Turning a Trail into an Art Gallery
For nine months I photographed two trail builders as they built a new trail on the North Shore of Vancouver, Canada. I made big weatherproof prints of 20 of the photos that we then put along the trail so everyone could see how it was built as they were using it, and called it Evidence of Trail Fairies.
Before I began, I didn’t know how much work goes into building a trail. But I quickly learned. I watched trailbuilders Martin and Penny bushwhack through the forest to figure out where the trail should go, remove a top layer of organic dirt to reveal a sand-like dirt that resists erosion, fill in undulations in the terrain with walls of rock sourced from nearby forest, and build wooden bridges to span creeks running down the mountainside. They worked like this for nine months, often four to five days per week, and their longest day was 14 hours.
Not knowing much going in was a big part of the appeal to me. As they worked, I watched and listened closely not only to understand what they were doing, but how they felt while doing it. I noticed when they felt friendship and awed by nature. I noticed when they felt exhausted, like the project was never-ending, and when they felt lonely in the dark. I made a list of these emotions, and used them as themes to shoot towards as I worked. Having this list of themes helped me fight off the repetition of photographing the same two people perform the same five or six actions alone in the forest, over and over.
I didn’t start off with the idea of putting prints along the trail — or any idea of what I wanted to accomplish. One night when we were at the pub after a day of trail work, Martin and Penny started talking about putting markers along the trail to show how long it took them to build each section. Something clicked for me, and I remembered hearing about Zoe Straus’s I-95 project where she made an outdoor photo gallery under a highway overpass. I blurted out “and we could put a photo at each marker!” They eventually abandoned the idea of the distance markers, but the idea of the photos remained.
When the trail opened I was left with 21,262 photos to edit. In all, I had been out with Martin and Penny 33 times, plus two times on my own. I arbitrarily decided that I wanted to see one photo per minute of riding up the trail, plus photos at the beginning and end of each section of the trail. After timing myself a couple of times on my bike I settled on 20 photos.
I edited the photos in stages. From each day I was out, I posted anything that seemed halfway decent on Flickr to show the builders what I was up to, and to try to get a sense myself of where I was at. From those I culled out the obviously unusable photos and made 4x6 prints of the rest, which I spread out on my living room floor. Then I took out my list of themes and began selecting photos that represented as many of them as possible. I often had trouble choosing between several photos, so I left the group together on the floor and lived with them for a while. Slowly, as if by magic, it became clear which photos from the group I preferred, and I culled out the ones I liked less.
We had to decide how big to make the prints, so I made mockups: some test prints of various sizes and large white sheets of paper of various sizes. We brought them out to the forest to see how they looked, and picked a combination that felt right: 40x32 inches overall with the photo being 30x20 inches. Then I made a print using the real materials and Martin and Penny figured out how to affix them to the trees with ropes (nailing into the trees would damage them).
With the real materials, I was surprised to see that the print lacked contrast and deep blacks. The printing company wasn’t used to doing photo-quality work, and it took some back-and-forth to get the colours right. I ended up making a set of reference prints, carefully brightened to be visible in dim light, to help the printer get everything looking good.
With the prints up on public land for three months I was worried about vandalism. I purposefully kept the prints free of any chains or locks that might tempt someone to break them. There were no logos or organization names anywhere to tempt protest. The prints were large and fairly deep in the forest, making them hard to carry away (trust me!). I kept them clean and straight every week so they would look cared for. I wrote text for the trail intersections in a personal style that explained the project and made it clear it was temporary. When the project touched on difficult topics, such as the secrecy needed before the trail opened, I chose my words very carefully. I wrote an article I knew would be seen locally that explained the project further (and another article when we took the project down). I have no idea if any of these precautions were actually effective or not but I’m very happy that in the end the only damage to the prints was from falling branches.
When we put the project up, I was scared that it would be ridiculed — or even worse that no one would care. Instead I received an outpouring of love and support both in person and online that I could never have hoped for. It was all because of the wonderful people who saw the project in person, in the media, or on the Internet: a broad group of people who brought with them a broad set of perspectives. In the next part of this series I’ll talk about how creating for this kind of mainstream audience doesn’t mean dumbing down your work.
This is part of a four part series. In the following parts, I’ll talk about how I recognized the tricks my brain was playing on me that were preventing me from finishing the project, and how math helped me overcome feeling like a failure despite having the outward appearance of success.
