Stillwater:
The Extreme Edge
of Lake Michigan

I

've been walking the shores of Lake Michigan all my life. When I got my first phone, and later my first camera, it was only natural that I would spend much of my time trying to capture its beauty. Later, I would begin creating abstracts of my lake; until then, however, I stuck with landscapes.

On January 20th, 2017, I took my oldest photo (above) that still stands up among my current work. It depicts the pier at Big Bay, the park of my youth, shrouded in the ice of coldest winter. It is composed well-enough, and vignetted at the bottom with dark rocks. The pier shoots off into the hazy void, and despite the tranquility of calm, shutter-slowed water, the ice's sinister shadows give drama and depth to an otherwise flat frame.

However, I don't like it because it's technically decent; I like it because it captures Lake Michigan.

It turns out that Lake Michigan, over 22 thousand square miles of blueish chop, is quite hard to photograph. Its size was its most difficult aspect; I struggled for a long time to capture its expansive rawness, at once extreme and gentle, in a single frame.

It felt like something that should've come easy. Those waters had me captured the moment I saw them; why couldn't I capture them?

I realized that I had approached the problem from the wrong angle. I didn't need to capture all 22 thousand square miles to capture the lake's essence, to capture how I felt each time I stood on its shores.

I changed my methodology. Instead of trying to photograph the chaos of a windswept expanse, I focused on simplifying, calming. The Lake Michigan photographs I loved were not the epic landscapes, busy and wide, but rather the tranquil ones, those which acknowledged the lake's power and size but did not dwell on it, which highlighted its dormant strength. I found this quality especially apparent in winter, when snow shrouds the land and the chilling lake gently surges against the ice.

As I grew older, I would more often leave the safety of Big Bay and explore more and more of the shore. While my childhood beach is accessible, the neighboring coastline is steep, rock-strewn bluff. Water-battered branches fighting for sun shadow chunks of rejected sidewalk and concrete streetlamps, which heap where the dirt meets the waves. It is a brutal landscape, alien, almost, compared with the sands of Big Bay, but it proved a welcome change nonetheless.

Again, I relapsed into busy, chaotic photos. However, the strewn concrete better suited the tumult of that style. I managed to blend the tranquility of the water with the jagged aggression of the shore (below), and I think it worked.

The following January, I decided to head down again to the lake. Snow was falling, the kind of thick flakes that would stay on your nose without melting, and I hugged my camera close under my jacket. Atop the built-up ice along the shore, my height or more above the frozen sand below, I found once again that tranquil strength: the frozen coast was high and formidable, sure, and the ice-bearing waves frothy and rough, but the ice cliffs muffled the waves, and the world was silent save the deep echoes of water far within the ice. Large flakes would land on the water and drift, riding the chop for a moment before dissolving. The lake, in all its frigid, powerful strength, was at peace.

Working quickly, I whipped out my camera several times, and perched atop the ice, I made these four exposures. They tell a story of a volatile world, harsh and biting as the wind, of the ephemeral ice which stands tall now but who knows what the next hour will bring?

The white cliffs tenaciously cling on to the shore, bearing crash after crash of dark, viscous slush-water. And yet, in this moment, between breaking waves and biting gusts, all is calm. The lake is at peace.