BRISTOL BAY

Photos by: Brian Adams

For this Fall 2020 magazine article about salmon fishing in Bristol Bay, I got together with our text team to help determine the approach for this story. TNC's work in this region is about the community and our writer, Dustin Solberg, used to live in this area. He knew a great deal about the way of life in the area, and we felt that this would be a unique opportunity to tell a local story about community at a national scale. We wanted to capture the ephemeral quality of the short summer and the salmon fishing season that economically sustains this region throughout the year, and we wanted the emotional takeaway to be very personal. For all of these reasons, I reached out to photographer Brian Adams who is from Alaska and whose work always depicts a reverence for the people of his home state. Brian's medium format film work contributed to that feeling of fleeting warmth in a northern climate. Our online article included an audio version of the story, read by the writer, that also leant to the personal quality of the story.