Capturing the ‘modern prairie’ with landscape photographer Alex Burke
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GREELEY, Colo. — As workers raced home from the oil fields, Alex Burke drove east. He chased the setting sun in a GMC Explorer that lost its sheen a long time ago. When he reached the first dirt road, Burke pulled over to study the clouds in his rearview mirror.
“If the sun pokes through, it could be a nice bit of color,” he said.
Many people know Greeley for its scent rather than its scenery, but for the past 17 years, Burke has scoured this prairie in search of landscape photographs.
Here in the grasslands, road signs, pumpjacks and turbines provide the only interruption to an otherwise endless horizon. In winter, the colors can be as bleak as the weather, except for a few minutes at sunrise and sunset.
“I love the solitude of the prairie. It's not a travel destination. You're not going to find wanderlust articles about it,” said Burke. “It's forgotten by a lot of people.”
While early American landscape photographers like William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins often portrayed the West as pristine, empty and untouched Burke often points his camera towards grain silos, homesteads and fracking equipment, inviting people to find beauty at the crossroads of nature and civilization.
Video: Cormac McCrimmon, Rocky Mountain PBS
“When people like Alex take really stunning photographs of this place. It allows people to understand that maybe there's something there I'm not seeing,” said Andrew Liccardo, a photography professor at University of Northern Colorado.
In recent years, Greeley’s record-setting growth has posed something of a dilemma for Burke: development threatens the very places he’s chosen to photograph, but he sees the region’s growth as an opportunity to share the beauty of the grasslands with more people, helping them foster a deeper appreciation for Colorado’s less famous landscapes.
“It's a really fast changing landscape. I've watched homesteads fall apart or be torn down. There is that urge to get out and document things before they disappear,” he said.
Burke initially photographed the prairie because it was close. He was working as a car mechanic in Greeley and could drive to the Pawnee National Grasslands before or after work.
“I realized that no matter where I stood, I always saw some oil equipment. So I said, ‘well, that's my thing.’ That was one of my earlier projects that got me into these simple, centered compositions,” said Burke.
Burke grew up in Estes Park, Colorado — a bucket list destination for many landscape photographers — but as a teenager, he was more interested in video games than spending time outside.
He first picked up a camera after moving to Phoenix for automotive school.
“My dad had this little digital camera that he didn’t really use anymore,” he said. “There were a lot of evenings I would just go out into the desert just to get away from the city. It just got me, wandering around the desert taking photos.
Eventually, Burke graduated from his dad’s camera, but he didn’t have the money for a newer digital camera, so he bought a 35 millimeter film camera.
“People were almost throwing them away,” said Burke.
Even as digital technology has advanced, however, Burke continues to photograph entirely on large-format film, primarily four-by-five inch sheets. He credits a photography guide by John Fielder with first sparking his interest in large-format photography. On Jan. 24, History Colorado will open a new exhibit dedicated to Fielder’s own work in the Great Plains.
Burke fell in love with the workflow, as well as the clarity, colors and the unique look he’s able to achieve using a view camera. Even as material and development costs have risen, film photography has seen a strong resurgence in recent years, especially among young people.
Burke now earns roughly 20% of his income by scanning negatives from photographers around the country. He uses a drum scanner, which provides maximum resolution images. The machine weighs over 600 pounds and must run on a 20 year old Apple PowerMac.
“There’s one guy who flies around the world to service them,” said Burke. “There’s probably only five or six hundred of these running in the world.”
In spite of its added costs, time and space — Burke has closets filled with negatives and a makeshift darkroom in his bathroom — he has no plans to abandon film. He sees Kodak’s release of updated film stocks as reason to believe that film will be available for the foreseeable future.
Burke is not anti-technology. When he arrived at a windmill on the Pawnee National Grasslands, he consulted with Gaia GPS, a mapping app to check property boundaries. Burke often uses weather data from the National Weather Service to predict cloud formation and photographic conditions. He even uses a small digital camera to meter and compose his shots.
Burke said there is also an insatiable demand for educational videos and blog posts he shares online about large format photography.
The view camera itself is quite light, made primarily of carbon fiber and wood, but Burke often lugs a kit of lenses and several film holders. When backpacking, he must load his film by feel, using a portable, light-proof sack.
During a recent photo trip, Burke’s subject — a windmill — stood just several hundred yards from the road.
“When I go out for a shoot, I might set up the camera and be like, the light's not working, this isn't going to do it, and I'm not going to burn a sheet of film. It’s not inexpensive at all,” said Burke.
“That's probably the biggest frustration is the amount of time I don't create something.”
Each sheet of film costs roughly $7, plus an additional dollar to develop. Since leaving his automotive job to photograph full-time, Burke spends roughly 100 days a year in his van or a tent.
“It's actually pretty hard to find someone that you can travel with as a photographer, because we live by weird schedules. When people want to be eating, we're taking sunset photos,” he said.
Then, just as Burke predicted, the sun dipped below a layer of clouds dazzling the prairie in gold. Burke checked his focus, calculated his exposure settings and attached a film holder with a sheet of Kodak Portra 160 to his camera. He pressed the shutter and flooded the film with light.
“And that’s that,” said Burke. After years of working, the process is intuitive.
As the light turned blue, Burke packed his camera and tripod.
“A big part of photographing locally is you just get this new appreciation for the way your own area looks. You don't have to travel across the country to find something interesting,” said Burke. “Everywhere that people live, there is beauty around.”
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
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