Photographer shares vision of Great Smoky Mountains

Glenview Announcements (IL) November 25, 2009 | J.T. MORAND Staff Writer Nature is unpredictable, but Richard Mack’s photographs give the impression the Evanston photographer knows what to expect in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

His timing was perfect in 2006, when he snapped the image of the sunset over Morton Overlook when the clouds broke for 45 seconds before blotting out the sun again. Or, when walking with his family by a field in 1976, sans a tripod, he spotted deer grazing in the mist. He set up his camera on a fence post, hoped for the best and fired away.

“It was a magical moment,” he recalled. “We were the only ones around. I was thinking they wouldn’t work, but they came out perfectly.” Mack recently published Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes, a collection of 247 images he’s captured since visiting his favorite national park in 1974. He has also published The Lewis & Clark Trail: American Landscapes, for which he won the International Photography Awards Best Nature Book Silver Medal in 2005. site great smoky mountains

Mack has been photographing nature scenes and landscapes since getting his first camera as a senior at Evanston Township High School in 1973. After graduating, he delved further into photography while attending school in Oregon.

“It’s just a paradise for that stuff,” he said. in our site great smoky mountains

Although he has since visited several other national parks, his heart belongs in the Smokies, partly because of convenience but mostly because of the diversity of wildlife and landscape. The distance between his front door and the park that stretches from Tennessee through North Carolina is just 600 miles, a day’s drive.

“I cut my teeth on nature photography in that park,” Mack said. “The beauty of that park is so diverse.” A book on the park seemed like a natural follow-up to his first, The Lewis & Clark Trail: American Landscapes, for which he took pictures of places the 19th century explorers traversed between St. Louis, Mo., and the Pacific Ocean. But, he realized, in all the years he’d been going to the Smokies, there were parts he still hadn’t visited and scenes he hadn’t witnessed, such as the area where the reintroduced elk live, nor had he seen snow in the park. The last couple years were devoted to capturing those images.

He enlisted Steve Kemp, a writer for the Great Smoky Mountains Association and the author of several books on the park, and Kemp’s wife, a botanist, to write the foreword and to identify plants.

But, Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes is all Mack’s vision of the national park, which is a treasure worth preserving.

“I want (readers) to come away with a peaceful feeling,” he said. “But I also want them to know about the park.” Book signing and talk By Richard Mack on Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes. 7 p.m. Dec. 1 at The Book Stall at Chesnut Court, 811 N. Elm St., Winnetka. (847) 446-8880 or www.thebookstall.com. 6-8:30 p.m. Dec. 4 at Barnes and Noble, 1630 Sherman Ave., Evanston.

J.T. MORAND Staff Writer