TimesArgus.com - We Are Vermont

Postcards from home and away

Brian Mohr and Emily Johnson bring the Andes and the Arctic to governor's office

here's no place like home for Brian Mohr and Emily Johnson. Home, being Vermont, that is.

Together they have photographed some of the remotest places in the world: the Andes mountains, inner Iceland, Greenland and the Rocky Mountains. But their favorite place to shoot remains the backwoods of New England in general, and Vermont in particular. About half of their more than two dozen color and black-and-white photographs on view at the governor's office in Montpelier through Sept. 26 are from the region.

"We have some of our best adventures close to home," Mohr says. "We realize Vermont is just as beautiful if not more beautiful. It's more of a subtle beauty, but when you get to know it you realize there's just as much here. It's just a different kind of wildness."

Mohr points out that northern Maine is the largest uninhabited area in the lower 48 states, and that added to the 6 million acre Adirondacks State Park, the great northern forest is a recovering ecosystem that though damaged by logging, is making a remarkable comeback. One of the charms of New England, Mohr says, is that you don't have to go more than a mile off-trail to experience a facet of wilderness here.

He and his wife, Emily, both grew up in New England (Johnson in Vermont; Mohr in Massachusetts) and met at the University of Colorado in Boulder. They are avid skiers and hikers who seek out the backcountry places most of us just aren't fit or determined enough to see on our own. They carry their Canon cameras and lenses in padded chest harnesses so they can shoot as they go. They also share credit for their photographs. Though naturally only one of the duo can shoot at a time, they recognize each other's aesthetic and logistical contributions to the process.

Perhaps most remarkably, Mohr and Johnson say they make a living doing what they love best: venturing off into new places with little more than three weeks' worth of food and their photography and camping equipment. Their photographs have been published in Backcountry Magazine, Vermont Life, Vermont Sports, Mad River Glen, Ibex and Patagonia, Inc. In October, they hope to go to Chile, as part of their Wild People, Wild Places project. The couple presents slide shows and photography exhibits primarily as a means to promote the preservation of the places they shoot.

The Moretown couple's stunning images could be classified as landscapes, though Mohr prefers to call them "dynamic" landscapes. That's because he and his wife, Emily, see themselves and/or other people as a part of the vista. Whether they're backcountry hiking with skis in tow in Vermont or in the Andes, they aren't shy about including themselves in the whatever glorious context they're capturing on film. Often one or the other of them is a silhouetted figure in the distance.

In "Patagonian Gaucho," for example, an Argentinian cowboy watches his sheep astride a horse. Man, horse and herd blend into the buff-colored, grass tufted landscape. In this photograph, at any rate, they are visually a part of the Earth.

Sometimes, humans dominate the scene. In "The Cyclist," a double-rainbow connects a rain-drenched biker to a verdant valley. The outer arc seems to hold back the slate-gray sky, while the inner arc is a sunny window onto two low-slung white houses. It's as though the biker is a conduit for the glorious light in the photograph.

Humans are definitely a presence in "Tinitiqilaq," in which featureless houses cling to a barren rock hillside. The shacks look pathetic in the shadow of the enormous ice floes that loom in the foreground.

When so inspired, Mohr and Johnson turn their cameras to the small miracles that bring magic to any landscape: an individual vermillion maple leaf or an iced glazed twig. The best of these is "Winter Birch." Here the lens looks skyward, through the snow-edged branches of a gnarled tree that stretch out like many arms toward a clear blue sky.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Mohr and Johnson seem to echo that sentiment in their photographs, though they might add a caveat: Human beings are part of that wildness.

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