When Michael Johnson goes out to photograph a landscape, he brings along his 1937 Deardorff view camera, five-by-seven black-and-white film, and patience. He goes to the place he’s been wanting to shoot–a barn a short drive from his home in Mount Carroll, Illinois, perhaps, or someplace just across the Mississippi River in Iowa–sets up his equipment, and waits. Waits for the sky to fill with the particular type of clouds he believes will complement this particular patch of ground. Waits for a coming storm to reach just the right level of fury. Waits for the changing light and shadows in his setting to arrange themselves into a portrait he appreciates.
Johnson doesn’t manipulate the landscape for his photography, and he doesn’t mess with it in his other line of work either. On the 70-acre farm where he and his wife, Patricia, grow trees for lumber, his approach is so subtle and naturalistic that on a walk around the grounds you’d think they were natural and unretouched.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Johnsons’ place is a tree farm, not a tree museum, and the work isn’t entirely selfless: every tree they cut down to make way for a preferred species becomes raw material for the sawmill they operate on their property, as do some members of the preferred species if they’re old enough to be cut down. “You’re growing some for your use, some for later,” Eads says. The sawmill operation is called Johnson Creek Hardwoods, for the stream (which got its name from some other Johnson) that runs along two sides of the property.
In both of his pursuits, photography and tree farming, Michael Johnson is elevating the Illinois landscape, an unassuming part of the world that’s usually overlooked in favor of Ansel Adams’s craggy peaks or rain forests in need of saving. Johnson’s work is a reminder that there’s something to be saved here, too, whether on photo paper or in the living landscape. “I’ve always found value in the land,” he says, “and all these things we do with the land. I do believe there is value in seeing the landscape.”
He didn’t buy it to farm. “I love solitude and I love trees,” Johnson says. His grandfather, Chicago financier Ralph Bard, had picked up a vast, forested Virginia plantation cheap during the Depression. (Bard, assistant secretary of the navy during World War II and later undersecretary, was part of the Interim Committee of eight appointed to advise President Truman on the use of the atom bomb.) The family would go down to Bard’s Virginia spread to hunt and hike. “My Aunt Kate asked him once about religion, and he said, ‘I guess it would have to be trees for me,’” Johnson recalls, and adds, speaking of himself, “I’d say my spirituality is certainly wrapped up in the natural world.”
Like those Dutch landscape paintings, his pictures make a subtle terrain look like the most precious section of the planet. The size of his prints, 26 by 36 inches, suggests they are important pictures of worthy places.
Describing one called Retreating Storm #2, he says, “These are the farm buildings across the way, and I’m in the van shooting because it’s raining. You can see the arabesque [of clouds] that I’ve waited to form from the bottom to the top of the frame, light and dark alternating, beginning with a dark foreground.
