Photographer with local ties chronicles environmental peril

“Floating On Oil: Top of oil tank at tar sands refinery,”  — Fort McMurray, Canada We see a walkway out to the covered inspection hatch and standing water, which has caused some rust. The rust does not impede its function, storing 400,000 to 500,000 barrels of the world’s dirtiest oil. Tar sands, a layer of bitumen-saturated earth which can be refined into petroleum, are primarily extracted in Canada. The first step in the process is to remove the old growth boreal forest, home to countless endangered species and a deep sink for tremendous amounts of carbon. The raw material is excavated with giant electric shovels (baggers) and trucked away to be crushed and boiled, which begins the toxic process of producing usable fuel from this tar. COURTESY J. HENRY FAIR.

By Jeff Morris

J. Henry Fair cannot be called a prodigal son, for two reasons. One, Lewisboro was not his home in the first place; and two, he did nothing but good while he was here, and has done nothing but good since he left.

But his appearance as guest speaker at Lewisboro Library’s annual meeting on Sunday, Feb. 2, was a homecoming of sorts, as he has not lived in town for the past decade. And, at his talk, he did admit to some misdeeds during his time here; he confessed to trespassing on private property in cahoots with former supervisor Jim Nordgren, as they traveled through town looking at natural features and areas with the potential to preserve as open space.

As to why he returned, Fair said, “The library invited me to come speak, and I said yes, with pleasure.” He spoke of the library being one of his favorite places, and was still astounded as he recalled all the arguments that arose over plans for its renovation and expansion when he was living locally.

“The Last Stand: Mountaintop removal coal mine at night.”  — Kayford Mountain, West Virginia. One of J. Henry Fair’s most iconic photos, from 2005, depicts mining operations that work around the clock at amazing speed; “this lonely stand of trees disappeared in barely a day.” The small bulldozer on the upper level pushes loose material down to the loader, which scoops it up into the next earth mover in line which will dump it into a nearby “valley fill,” burying the stream there. COURTESY J. HENRY FAIR.

Fair told us that while there are some people in town he is still in touch with, “Many of my friends have moved on. I have been back once or twice in the last years to walk in Ward Pound Ridge, and stopped by the Wolf Conservation Center to say hello on one of those.”

Stopping by the WCC made sense, as Fair was the co-founder. As he explained in his talk, he was living in Chelsea and moved to South Salem with his then-partner to found the Wolf Center after locating an available parcel of land.

Chelsea was not his original home. That was Charleston, South Carolina, which in his descriptions becomes yet another stop on a lifelong itinerary of places he has left and to which he has returned. His lecture was a dizzying trip through locales across the world where he has lived, visited and worked—dizzying not least because the bulk of his most recent work has been conducted in the air, taking photographs from small private planes whose pilots volunteer to take him where he wants to go.

Fair began as a portrait photographer, whose early work focused on musicians. But as his awareness of environmental degradation and climate change grew, his subject matter evolved to document what people have been doing to the planet.

His work, illustrating the effects of global warming, environmental pollution and habitat destruction, has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the globe. His most celebrated images show closeup views of what appear to be beautiful artistic patterns, only to turn out to be industrial waste; as he calls it, “beautiful landscape or horrible destruction?”

There was a Ricky Nelson song called “Travelin’ Man” that was a hit in 1961, and while that may be a dated reference, it would be an apt description of Fair. He has constantly been on the move, traveling from city to city and continent to continent, and his presentation followed a similar pattern. He somehow moved from his days in South Salem to his early life in Charleston, to studies of coal mining using mountaintop removal in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, to tar sands oil in Canada and industrial sites in Germany; and along the way, managed to include a section about Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad. His concerns include historic sites now facing destruction from flooding.

Some particularly gripping images he took show the burning Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, which exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, killing 11 crewmen and subsequently collapsed, resulting in the largest marine oil spill in history. Fair’s volunteer pilot somehow managed to cajole his way into the restricted airspace, resulting in rare photos of the burning rig.

Fair says that he now considers himself primarily an environmental activist, rather than a photographer, though photography is both how he makes his living and how he conducts his activism.

His most recent area of interest shows just how depressingly far the climate crisis has progressed. He is conducting studies of coastal areas which are already, or soon will be, experiencing the results of rising sea levels. Aerial photo studies he has made show coastal areas and wetlands from Maine to Westchester to South Carolina and in far-flung locales. He displayed photos of movable seawalls in the Netherlands and in London, meant to close and protect ports and inland waterways from storm surges.

Audience members at his talk seemed desperate for some reason for hope, and asked what the experts Fair consults with think about the current situation and prospects for the future. But as he spoke about huge sections of glacial ice that are in imminent danger of collapse, how much sea levels have already risen, and his change in focus from preventing climate catastrophe to adjusting to the new reality and finding ways to deal with it, the answer was already evident.

Nonetheless, Fair continues to travel, take his photos, and advocate for whatever actions people can take to keep things from getting worse. Perhaps “Travelin’ Man” is not the right reference; a more accurate, though nearly as dated, nickname might be 1985’s “Man In Motion.” But everyone at the library was glad to see him stop by, if only for a few hours.