Jeff Richter’s camera captures Lake Superior in rare and beautiful ways.
At first glance Pure Superior: Lake Superior
Photography
by Jeff Richter comes across as a beautifully designed, well thought out picture book with four essays dispersed throughout its pages to give a reader something to, well, read.
At second glance the 200-plus photographs stand out on their own as individual pieces of art. Theytell a story and it is one that can’t be absorbed in a “quick” glance.
Make no mistake. Jeff Richter is a top-shelf nature photographer. He shoots film—no digital reproductions or manipulations will be found in these pages—and in ten years of chronicling Lake Superior, its seasons and its animals, Richter manages to capture the beauty and strength of the area in ways I have not seen before.
With four well-known writers—Sam Cook of Duluth; John Bates of Manitowish, Wis; Justin Isherwood, Plover; and Howard Paap of Bayfield lending their sometimes funny, sometimes poetic stories to these pages, Lake Superior and many of her moods are revealed. The reader is whisked away on adventures most will never be able to take. The writers travel in sea kayaks or canoes or go on hikes into remote areas surrounding the lake. They take chances and risks most of us will never take, their experiences, their pleasure and their fear, their dances with the winds and waves of Lake Superior captured beautifully in word.
Lake Superior is a big lake, the largest fresh water lake in the world with a surface area of 31,700 square miles. It contains more fresh water than all of the other Great Lakes combined; in fact, 10 percent of the earth’s fresh surface water is held in this basin. More than 300 streams and rivers feed into Superior, and it hosts the largest island, Isle Royale, found in any fresh water lake on the globe.
All that aside, Superior is a translucent mirror; it is a cacophany of liquid light—sometimes tranquil, sometimes raging. It echoes the sounds of gulls and loons, ghostlike across its rocky shores. It whips and scuttles and shuffles the wind along its water. It is magical at its best, never boring or mundane. And it is captured in the lens of Jeff Richter in Pure Superior.
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