I found out Saturday that I was selected to be the Artist in Residence for Everglades National Park. “So what is an artist in residence?” everyone is asking me. To be honest, about all I know about it at this point is you are given a cabin in the park for a month and asked to find inspiration from your surroundings to practice your art. Painters, poets, writers, musicians and of course, photographers apply for the program. I’ve been told it’s pretty competitive to be chosen for this, but isn’t that the way art is? Volunteer to come work your butt off for a month in search of “inspiration”. (your only compensation)
But this is a fantastic opportunity, I’ve been saying I’m going back to photograph the Everglades every year for the past 6 years since I began freelancing, but it always seems something comes up and I wind up saying “next year”. But this will force me get me off the couch and do it.
The Everglades coastline is an amazing place that is literally ground zero for global warming. If sea levels rise a mere inches, the low lying mangrove swamps and small coastal islands will be completely redrawn on the maps, so I could be photographing places that will not be there in a few decades. If sea level rise is measured in feet, a very large portion of Everglades National Park will disappear into the Gulf of Mexico, making photographing this place “this year” even more important.
This opportunity to spend a month dedicating myself to nothing but photographing nature will be a first for me. I’ve set aside a day here and a week there on occasion but never an entire month. Which is the beauty of the Artist in residence program, total immersion.
My basic game plan at this point is to spend two of those weeks paddling the wilderness waterway, a 100 mile stretch of the Florida coast that is national park the entire way. You don’t see a road, building or any other sign of man the entire trip, and no cell signal for most of the way either. So “Wilderness” is a very accurate description for the Wilderness Waterway. Not many tourists ever venture out in the remote west coast of the Everglades so I hope my photographs will offer a glimpse of this wonderful place to those who don’t really relish the idea of being 40 miles from the nearest creature comforts of any kind. The rest of the month I will spend on shorter day trips photographing the more traveled places that the averages tourist sees in Everglades N.P. like Shark Valley and the Mahogany Trail and enjoy sleeping in a bed at night with a roof over my head.
Nazan is going to fly down for our anniversary on the 10th and we are planning to paddle out to Cape Sable, a 14 mile beach that is completely uninhabited. Camping on a beach of the Gulf of Mexico sounds like a good way to spend our 4th anniversary, especially considering we got married on the beach of Cayo Costa, an island that is a state park about 60 miles north of Everglades N.P..
All in all it sounds like a great way to spend a month.
