Jim Appleton
This is a group of photographs about people.
On The Road – Jim Appleton – A life behind the lens: PeoplePost + Comments (14)
Outside Magazine hired me to document a story essentially about one guy and this tunnel.
It connects the town of Whittier, Alaska to the outside world.
Anchorage is about 100 miles away, but impassable terrain and limitations of the railroad schedule and its car-carrying capacity made that distance feel more like 1500 miles. Until modifications shortly after my visit which made the tunnel navigable by passenger cars, Whittier was a bizarre end-of-the-road high density community of class-A weirdos.
Mine were the “before” photos. Of those weirdos, mainly. The one guy I was sent to photograph tried, unsuccessfully, to drive the tunnel because he ran out of antidepressants.
Getting to Whittier from Anchorage was an epic process.
The magazine arranged for a float plane. Bad weather in Whittier prevented that option for several days, and then indefinitely.
Finally, I called the railroad and arranged for them to give me a ride on a regular maintenance run. I took a cab to the railhead at oh-dark-thirty, sat through the daily safety briefing, and met a doctor who was also hitching a ride, swapping with the doc then in Whittier.
After all that, this photo is shot from the deck of the flat car at the front of the train at the Whittier end of the tunnel. The guy in the photo is a driver ferrying the two doctors, who were at this moment going over some documents a few feet behind me.
Right after taking this, I asked the train operator when I should dismount.
He said to wait. I watched the arriving doctor drive off into town.
Then the train backed up at least a mile, and the operator told me this was where to get off.
I had considerable luggage and he knew that. And he knew what I was working on. He’d also just told me it’s common for bears to nap in chambers off the tunnel.
Welcome to Alaska. Now go work for the privilege of being here.
Leica M6, 50mm f/2 Summicron at f/5.6.
I used mechanical film cameras here partly out of esthetic preference, but also because of reliability in extreme cold — minus 30 Fahrenheit, with 60-mph gusts. Lightning-like discharge of static electricity directly onto the film surface is also a concern in the very dry air, so I took care to wind film slowly by hand.