Sawdust Mountain
When I was young, my family would hunt for mushrooms in the forests of the Cascade and Olympic Mountains. Some days we would spend afternoons along the shallows of a river watching salmon fight their way to spawning grounds upstream. These were the icons of the region: forest and salmon, pillars of Northwest identity. These photographs address the complicated relationship between the region’s landscape, the industries that rely upon natural resources, and the communities they support. Sawdust Mountain is a melancholy love letter of sorts, a personal reflection on the region's past, its hardscrabble identity, and the turbulent future it must navigate.
Purchase the critically acclaimed monograph, Sawdust Mountain.
A culmination of four years photographing throughout Oregon, Washington and Northern California, "Sawdust Mountain" focuses on the tenuous relationship between industries reliant upon natural resources and the communities they support. Timber and salmon are the bedrock of a regional Northwest identity, but the environmental impact of these declining industries has been increasingly at odds with the contemporary ideal of sustainability. “In his moving group portrait of a community of loggers and fisherman in the Pacific Northwest, Mr. Johnson, a native son, documents the precariousness of life in this corner of America. At the same time, his photographs capture the defiance of those who have made certain choices--rural solitude instead of an urban economy--and are content (or not) with that bargain." -- Richard B. Woodward --Wall Street Journal.
11 x 11 inches 144 pages, 70 color images Hardcover
ISBN 9781597110914
Published by Aperture with the Henry Art Gallery, Spring 2009
with poem by David Guterson and essays by Tess Gallagher and Elizabeth Brown
$50 plus shipping