When photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum was a student at UCLA in the late ’60s, he manipulated virtually all of his work. He solarized images, drew on prints, painted on paper with chemicals. The photographs themselves were a means to an end, not finished statements. He disdained the work of such great photographers as Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, dismissing it as “boring.” One semester he decided to do a presentation on the work of Paul Caponigro to enlighten his fellow students about just how mundane it really was. “I was going to give a great, flippant presentation,” he recalls. But the presentation never materialized; the more Ketchum investigated Caponigro’s work, the more respectful he became. His talk wound up a fairly straightforward affair, and he ended it with a Caponigro photograph be particularly liked—an obtuse piece he saw as a night sky full of stars against a curved horizon. “I’m not sure what it is,” he told the class, “and that’s why I like it.” His professor asked if anyone knew what it was, and several voices called out, “An apple on a plate.” Immediately, Ketchum saw that this image, which be had looked at repeatedly for months and had always seen as the night sky, was in fact an apple on a plate; Caponigro had shot it with a filter, turning the red apple very dark and exposing the green pinpoints of phosphorus in the fruit. For Ketchum, the moment was a seminal one.
     “I saw that Caponigro was able to see one reality in another and capture it, and I thought that this was much more powerful than dreaming up multiple realities in the darkroom. I’d always seen photography as a technical tool… I began to realize that it could itself be a statement.”
     Ketchum has since made a life of documenting dual realities in nature. One aspect of his work comprises glorious shots of unadulterated landscapes—New England forests in the fall as alive with mayhem and color as a Pollock canvas; ice-blue pools of water on an Alaskan glacier, a fusion of form and color reminiscent of Mondrian; a collection of bull rushes and milkweed flowers, exploding out of the center of the frame with all the intensity of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. These are juxtaposed with shots of man-made destruction—forests that have been clear-cut, their hills strewn with the corpses of trees;· refineries and mills, smoke billowing everywhere, machinery run rampant; massive grey steel bridges that have supplanted the technicolor woods. Occasionally, the work is more subtle: On the cover of his latest book, Overlooked in America, The Success and Failure of Federal Land Management, there is an alluring shot of a waterfall surrounded by trees in the glory of fall. The river pictured is so polluted that anyone who drinks from it or swims in it gets ill.
     Ketchum, who will display and discuss his work at the Academy of Arts this Sunday, is described as an “environmental photographer”—his shots of nature and the degradation wrought upon it are praised as some of the most breathtaking and heartbreaking in the world. In 1989 the Sierra Club gave him the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography. Last year, he was named to a 500-member United Nations global honor roll and received the U.N.’s Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award. A twenty-five-year retrospective of his work is currently traveling around the country, and in June he will display his work at the U.N.’s Global Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Ketchum describes his work as “subversive”; others might employ the term seductive. The strategy is this, he says in a phone interview from L.A.: “The beautiful pictures make you interested in the work. Most people who pick up a picture book are looking for an escape—my books have as many unpleasant realities as pleasant ones.”
     Ketchum’s first major body of work as a nature photographer was published under the title Winters 1970-1980; he shot much of it in the Sawtooth mountain range of Idaho, a world he describes as “very peaceful, minimalistic.” The black-and-white work focuses on the essential elements of the wilderness in winter—snow, mountains, rocks, trees. Ketchum says it was largely created out of his desire to pay homage to Eastern philosophies and constructions. From this series, he launched into Order from Chaos, stunning full­color studies of leaves and trees during seasonal change— dense, claustrophobic portraits.
     In the mid-’70s a trip to India and a conversation with a friend there forced Ketchum to think about the dual existence he was living—on the one hand, he was an increasingly angry and frustrated environmental activist, on the other, he was making a living photographing the landscape —a chemically toxic and potentially intrusive process.
     When he returned from India, Ketchum did some work in the national parks, conscious that photography had played a vital role in convincing the country that these wildernesses were worth preserving. When, as a result of this work, he was offered a grant to photograph the Hudson River, he jumped at the chance. “The Hudson was the first river to be declared dead, the first to be cleaned through the Clean Water Act—I took it as a metaphor. I photographed its beauty and also toxic pools and an atomic energy plant [on its banks].” The finished work, published as The Hudson River and the Highlands, set off a debate: Did it work to inform or was it just killing more trees? “I felt that the book was too soft,” Ketchum says today. “I was becoming increasingly angry.”
     Ketchum took that anger to Alaska and used it to create The Tongass: Alaska's Vanishing Rain Forest, a striking book that documents the deforestation of the Tongass by the United States Forestry Service. The book was published in 1987, in conjunction with the introduction of timber reform legislation in Congress; it helped make the issue “sexy,” says Ketchum. As everyone in Congress knows, sex sells. After extensive lobbying, in 1990 the logging program in Tongass was stopped.
     By that time Ketchum was engrossed in the Overlooked project. Over a period of four years, he shot in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area, using it to illustrate the problems in the federal government’s entire land management program; indeed, each photograph is identified only with a number, to make each site less specific and to encourage the idea that degradation is occurring everywhere. The images are accompanied by a fact-laden text, full of stats on pollution and destruction in federally managed precincts. The last words in The Tongass are Shakespeare’s; they strike a blow as harsh as each photograph: “O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth/That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!” The quote ending Overlooked from the Australian rock band Midnight Oil reflects Ketchum’s increasing outrage: “The candy store paupers lie to the shareholders/They’re crossing their fingers, they pay the truth makers/The balance sheet is breaking up the sky.”