“Capturing Alaska”
with Wayde Carroll






Eek, AK- Birthplace of Photography (for me).


  
  My wife and I were lucky enough to spend a year living with the Yup’ik people in southwestern Alaska in 1995/1996. My wife was teaching and I was desperately trying to work out how I could get myself out of a career I hated. Eek was the name of the village and is the place I started to pursue photography “seriously”.
 While my wife taught native children in the K-12 school,  I spent time feeling very weird about not being able to work (no jobs for me in this small village of 300 people) and made lists of all the things that were meaningful and enjoyable to me and that I could see myself actually earning an income with. My lists kept narrowing down to photography.
 I had a bachelors’ degree in art with an emphasis in photography and never really considered that I might do it as a career. I was a musician, outside of the dreaded career, and thought I’d end up doing that but eventually realized I didn’t want to spend all my nights and weekends away from my family. My new bride, Lisa, and I wanted to have kids someday and I couldn’t see the two lifestyles meshing well. Not that people can’t, I just couldn’t see it for me.
 As a photographer I was able to combine a love of cool gadgets with a passion for art and love of adventure. Photography became a reason to explore the world in intimate detail.
 While not many photos survived later edits from that first year of “serious” photography, living among the First Alaskans, as Alaskan natives are known, was an incredible luxury for a budding photographer. I was fascinated with the village, it’s people and their culture. A love for the Alaskan bush was born in me that has only grown with time.
 My good friend, John O. Mark, who was the principal of Eek school (and first Alaskan native to become a principal!) while we were there, has since relocated to his home village of Quinhagak. It took me about eight years to finally make it back out to the bush after heading back to California. These images are from that trip. I take great pleasure in being able to visit with the Mark family and photograph their village. I can honestly say, that as a boy growing up in California, I never imagined that I’d be eating caribou stew, dipping dried salmon into seal oil, and enjoying steam huts with Eskimos!
 I will be heading out to Quinhagak again this summer and I can’t wait.
 Having a camera constantly around my neck has drawn me into observing things in minute detail and forced me to get involved with the world. It has become an obsession, always searching with my photographers “eye”.
 In photography I have found a career in which I’m never thinking about when I can retire. Now, I don’t plan to.