James Mason: Northern Exposure

James Mason has just left his job after six years as a reporter/photographer in a remote Alaskan town above the Arctic Circle. He tells John McDermott how leaving another job 27 years ago changed his career, and how he ended up in the frozen north after selling bicycles in California and risking his life in the Balkan War.

In the early months of 1980, James Mason was fired from his from job as staff photographer on a small newspaper in Washington state in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. As he was cleaning out his desk, he heard on the radio that Mount St Helens, a volcano in the state's Cascade Mountains, was likely to erupt at any time. James' life was about to take a turn, one of many in his career.

Nothing much happened until a few months later when, on the morning of 18 May, James and a friend heard that the mountain had exploded. Using the friend's plane they took to the sky to see if James could get some pictures. They were confronted with one of the largest natural explosions in US history and by the following week his images had appeared on the cover of Newsweek and several European magazines.

James was exposed to serious photography, and the idea of travelling to create it, from an early age. "My father had an aunt who was a music teacher and noted organist. In the 1930s she travelled around Germany with a Rolleiflex, photographing churches and their organs. In 1946, she went back to devastated post-war Germany and re-shot at the same locations, then mounted them next to the original ones in an album. I was only eight years old when I saw them, but they were stunning and their impact on me was huge," recalls James. "Also, my dad was a surgeon in a field evacuation hospital during the war and took his camera everywhere. His pictures tell the story of what it was like to be a doctor in wartime."

Despite these early influences, James, now 59, did not start out to be a photographer. He had plans to be a language teacher, eventually specialising in Russian and Slavic languages at university. He even spent three years studying in Zagreb, in what is now Croatia, an experience that would ultimately make an impact on his photography career.

"I was emotionally attached to the country from the time I had spent there as a student. Student leaders I knew in the early 1970s had become some of the leaders of the Croatian independence movement 20 years later. So I sold the shop, packed my gear and flew to Zagreb in October, 1991."

During the war Mason spent time with some renowned war photographers. "I learned a lot from guys like Jim Nachtwey, Luc Delahaye, Tony Suau, Gilles Peress and Greg Marinovich. They were all there."

 

© James Mason A soldier called Marinko takes a shot at some "unfriendly guys" who wandered into range near the village of Brdo.

The work was often dangerous and late one night in Vitez, Bosnia, James decided to speed through an impromptu roadblock and ended up with 18 AK-47 rounds in his Volkswagen Golf. The car was destroyed, but Mason emerged unscathed. Later the two soldiers told him they were not shooting to kill, but just wanted to teach him a lesson.

Another Bosnian militiaman pointedly told him later: "You're crazy. You don't have to be here. If I were you I'd be out of here in five minutes. I wouldn't even stop to pack my suitcase!"
"The Balkans taught me that the politicians are always looking after their own agendas and that the human animal isn't always a nice one."

 

© James Mason The mother, wife, child and brother of a Muslim soldier killed in battle rest before the funeral in a tiny village near Zenica.

In mid 1994, James took a break from the war and came home to visit friends and family in Oregon. He learned that his mother had cancer and decided not to return to Europe. Six months later she died. After another four months spent helping his father get settled James had lost any remaining urge to cover the war and decided instead to return to San Francisco to resume his freelance career.

"As much as possible I adopted the local way of life. The Eskimos were generous in sharing what they knew about dealing with this environment, how to dress properly, for example. I learned to hunt caribou and store the meat. I can set a salmon net and prepare the fish for drying or freezing."

Mason's job in Kotzebue was to cover anything and everything of interest, from high school basketball and snowmobile races to seal hunting, plane crashes and local politics.

 

© James Mason Bad weather and poor visibility causes the pilot of this plane to set down on the ice two miles short of the runway. He was unhurt, but the plane was seriously damaged.

Being a reporter has allowed him to become part of the community, though only up to a point. "When you're the reporter in a town like this, it's like being the cop everyone keeps you at a certain distance. That was one of the tough parts of my life there. Being the only reporter in such a large area carries a lot of responsibility. People count on you to tell their story right and if you don't get it right there's no place to hide."

The north of Alaska also poses challenges of a different type. A key issue for Mason was light, both in photographic and health terms. At such a high latitude (nearly 67 degrees North), there are as many as six weeks in winter of near total darkness and similarly almost constant sunlight in summer.
"Even Eskimos get depressed during winter. If you don't seek out light and stay active you can end up sleeping 20 hours a day. In summer it's the opposite. It can be difficult to get enough sleep. I learned to turn my bedroom into a dark cave in the summer."

While working in winter's darkness has led him to sharpen his lighting skills and to work more indoors, the Arctic summer can be a photographer's dream as the sun is always low in the sky, producing spectacular light.
"Imagine a sunset that lasts six hours instead of fifteen minutes," says Mason. "In deep winter I'm lucky to be able to shoot at 1/125 of a second and f/2.8 at 400 ISO. And that only lasts about an hour.

"Living in this region means almost never seeing an unfamiliar face and I will miss countless friendly people I may know only to say hello to. And I will never forget the feeling of flying across frozen Kobuk Lake at 100 miles an hour on my snowmobile on the way to shoot a high school basketball game ninety miles away in minus 30º F. But every six years it seems that I just need to head off in a new direction it's that time again. I plan to keep doing this until I the day I die, when I hope someone will find me with my camera around my neck and say 'Hey, check his camera. Let's see what his last images were."

 

© James Mason If freeze-up comes before the first snow, Kotzebue Sound becomes a big skating rink.

INSPIRATIONS

The portraiture of Karsh of Ottawa. San Francisco rock photographer Jim Marshall, especially his book, Proof. The documentary work of Gilles Peress as seen in his books Farewell to Bosnia and Telex Tehran. The pure, honest photojournalism of Danny Lyon. And Robert Frank's The Americans.

TECH INFO

Equipment:

• EOS-1D Mark II
• EF20mm f/2.8 USM

• EF28mm f/1.8 USM
• EF70-200mm f/4L zoom
• EF50mm f/1.4 USM.
• EF300mm f/4L IS USM telephoto
• EOS 10D with an EF15mm f/2.8 fisheye
• G4 Powershot

• Apple Macintosh G5
• Canon DPP (Digital Photo Professional)
• Adobe Photoshop
• VHF Radio Transceiver
• Snowmobile
• Husky dog