Photographer Ben Huff Travels the 'Last Road North'
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| | Photographer Ben Huff and one of the cameras used for his Dalton Highway project. Photo by Dirk Dahmer. |
When he’s not busy working as a receiving manager at a local bookstore, there’s a good chance Ben Huff is traveling the Dalton Highway or at least planning his next trip there. For the last year Huff, 35, has made photographing the people and landscape of the Dalton Highway his all-consuming passion. His efforts received a boost in November 2007 when he received an Individual Artist Award grant from the Rasmuson Foundation. One of his Dalton Highway photographs won second place in the Alaska Positive 2008 photo exhibition. Now he’s hard at work preparing "The Last Road North," a May exhibit of his photos at a gallery in Ester.We recently sat down with Huff to learn about his work and how it’s being shaped by the Dalton Highway, its people and its landscapes. The BLM manages a long swath of public lands along the highway from the Yukon River to the north side of the Brooks Range. Within the Dalton Corridor, the BLM maintains campgrounds, rest areas, interpretive panels and a visitor center.
Why the Dalton Highway?
There’s so much of the Interior that’s summed up on that road. There are so many different characters up there. There’s hunting and subsistence and science and commerce and oil — it has everything.
I’ve always been drawn to the road system, and the history of photographers —photographers a lot grander than I am — working in the West and on the road system. It was interesting to me to try to work in a bit of an established tradition on a road that every time I go still fascinates me and scares me and enlightens me. The things you can see and the access you have by car on that road — it’s incredible.
What sort of subjects have you photographed on the Dalton?
I’ve made a lot of portraits. I’ve made a lot of photos of things that are maybe a little more obscure. I guess I never really set out to make a travelogue such that ‘Here’s a photo of Gobbler’s Knob and here’s Beaver Slide and here’s Sukakpak Mountain.’ I have some photos of those things but maybe in a little less direct sense. It’s all been about not so much a document of the road as it’s been ... more a document of my time spent on the road, the folks I’ve spoken with and spent some time with and who’ve been gracious enough to give their time, and weather and light, things that you remember, things that resonate.
There certainly are large landscapes with a definitive horizon and big space, and I don’t think there’s any way to ground [the project] without doing some of that ... There are times where I’ve sat in the truck for a half hour at a certain spot absolutely in awe of something. Sometimes I don’t even take the camera out. Sometimes you let them go.
How many trips have you made up the Dalton Highway?
This year about 10 or 12 trips of varying lengths. Sometimes I’ll just go to the [Yukon] river, and sometimes I’ll go all the way. I stay in a tent in the summer, but for the most part, I sleep in my truck. If I get up in the middle of the night and get an urge to move, I move.
And you travel the highway in the winter, too?
By all means. It’s been important to get the winters, to get the darkness ... To not shoot in the burly months does the whole thing a disservice. You really have only four good months, and even that, with the mosquitoes ... you really have no good months up there! But yeah, it can get cold.
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