Photographer Jim Brandenburg likes to tell the story of how he tried to get a great picture of a wolf for some 20 years without success, because wolves in proximity to civilization fear people as predators.
Brandenburg had photographed assignments around the world and had been named magazine photographer of the year twice, in 1981 and 1983, when he was lured to the Arctic by tales of wolves that would nudge their noses right into your tent.
”After 20 years of searching, it took 10 minutes to realize this was it,” Brandenburg says of his first encounter with arctic wolves while photographing a North Pole expedition for National Geographic magazine in 1986. ”I had found wolves with no fear of man.”
These wolves lived on a steppingstone to the North Pole, Ellesmere Island, where they had encountered only a few explorers. Ultimately, the wolves allowed Brandenburg to photograph pups in their den.
”The Photographs of Jim Brandenburg,” on exhibit through May 12 at the Field Museum of Natural History, present Brandenburg`s spectacular panoramas and closeups of wildlife. Much of the work in the exhibit was shot for National Geographic, but Brandenburg has photographed for other magazines, including Life, Smithsonian, Geo, Audubon and National Wildlife.
The exhibit includes a generous selection of photographs from his recent book, ”White Wolf: Living with an Arctic Legend” (Northward Press, $40). The traveling exhibition of 40 color prints was organized by the American Museum of Wildlife Art in Red Wing, Minn.
Brandenburg curtains some of his most dramatic images in fiery sunsets or the iridescent light of dusk. ”I`m so used to waiting to photograph until late in the day when the sun gets so luscious, everything glows and comes to life.”
A time exposure of a trumpeter swan, an endangered species, presents an almost phantom image created as Brandenburg panned his camera just after sunset.
”I wanted to show graphically that this bird may or may not be here in the future,” he says. With this combination of precision and poetry, Brandenburg conveys both the power and fragility of nature.
His photographs of arctic wolf pups, African elephants and zebras, owls, hawks and other creatures break through the barriers that so often seem to divide human beings from the rest of nature. Several pictures on exhibit of a lone white wolf, free to roam its ice-palace wilderness, offer a vision of the wild that suggests a perfect metaphor for human freedom and harmony with the environment.
Brandenburg, when he was interviewed by phone at the log home he built in the North Woods of Minnesota, was watching for a pack of timber wolves he has been photographing. He spoke of what kept him going-and keeps him going-in search of the elusive wolf, despite other huge successes.
”It defies logic. It`s almost like a spiritually guided thing,” he says. ”It was this incredible passion or something from the past-genetic memory from early man living with wolves, developing with wolves. The wolf was the first domesticated animal. The wolf was my Mt. Everest.”
Brandenburg mourned the fact that a picture he had just taken of a wolf leaping at a raven-one he counts among his best shots-will be unusable because the wolf wore green ear tags, attached by a researcher.
Brandenburg is a photojournalist who has worked on assignments in China, the Soviet Union and war zones, but always with an eye on nature and the land. He is an environmentalist who grew up on a Minnesota farm near Luverne, population 4,568, where the local heroes were hunters and star basketball players.
He is a former rock musician who as a teenager played backup guitar for Chuck Berry. Two years ago he helped form Concerts for the Environment to organize performances benefiting environmental causes.
At that time, he was recovering from injuries inflicted by a charging rhino. Though he has photographed rhinos in Africa, the injury occurred on a commercial assignment in a nature habitat of a zoo. ”I let my guard down. It was poetic justice,” he says.
He recently published the book ”Minnesota: Images of Home” and is currently working on a another book project and a television documentary.
But he says the Ellesmere Island work, to which he devoted several years, is the highlight of his career thus far.
Ellesmere Island is dark six months a year and bathed in a perpetual sunset glow the other six months.
But the price of this ethereal light, so prized by nature photographers, was a typical wind-chill temperature of 80 degrees below zero. Even a veteran photographer couldn`t always cope with such an unforgiving environment. Bradendburg notes in his book that ”one breath on the viewfinder enamels the glass with a 1/16th-inch coating of ice. This must be scraped off with your fingernail, which means removing your two sets of gloves, which means freezing your fingers.”
Undaunted, he and biologist L. David Mech won the acceptance of a wolf pack of seven adults and six pups when Brandenburg returned to Ellesmere to photograph the island`s wildlife on assignment for National Geographic. The wolf pack became a separate story that won him the magazine picture story of the year award from the National Press Photographers Association.
”We camped out at their doorstep. I`d go to the den and hang out. The sun never set, so I would go three days at a stretch without sleeping,” he says.
He accompanied the wolves on their hunts and photographed their attack on a herd of musk ox. He photographed the adults caring for the pups and the pups frolicking in play. He captured the solitary forays of the pack leader and the interaction in a strict dominance hierarchy. He and Mech named the wolves:
Buster was the regal pack leader and Mom the serene mother of the pups.
”Scientists attach numbers to animals. They don`t want to get emotionally involved. Sometimes we can be too clinical. We measure things to death,” Brandenburg says.
He says he believes people respond to his pictures emotionally, making photography a vehicle of consciousness-raising about nature and the environment. ”I believe we change through our hearts, not through our heads.”
Brandenburg returned to Ellesmere again in 1988 to make a National Geographic television documentary on the wolves that aired on PBS.
Brandenburg, 45, credits his development as a photographer to the freedom his parents gave him to pursue his own interests and roam the countryside. He says that throughout his boyhood and adolescence he enjoyed exploring nature and drawing.
”But you didn`t enjoy nature for nature`s sake when I grew up,” he says. ”You had to be trapping or hunting. I went into hunting. I learned the secret ways of animals and tried to outsmart them.”
He also started taking pictures of animals with a $2.50 Argus. ”I was having more fun shooting with a camera than a gun. I combined my art and my hunting, and that became my nature photography.”
Brandenburg went to college to study wildlife biology, decided he wasn`t cut out to be a scientist and then studied art at the University of Minnesota. ”To this day, I`ve never had a photography class,” he says.
After college, he became picture editor for the Worthington Daily Globe in Minnesota and began freelancing for National Geographic. In 1978, he joined National Geographic as a contract photographer. He still photographs for the magazine but works independently now, with his son Anthony and daughter Heidi assisting him.
What: ”The Photography of Jim Brandenburg”
Where: Field Museum of Natural History, Roosevelt Road at Lake Shore Drive;
922-9410
When: Through May 12; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily
How much: $3 for adults, $2 for children; free on Thursdays
