" Turner Tie Barn, Northern Wyoming," black and white photo, 2004, Michael McClureIt is with great sadness that wyomingarts reports the death Friday, Nov. 28, of photographer Michael McClure of Lander. He died after a long illness.
Michael received a Governor's Arts Award last year in Cheyenne. His body of work encompasses almost 50 years and documented many changes across Wyoming, notably in the contested Red Desert.
For more about his life and work, go to today's Casper Star-Tribune story at http://www.casperstartribune.com/articles/2008/12/02/news/wyoming/b927fcafee8633de87257513000b32a2.txt
Here's the text of an article about Michael that appeared in the winter 2008 issue of the Wyoming Artscapes newsletter:
Wyoming became Mike McClure’s home when his mother moved to Lander in 1948 to practice medicine. It then became his life-long photographic subject.
His career began in 1960 as photo editor of the Daily Collegian at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he earned a B.A. in journalism. From there, he moved to United Press International Newspictures and the Detroit Free Press before returning home to Wyoming in 1971.
Publication of the Wyoming State Land Use Plan in 1979 gave Michael his first opportunity to create a border-to-border photographic essay about the state. In 1980, he was awarded a grant from the Wyoming Council for the Humanities and the Union Pacific Railroad for “Wyoming Tradition and Transition,” a 74-photograph exhibit still housed at the Wyoming State Museum and considered a documentary resource.
In 1983, Ansel Adams awarded Michael a scholarship to attend his week-long photography workshop in Carmel, California. He has also studied with Jerry Uelsmann, John Sexton and Robert Gilka.
In the late 1990s, while researching and writing his book Camping Wyoming, Michael began documenting rarely-seen historic sites in remote areas of the state. Abandoned homestead cabins, petroglyphs and other signatures of the past had long been left untouched in the unpopulated landscape. But natural decay, the pressures of development, and plunder by collectors were taking their toll and McClure realized that he should document these remains before they completely vanished from the landscape.
Through grants from the Wyoming Council for the Humanities, the Wyoming Arts Council, the NEA/USFS and Fremont Motor Company of Wyoming, Michael produced a 90-photograph interpretive exhibit, “Artifact: A Cultural Geography of Wyoming.” That exhibit opened at the State Museum in 2003 and remains in the museum’s traveling exhibits program. He also published a book of the same name.
McClure says that “the primary goal of a photographer should be to provide a fresh view of the world around us: an offering of new perspectives and a new opportunity to ‘see’ things differently.”
