Photo Essay
Haunting Beauty
A photographer with a Heartland perspective shows Florida’s Everglades in a whole new light.
By Joel Sartore/Text by Ted Levin
The Florida Everglades is not the easiest place to photograph. The landscape is tabletop flat and subtle, an inland sea of sawgrass cut by shallow-water sloughs, punctuated by tree islands, rimmed by pine and cypress and mangrove. There are no mountains or hills. No purling rivers rushing toward the ocean. In fact, south Florida is so flat that USGS topographical maps are drawn in five-foot contours rather than the more customary 20-footers. (Some sections of south Florida are so flat the maps show no contours at all.)
“It’s all in how you look at it,” says Nebraska photographer Joel Sartore. “You can get good pictures out of anything if you work it enough.” Although the Everglades has been worked to perfection by large-format photographers—the late Eliot Porter and Clyde Butcher come to mind—and though countless other professionals and amateurs have exposed enough 35mm transparencies there that if laid end to end, they would probably circle the galaxy, Sartore’s vision is fresh; like an alchemist, he transforms a common scene into uncommon grace.
Sartore arrived in Florida on October 11, 2005, shortly after Hurricane Katrina had passed through. Since it was off-season in Everglades National Park, where Sartore spent his time, most of the park’s facilities were closed and the million or so tourists who visit during the winter were elsewhere. “All this open space between Naples and Miami, and I had the park to myself,” says Sartore. “It was alive and vibrant.”
The Everglades is land on the verge of water, water on the verge of land. The 2,358-square-mile national park, the southernmost portion of a watershed that once covered 14,000 square miles of central and southern Florida, was the first park in the United States to be set aside for its biology rather than its scenery. The region is a biological melting pot. Its native wildlife is a mix of temperate North American and subtropical species, while the native vegetation is mostly subtropical. Down here black bears root in the shade of royal palms and bald eagles nest in buttonwoods.
Clouds of wading birds and flotillas of alligators first called our attention to wild south Florida. Birds beyond counting—hundreds of thousands, some claimed more than a million—nested in the saltwater jungles at the heel of Florida. More than a million alligators may have patrolled the sodden wilderness. The lifeline for this menagerie was the Everglades itself, which produced a banquet for the masses.
Since the park was dedicated in 1947, the replumbing of south Florida has placed the region on ecological life support. Everything wild is in jeopardy. While Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., collectively pledged upwards of $10 billion to repair at least some of the damage, the restoration languishes.
Sartore’s photographs remind us what’s at stake. Captured is the haunting beauty of the Everglades, the result of Sartore’s dedication, ingenuity, and luck. The photograph of the alligator’s tail, a moment of unplanned good fortune, was taken from eye level on a bicycle path with a 400mm lens. “There was no time to change lenses,” he says. “It was a lucky accident.”
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