Interview with Eamon Mac Mahon

Departing from traditional landscape shots of sunsets over pristine lakes, rolling hills and aurora borealis, Eamon Mac Mahon uses eerie natural light to create meditative images that cast our eyes on the patterns of Canada's geography. Recently, the Toronto-based photographer (who has also lived in Alberta) went on a hunt to track down some of southern Ontario's remaining old-growth forests. He also travelled north of the tar sands to reconnect with the forests of his youth. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The New Yorker, The Walrus and New York Magazine.

		PHOTOGRAPHER Eamon Mac Mahon On assignment for New York Magazine in Sarah Palin's home town of Wassila, Alaska, in 2008, Mac Mahon had a near death experience and found that there's more to the small town than he thought. Read on below for his story. To see more from his shoots in old-growth forests, check out the June 2010 issue of Canadian Geographic. And to view more of Mac Mahon's work, visit his website. (Photo: Peter Mettler)
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Q Ontario was heavily logged by early Canadian settlers. How did you find areas of old-growth forest to shoot for this story?

AI started researching on the internet and found something that gave the general area of a forest in southern Ontario near the Bruce Trail. Although, when I got there, nobody in the town nearby knew where it was.

So I went out on the trail looking for these patches of old-growth and while walking along, this dog ran out of nowhere and started barking at me. A man followed it out of the woods. He turned out to be a local farmer, so I asked him about the old-growth forest. He said he didn't know the one I was looking for, but he was just on his way to a local barn where all the farmers gather on Friday nights to drink beer and talk. So he offered to take me with him.

Q Did you have a drink with them?

A Yep, and they gave me some suggestions. The main chunk of old-growth forest they said was on another farmer's property.

Early the next day, I went out and tracked down the area. It had been in the farmer's family for years. Everything else around there has been cut and replanted over and over.

Q What's important about these pockets of old growth?

A When you go to these places, you get to actually see what the forest in Ontario looked like before it was completely settled. It's important to preserve.

Q You also took a shot of a planted forest in Ontario. How does it differ from the old growth?

A After people log, they sometimes create a tree plantation with the idea of harvesting the wood at some point in the future. That's why this forest looks so unhealthy. It's all one species in rows and they're all the same age. That shot and the one of old growth were taken in the same month.

With the 50 Million Trees Project in Ontario, they're replanting forests with a variety of species. Hopefully, even though they're replanted, they'll somewhat resemble the original forest and develop more naturally than this planted forest as they mature.

Read Eamon Mac Mahon's tips on photographing landscapes.

Q The forest comes up again and again in your body of work. What draws you to it?

A When I was only a few months old, my family moved from Toronto to Grande Cache, Alta. We settled on the north edge of town and literally the end of our backyard was where the woods began. I spent the first seven years of my life playing among those trees as much as I could.

I'm drawn to the feeling that you have, especially in an old-growth forest, that the world takes care of itself, that nature left alone has systems that keep each other in balance. In the city you feel that everything's falling apart all the time and that you have to keep working to fix and maintain it.

Q Since you've shot landscapes for so long, and have this connection that goes back to your youth, what was it like when you shot an assignment in the tar sands last September?

A It's a depressing place. Still, the boreal forest around it is amazing. I spent my first week there in the woods and saw things that reminded me of the landscape I grew up around in Alberta.

I was shooting in a high area in the north, so you could see the forest stretching out in all directions except south, where all you saw was this black gap. It's hard to get across how far it stretches. They say the mineable area is the size of Florida. You can fly for an hour and you're still over the tar sands.

Q Was it an emotional experience?

A That first week I was shooting in the woods I stayed in a trapper's cabin. It was right next to a radio tower, so I could pick up CBC very clearly.

One day I was eating lunch and there was an interview on with a writer named Edna O'Brian. She was talking about her writing process and said that reconnecting with her first impressions of the world allowed her to write things that moved her.

I was overwhelmed by what she said. Alberta's boreal forest is what I first remember, and what they're doing in the tar sands is very disrespectful to the forest. When they're done, the intention of the oil companies is to return the land to the way it was. But they won't be able to do that. They look at it in a very simplistic way: the trees are raw materials. When there's so much money to be made, you'd want to kid yourself in that way.

The whole forest is a bunch of little networks. They say the trees only live to be about 80 to 100 years old, but the systems there are so much older. The forest has grown there since the last ice age. The ecosystem includes all the moss, the lichen, the combination of dead trees, new trees and all the animals and insects.

Q A couple years ago you travelled to Sarah Palin's home town of Wassila, Alaska, when John McCain chose her as his running mate. What was that like?

A New York Magazine spent a lot of money to get me up there. I was nervous about walking around with a camera and how people would receive me more than anything.

There was a pro-Obama rally along the highway the day after I got there. The city is mostly Republican, but there were a lot of people who supported Obama. Wassila ended up being completely different than what I expected.

Everyone was really friendly there. It's nerve wracking doing assignments like this because you're always looking for an image and you never get enough rest.

Q What was the most interesting thing you caught on film?

AActually, I had a near-death experience there. I went to these old missile silos outside Wassila. They used to be part of a military base, but now it's abandoned and people go to dump their old cars or washing machines inside. Other people come and shoot the silos with machine guns, blow them up with grenades or test out their scopes.

Two girls brought me there and drove me around. I was photographing in one area when all of a sudden there was a gun shot from about 60 metres away. I heard the bullet whiz right over me. Then the person really started shooting. They must have had a semi-automatic. All I heard was 'bang! bang! bang!' and there were bullets just flying past me. The closest must have been two metres away. It was like Vietnam! I just stayed low and tried to get to the truck.

There were trees between us and the shooters, so they couldn't see us. I was yelling the entire time, but they couldn't hear me, and the girl's truck didn't have a horn either.

As we sped away I heard a ricochet as one of the bullets bounced off a barrel that was about a metre away. But like I said, the people were really nice.

Interview by Graham Lanktree