The walls of the Newberry Library are decked out in America. Stretched from the ceiling are snow-flecked Idaho pines at dawn, a sky that’s a range of blues on the North Dakota prairie, a cloud exploding over the Montana flatland. The hangings, measuring 10 by 22 feet, were blown up from 35-millimeter negatives–a mite of dust in comparison.
“I read the article and ten minutes later the idea was formulated and I started research,” he says.
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Sent by Jefferson to explore the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark set off in May of 1804 from Saint Louis, at the mouth of the Missouri River, and went upstream, through what would become South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana, and then, after a desperate climb over the mountains, made it down to the Pacific. Then they headed back, a round trip of 8,000 miles.
“I traveled the whole trail, but I never did it in one fell swoop,” Mack says. “I would go out to Montana for a week and then come back and go out to Missouri for a week.” Leapfrogging across the country, he racked up 30,000 miles of driving over two years of part-time work. He did it alone, though his brother-in-law tagged along toward the end. “No one wants to go with you if you’re a photographer doing landscape work,” Mack says. “You’ll sit in one place for hours on end.” A four-by-five large-format camera–standard for landscape photography–was too cumbersome, so he shot with a 35-millimeter from shore and, occasionally, from a plane.
When a book’s ambition is to retrace the path of a transcontinental expedition, publishing the book should be the easy part. It wasn’t. When Mack discussed contracts with publishers, “the numbers they proposed were so low that it wouldn’t have paid for me to do the book,” he says. “But the biggest part was the issue of wanting to produce the best book.” The publishers he spoke with insisted on a lower cover price, which meant sacrifices in quality–a smaller size, cheaper paper, and the loss of creative control.
The book’s also available at the Newberry bookstore. “I was thrilled to find his work,” says Riva Feshbach, the Newberry’s exhibits manager, who worked on “Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country” for four years. The show, which also includes books of the era, maps, and period photographs, aims to put Native Americans back in the Lewis and Clark story, complicating the popular narrative of the explorers conquering a basically blank continent. “From the beginning, we wanted the landscape to be the visual theme for the exhibit.” But they didn’t want it to look “antiquarian,” she says, as many representations of the expedition do. They wanted a modern look. “The idea of the landscape is such an important link for people to the subject of the expedition,” Feshbach says. “As part of the story, it’s really important.”
When: Sat 11/5, 11 AM
