Trove of Colorado photos enters the public domain
For the past eight months at his home in the hills of Summit County, Colorado, John Fielder spent most every morning and afternoon sifting through photographs tucked away for decades.
They were transparencies from his years of hauling heavy film equipment deep into Colorado's backcountry. The transparencies needed paring down — duplicates in which the exposure and/or contrast wasn't quite right. Fielder estimated copies to number around 150,000, with another 50,000 or so from his digital days after 2008.
The countless hours spent sifting, editing and scanning were "enough to whack me," said Fielder, 72.
It was all for the sake of others.
Colorado's most famous nature photographer has arranged the gift of a lifetime: his lifetime of work, to be placed in the public domain.
History Colorado, a nonprofit agency preserving and promoting Colorado's heritage, has announced that Fielder has donated a massive portfolio spanning the peaks and plains of the state's nearly 105,000 square miles, compiled from an illustrious career spanning the better part of 50 years.
Some are well known, others have never been widely seen before. All of them, more than 5,000 selected from that batch of about 200,000, will be free for personal and commercial use upon History Colorado completing its online hub this spring.
History Colorado executive director Dawn DiPrince called the magnitude of Fielder's donation "breathtaking."
The donation was made, she said, "so that future generations might be both inspired in their stewardship and informed of how humanity has impacted these lands."
Fielder likes the idea of ordinary citizens getting to see remote hard-to-reach spots through his images. He also hopes scientists will use the repository "to have a baseline for judging climate change," he said, "and the impact of global warming in the decades to come."
Fielder previously collaborated with History Colorado on a seminal work, "Colorado 1870-2000." The book offered a side-by-side comparison of 20the century scenery with that captured by William Henry Jackson from the dusty frontier.
Just as the book cemented Fielder's legacy in 2000, it proclaimed the newer mission of his career: to somehow protect the grandeur he saw being compromised by man-made climate change.
"The deaths of millions of acres of trees because of global warming," he said. "The proliferation and fecundity of insects that would normally freeze to death in the bark, but now have been able to propagate beyond what they normally would because of global warming."
And glaciers. "Even though we're not known for massive glaciers, we still have them. St. Vrain Glacier in the Indian Peaks Wilderness — that thing is almost completely gone. In Rocky Mountain National Park — gone."
He has said he realized at a certain point that his photos had popularized and even marketed the state's beauty. And he sought to be part of the solution.
He uses his photos to fund and promote causes dear to him, such as clean air and water. And causes such as the initiative approved by the state's voters in 1992 that created Great Outdoors Colorado, which has used lottery revenues to set aside more than a million acres. In 1993, the Colorado Wilderness Act created 36 federally protected landscapes — landscapes that Fielder spent days, weeks and months exploring to provide inspirational photos to lawmakers.
While people have been a problem, Fielder maintains hope that they can also help. "I have come to know that photographs can influence human action," he said.