EXPLORATION - Focusing on the Missouri
by Elaine Primiano
photography by Joe Riis
For Joe Riis, the road—or in his case, the river—less traveled has always been a way of life. The University of Wyoming senior has been blazing his own trail in nature since childhood. Last summer that trail led to a conservation photography project on the Missouri River, which has blossomed into his life’s mission.
Living just three blocks from the river as a boy in Pierre, South Dakota, Riis spent most of his days each summer from his young years through his teens on the Missouri.
He fished, boated, swam, played on the sandbars, and watched the sunset stain its waters blood red. Indeed Riis, who describes living along the river in terms that most of us would consider as elemental, expresses his early enjoyment of the river and its beauty in a way that makes one think river water courses through his veins like blood itself. Growing up in the river’s natural rhythms, Riis found the Missouri left an indelible impression on his spirit and a desire to preserve and protect it. It was as a student at UW that Riis rediscovered his lifelong love of the Missouri River.
Originally a premed major, Riis switched in fall 2005 to wildlife biology and environment and natural resources in UW’s Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources, where students work in teams to address complex, real-world environmental policy and management problems, and complete an internship to supplement their academic training with practical experience. Riis says he didn’t want to work at a regular government internship last summer, and so he took a different approach.
With a $1,000 grant from the Haub School, Riis began work last May on a project he calls Missouri River EXPOSED. By the time he finished in August, he had kayaked 500 miles on the Missouri River in Montana and the Dakotas, meeting with fish biologists who specialize in species native to the river and documenting their research with his pen and camera.
The Missouri: problems and promise
The Missouri is the longest river in the United States, flowing 2,341
miles from its headwaters in Montana to its confluence with the Mississippi
River at St. Louis. It drains one-sixth of the country, and its basin
comprises 10 states, including most of Wyoming. Some 734 miles are used for
the commercial navigation channel from Sioux City, Iowa, to St. Louis.
Central to the ecological issues of the Missouri River is the Army Corps of
Engineers, which has managed the waterway through dams and reservoirs in the
north for more than 60 years. Riis says the corps controls water levels
primarily to enhance barge navigation in the south, and this has had
devastating effects on natural water levels, river flows, and habitats,
especially during times of drought like those experienced in recent years.
“The Missouri River affects so many things and has so many purposes, but one use seems to get preference,” says Riis. “They [the corps] need to take into consideration the ecological effects of changing and managing the river for the barge industry. Now there are endangered species in the river.”
The pallid sturgeon, a fish dating back to prehistoric times, and the least tern and piping plover, birds that nest on sandbars in the river channel, all depend on the river’s natural habitat for survival. They are also all endangered.
Through his photos, Riis says he hopes to instill in the public an appreciation of the river’s natural beauty and an awareness of the ecological problems that threaten the river and the species that depend on it. Last fall, he launched a traveling exhibition of his Missouri River EXPOSED project, which includes a dozen riverscapes and wildlife images, along with descriptions of the issues involved. The exhibition, which opened in public centers and galleries in South Dakota, has traveled as far as West Virginia. It will appear in other locations this year, including the Department of Interior Museum in Washington, D.C. and the UW ASUW Gallery.
“Joe is exposing a wide audience to the beauty of the river and the need to protect it,” says Harold Bergman, UW professor of zoology and physiology and director of the William D. Ruckelshaus Institute and the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources. “For many people, Joe’s wonderful photographs draw their interest to the river much more than a newspaper article or complex technical report can.”
Bergman’s involvement was key to Riis’s project.
“I went into Harold’s office and said, ‘this is what I want to do; how can I make it happen?’” Bergman reviewed and approved Riis’s proposal, resulting in the award of the $1,000 Haub Creative Activities Grant to start the project.
The power of story
Riis built a Web site (www.joeriis.com)
documenting his work on the upper Missouri. It relates the sights and sounds
of the river, his reactions to them, and his passion for place.
There is a shot of morning on the river in a remote part of South Dakota.
Riis had spent the previous day sheltered in his tent during a raging
thunderstorm and was eagerly anticipating the day’s photography.
“I usually wake about 20 minutes before sunrise to get my camera situated for the new light,” says Riis. “This morning was different. I awoke about 30 minutes before sunrise, not to my alarm clock but to the sounds of drums and flowing chants.”
A group of Yankton Sioux on the bluffs above the river were singing and
playing music that “flowed with the river,” he says. Although he estimates
they were a mile away, he says he could hear every beat because of the
amplifying effects of the river valley.
“The sound was deep and vast,” says Riis. “It was an inspiring way to
wake, because the music flowed flawlessly with the sunrise; the tone changed
as the sun rose.”
He says the music made him reflect on the way society no longer flows with
nature’s beat. “Today the Missouri River has lost its heartbeat…,” he says.
Before the thunderstorm, he photographed some small plants submerged in the storm-swollen river under a foreboding sky. “I think the leaves were small cottonwoods that only looked like that about 30 seconds before they wrinkled up and fell over from the water,” he recalls.
Another photo, taken in Montana, shows a diminutive toad resting in the
palm of Riis’s hand.
“It was a really hot day and I was tired of kayaking, so I was lying in my
tent on a sandbar,” says Riis. “As I lay there, this little toad kept
jumping in my tent and eventually was there all day.” As Riis prepared to
take pictures at sunset, he snapped the photo. “The quote I have on it is,
‘The River Is in Our Hands,’ because it’s true,” he says. “It’s in our
hands, and we can do what we want to do with it.”
Where credit is due
Riis credits his parents and his birthplace for his love of nature. His father, Jim, a fisheries biologist, and his mother, Jeanne, a physical education teacher, both loved the outdoors and photographed as a hobby.
He fondly recalls the family’s first big trip to Alaska, when he was 5
years old, and fly-fishing excursions with his father to Montana. He hunted
with both of his parents. After studying photography in high school, Riis
accompanied his father back to Alaska, meeting one of his father’s friends,
renowned moose biologist and photographer Victor Van Ballenberghe.
“He [Van Ballenberghe] took me out to Denali National Park, and that was
when I first realized I really liked photography,” Riis says. “In Alaska it
was very easy to take good pictures.”
A more recent photographic mentor and inspiration is German photographer Florian Schulz, whose five-year conservation photography project in North America recently culminated in a book titled Yellowstone to Yukon: Freedom to Roam.
“His project is kind of a template for my project,” says Riis, who
through e-mail and meetings became friends with Schulz during the past few
years.
Riis says Bergman, who taught the first ENR class he enrolled in after switching majors, is another mentor. “You don’t usually get to talk much to a director,” says Riis, “but Harold goes out of his way to become friends with all of the students. The whole program is really rich and everyone is enthusiastic. That’s where I get my core belief in wanting to make a change.”
A passion-filled mission
This summer Riis plans to kayak the river in remote areas of Montana and South Dakota and photograph what he calls “hot spots,” places where the river still looks the way Lewis and Clark found it during their 1803-06 Voyage of Discovery. Following graduation in 2008, Riis intends to kayak the entire length of the Missouri River and photograph both its beauty and its problems, including dams, unnatural water flows, drought, endangered species, and the impact on Native Americans living along its banks.
As his work expands, Riis wants to place his exhibition in large airports and malls that garner significant pedestrian traffic. He also envisions conducting a speaking tour, with stops in every major city along the river from St. Louis to Great Falls, Montana. And, as with most photographic projects, he hopes to publish a book of his work.
“I’ve been applying for more grants, contacting more people; and now with this exhibition, more people are getting to know it,” says Riis. “A lot of things don’t work out, but for every five or 10 things I try, at least one does, and that leads to something else.”
For the small-town boy who spent summers on the river and blossomed into
the young man who fights to protect the Missouri for future generations
through photographs and words, this is an awesome responsibility.
