It is the looming and vaguely overwhelming fear of the unknown that has my heart banging in the quiet hours of the night lately. I’ve worked remote gigs in the frozen corners of Alaska, the rural back roads of dusty California and screamed across corporate sales floors above the streets of downtown Denver. I’ve been dealt my share of painful nerves in these varied roles and found that the first jolt of adrenaline never really gets any less stomach turning, and yet–and yet–I’m constantly in search of the next something. Something to be experienced, felt, tasted, loved, lived. A new mental state with sensation as the proxy.
Alaska, in all of its infinitely delicate and rough hewn forms, captured my curiosity and has kept my compass pointed north for some time now. Work at an isolated salmon hatchery brought me here, to a stretch of placid, protected coastline, in which people of the First Nations have fished salmon for over ten thousand years. Now, in this area, industrial-level salmon harvest–fishing for capital–and other degradative factors, exceeds an ecologically-balanced give-and-take. Enter the need for state-run hatcheries, as a last ditch means to patch the hole climate change and industrial fishing digs in the ecosystem, the effort to protect an economy and its people put before ecosystem restoration. But of course, the closer one gets to any economic-ecological web, the more complex the ethical and material questions become–thus the more vicious and tender are the debates.
The island is accessible only by chartered boat or rough riding float plane. Throughout the year, the seasons diverge into varieties of work: slicing fish bellies, scraping roe from abdominal cavities, cleaning incubators, skiffing across the frozen bay with the wind whipping at 60 kts and the usually placid waters leaping beneath the bow. It is tough work and some of the most enjoyable I have ever experienced. The only inhabitants of the island are us hatchery workers–living remote to raise salmon, to run away, to run towards wilder spaces, the unknown, to make a bit of cash. Whatever.
I choose the places that I work based on what I want to photograph. I’m fascinated with big industry at the moment–how the human cogs fit into the mesh of metal and mud, greenery and dust. At the hatchery, I chose to use my ultrawide angle nearly exclusively. The massive amount of negative space it captured lent itself to the barren, empty feel of the island. In blizzards we felt alone, lost in a world of muffled white and separated from society more completely than I’d ever experienced.
The photographs I’ve selected show the wintered-over harbor of Cordova, the last town passed before months living remote, and the quiet places of the island and its humming hatchery.
Just as I thought I was ready to return to real life–whatever “real” means; a dramatic alteration of one’s life patterns is a good reminder that any assumption of a normative standard is a false assumption–I instead signed a year long contract to work as a quasi marine biologist (read: human tally counter) on the commercial trawl vessels of the Bering Sea.
Gone for me are the days of simpler hatchery life, that slower island life. Down in the boat’s factory gut, I will be pulling silver salmon from two-hundred ton codends of pollock, plucking their scales, marking individual lives as scratched-off bycatch in a tight-quota. To trawl a net through the ocean in search of a certain species of profitable fish is to assume responsibility for an incredible amount of living waste. Photography, for obvious reasons, is largely prohibited on factory-trawlers. I will do my best, however, to see and communicate what I can of the Alaskan fishing industry. It is a powerfully delicate network of machine and ecosystem. There is beauty in even its ugliest and most tragic moments.
Text by Katherine Cart
All images © Katherine Cart
