’re probably too young – I mean I don’t mean to insult you – but it’s hard to realize this: in 1983, most of the people in Suzhou were on bicycles.

No worries.

Very few people had cars. It took me three hours to get from Shanghai to Suzhou by train and driving by car was like a country adventure. I did it once and it took like 5.5 hours. You had to wander through the rice-fields and fish farms and there wasn’t a direct route. Everyone was living in the old world stone buildings with no running water. There was only one foreigner-friendly hotel and I was the only non-Chinese to ever come through the doors of the Institute and become a working partner.

Going back to the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute: I hear that you’ve been collaborating with them to translate your photographs into silk hand embroidered wall hangings, table pieces, and standing screens (from his website). This form of reinterpretation with a different medium intrigues me. Who came up with this idea? You’ve talked a little bit about the Mao era and this type of embroidery. Who are the embroideries made for? And what is lost or gained in the process of reinterpretation?

Sure. I’m not sure whom they were made for. When I first got there, there were a lot of embroideries that involved landscapes with Chinese characters sewn over them. I never see these kinds of embroideries anymore. I suspect the characters were political slogans with classical Chinese landscapes behind them. I’m sure they were Mao-isms, and that they were used as part of the sublimation of the arts at the time to put out some of his statements and put them out as great art.

I saw that SERI had already played with the idea [of embroidering from photographs] which is why I sought them out. The way they originally managed rendering from photographs was to use a stitch they invented in Suzhou like drawing with a pencil: they shaded in with needle and thread. They followed the photograph, but close up, it still was a lot of random stitches – it only looked like the photograph from a distance. In considering working with me, many of the embroiderers worried that they would never get the dimensionality of a photograph in embroidery. Traditionally, SERI’s style was to stitch everything in the image. To the Chinese, as I was told, what you’re buying is the embroidery, so filling both sides of the embroidery with stitches is the point. But for me, coming out of a Western art school background where negative space is always used, I said “look, why don’t you use some of the double sided transparency as part of a design?” So, in one of the pieces, we didn’t fill the water in, which was unprecedented at the time we did it. But because of what we did, we were able to see through the piece. It also makes it more textural, and more dimensional because things stand off of the surface. Also, it makes it a bit more like film because when it’s lit correctly, it looks like a back-lit transparency.

In the end, I said, “if you just copy everything down to the last detail, you will really see the photo illusion.” So, there was an argument about whether or not that would happen, and then they agreed to do a piece. And it did work.

So, then we went from there. I wanted to try a lot more things.

Can you talk a bit about the “Grand Canal” project that was a part of the Aperture book called China: 50 Years. Why shoot the canal? How did this project come about?

In the beginning, being excited about being in the country and being a photographer, I was really eager to travel: I would work at the institute and then travel periodically for a month or two. I went everywhere, just so I could get more of a feeling of the country. I took pictures everywhere, but I spent a lot of time in Suzhou, where I would just wander through the streets with a bicycle. Suzhou wasn’t big enough that you could actually get lost, so I would just take off for whole days. It was impossible to not photograph the Grand Canal or the side canals, because the whole city was one of the greatest canal cities IN all of China. And it was going to be all changed, as you all know; it’s been completely transformed. So, I wanted to take as many pictures of this version before it was gone.

Now, the Grand Canal has been all cleaned up; the pictures that I took aren’t like what it’s like now. They said that it was too smog-producing and looked too decrepit. Now, it’s completely different and it’s now used for dragon boats for couples who are on honeymoon bliss and all that.

Was it a personal project at first or were you commissioned to shoot it?

Yeah, it was just me taking pictures at first. Then Aperture saw them and they were going to do that book and thought that it fit in very nicely.

China is and has been growing at an unprecedented pace. I’ve heard that certain up-and-coming cities have a slogan that characterizes their development as “development without tears,” referring to their lack of preservation and willingness to tear down old things. As a natural landscape photographer, what made you attracted to (and not repelled by) this country?

Oh, I’m not repelled at all with this country. I love the Chinese sense of self and style and I love Chinese food. And I love ancient China, but I could see what was going to occur. I believe that, as an artist, a lot of what you do relates back to the way you see the land. As a landscape photographer, and someone who appreciated Chinese art, it was interesting for me to go to the country and see the place where many of the first landscapes as art were created. At one point, during college at UCLA actually, we were studying drawings from a Chinese painter who had painted at Mt. Wangshan. Of course, the mountain has stairs all over it. But in art history (this is in 1968), I was told by my professor that the paintings were fanciful landscapes dreamed up by these artists to glorify the countryside and make their patrons happy. Of course, when I got to China, I found that that wasn’t the case at all; the paintings were drawn from real life.

They were real. That’s interesting.

Right! And what a European-centric view of the world that was, to completely misunderstand representational drawing. So, those discoveries were really exciting for me. So, it occurred to me that if China came forward into the new world economy and that the shackles of the Mao era were gone, a country that was so large and that had so many resources and so much intelligence was going to be a huge force in the world. I knew that there was no way that this country was all going to live in waterless, heatless stone buildings. I knew this would all change. Bicycles would give way to cars and all that inevitable stuff. I guess I wanted to photograph as much as possible before it disappeared. Looking back on it – now I’m not a journalist – and looking at what I saw, I realize that I missed a lot of stuff. I didn’t realize how big the change would be. I didn’t take enough pictures.

Right, so as a photographer, how do you decide what to shoot? Is there a lot of pre-photography research that goes into researching what is going on, or is it more organic (walking around, talking to people, etc.)?

It’s much more organic: I walk around, take pictures and base it more on instinct. I would see huge changes everything time I came back. And with each return, I thought “Oh, my God, I need to take pictures of this before it’s gone.” So, I think if I had more of a journalist instinct, I’d have done even more. But as it was, just because I was there, the pictures have some value.

As China changes and grows, what is the photographers’ role in the midst of all of it? Do you think the photographer’s role, in the context of China, is primarily journalistic?

Again, because I’m not a journalist, and because I’m not trying to record the story and am just trying to take pictures, it’s very clear now that I don’t have that intent. Standing outside of the cities and seeing them change, I’ve kept up with that [taking pictures]. So, I’m just continuing to do that. Every time I go back to Shanghai, I go to the tall buildings and photograph in all four directions. In my first photographs of Shanghai, the Peace Hotel was the only place you could stay, everyone on the Bund was wearing blue and grey, and Pudong was a rice patty. There was no bridge across the river to it. Now, the largest buildings in the world can be found there. If anything, China’s more alive and full of color then any country in the world right now; the idea that they were all dressed in drab greys and blues is quite funny. But just by being there, and you look at the span of time that my pictures were taken, you can really see Shanghai moving from ancient to modern.

In terms of your environmentally-oriented work, would you characterize your work as having a message that’s more open to interpretation or one that has a message that’s rather sharp? How do you reconcile the line between passive observer and activist?

Within North America, my message is pretty sharp. My projects are connected specifically to legislative acts, or attempts to pass conservation law or protecting wildlands – things like that. Most of my work is quite specifically pointed. I don’t do political work outside of the United States because, until recently, I thought that I would not have as much influence outside of the U.S. But in the last decade, that’s changed: photographers are out in the international arena making a big difference. They’re leading the way with good conservation photography. They’re funded by groups like National Geography and people who can really help with their money to make a difference.

But back when I started doing this, where I felt I would get most effect was inside my own country where I knew the political system. Within that, I’m very political. Outside of it [the country], I’m more of an observer. Yes, I’ve gone and seen Three Rivers Gorge and have seen the cities transformed, but my mission isn’t much to comment about it as it is to observe it occurring.

You mentioned a lot about how photographers are out shooting and making a difference, even legislatively, and that this is a fairly new thing. Can you talk more about this?

Well, I think the growth of the idea that photographers could be advocates for the environment started in this country [the United States]. It started off in the late 70s. If you looked at some of the acknowledgements that I’ve had, you’d be inclined to think that I was a part of this group. I think it was really 10 photographers my age: we had all been out there working on issues of our concern regarding the planet. And now things have changed. For instance, National Geographic used to be a fairly neutral magazine that never took a controversial point of view. But once the environment started to significantly deteriorate and the scientists started to say that this was happening, National Geographic started to have a lot more political intent. 12 or 15 years ago, this just wasn’t the case. Even young photographers from other countries are coming into the fold everyday and saying “hey, I don’t just want to take calendar pictures; I want to take pictures that make a difference.” They’re joining with groups like the International League of Conservation Photographers and working with Conservation International and their pictures are becoming more and more valuable to the media in promoting and furthering conservation research around the world. And again, it’s not just American photographers. And this has been happening almost exponentially. It probably drives the politicians crazy; I know that it at least drove the Bush administration crazy.

I see the troupe “old and new” in a lot of the work of photographers who photographed China in the 80s and 90s and even today. Do you anticipate or see any trends or memes in photographers working in China today? Or in the future?

The Chinese are brilliant. It’s mostly that they’ve been sort of contained for a while and it’s just recently that they’re really exploring their brilliance. They’re coming online with successful new ventures. Within that, young Chinese artists – especially the ones embracing the avant-garde, and the conceptual, and modern photography - have shot right to the top of the art world. So, they’re really getting the top accolades. They’re already ascending stars.

I think, quite frankly, the depth of culture in China gives a tremendous platform of things for a Chinese artist to work with and borrow from and mock and aggrandize: 5000 years of cultural history and lots of art connected to it opens the door for a lot of cross-bred ideas. There’s no reason that the Chinese as contemporary artists should not be at the forefront of everything.

Within the world of photography, that’s just a small part. The greater world of photography is expanding in different ways now. I think I see a kind of populism in China that is increasingly becoming somewhat democratic: when it’s treated badly, it protests to the government. Admittedly, the government still has some harsh responses to that, but at the same time, corporations who had dye factories who poisoned streams have been punished; CEOs are being put in jails and companies are closing down. So, it’s clear to me that China is very aware that coming into the 21st century and having a population as large as it has is going to have toxic by-products of epic proportions. It’s not stopping them from going there [toward development]. But its making them think about how to resolve those problems while they’re going there. So, yes, you do have terrible air and water pollution around industrial centers, but at the same time the government has realized that this isn’t sustainable: it can’t stay the way it is. And so they’re actually doing more to resolve that, then, say, the Bush administration that just pretended like it wasn’t happening. So, I think they’re taking those problems seriously and working to fix those problems because you realize that there’s a cost to them.

Right. There really is an advantage sometimes to an authoritarian regime, because if something is on the agenda, then things get done really, really fast.

Yes! Absolutely, right. And at the public level, because of the visual literacy of a lot of new technology like cell phones and cameras, the public is really beginning to respond to the government in ways that weren’t possible before. They’re also able to get the news outside of the country and make embarrassing circumstances for the government in ways that weren’t possible before too.

In terms of visual literacy, with much of the population still in rural, underdeveloped areas, what portion of the population is actually visually literate?

If we’re talking about intellectual literacy, perhaps not [much]. But even in some very rural places: suddenly, people have a cell phone or television set. Now, with that cell-phone – and when I’m talking about visual literacy – a rice farmer without a great education whose rice paddy is being poisoned by a factory upstream can take his cell phone, take pictures, show somebody at a university who is more connected, and all of a sudden, they start a small revolution. And finally, the factory is closed. There’s a kind of weird, new visual literacy in which the ability to make a record in a way that “uneducated people” couldn’t before is suddenly a whole new weapon. And they really get it. When the Earthquake happened, look at all the internet information that leaked out from cell phone pictures and Skype telephone networks. There was no keeping the cap on anything. With all of this new technology, for whatever it’s worth, the authoritarian government, to some degree, has to let the cat out of the bag. I don’t think they’ll ever be able to totally control it the way they did before. Also, a lot of this has to do with the fact that Chinese are internet players of the first class.

In terms of the internet or visual literacy, Rebecca MacKinnon, who is a Professor at the University of Hong Kong and who writes a fantastic blog about China and the internet, makes the argument that the internet often doesn’t democratize China because, while the amazing amount of chat rooms, posts, and pictures are stirring up a bunch of energy, the internet is often merely a safety valve that the government uses as a receptacle to contain complaints without any institutional change. What would agree or disagree with that?

Well, I would agree in that context. However, while it’s doing that, somewhere within that, an advocate is born. You never change the entire public, but you can change, say two out of 200,000 and they’ll become cultural leaders. It’s a fishing game. I’d say that generally, she’s right: it’s useful for the government to allow people to vent without taking to the streets. At the same time, more information is in more hands, and it may appease 98%, but for 2%, there will be no appeasement. You breed appeasement, but you also breed long term heroes.




What do you guys think? As news organizations like the New York Times are posting articles about China's visual history, (specifically, today's) how important is visual literacy and how does this affect the life of the average Chinese?