Clyde Butcher – The Ansel Adams of our Time

Esteemed landscape photographer Clyde Butcher can’t quite see the fame he has achieved with his iconic black and white landscape photography. He’s famous enough that former President Jimmy Carter has taken a swamp walk with him. He’s also famous enough to have worked with Everglades advocate Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, author of the seminal book “Everglades: River of Grass,” published in 1949. Butcher’s also famous enough that renowned documentarian Ken Burns used his images of the Everglades in his 2009 documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. And locally, Butcher's fame motivates his followers to drive 50 miles east from Naples and 50 miles west from Miami to visit his Big Cypress Gallery, thinking nothing of spending as much as $300,000 to fill their walls with his monumental images.

Butcher doesn’t see himself as famous. To him, he’s still the son of a humble sheet metal worker who hopscotched around the country in the 1950s.

“To this day, we keep thinking it's somehow a fluke,” Butcher said. “I probably never have thought of myself as famous. Never really thought of it. It’s just what I do. I don’t call it being famous. Other people see it, but I don’t see it. We live in a 900-square-foot house. I was the son of a sheet metal worker. We lived in a trailer for five years. We were living in Kansas City in 1953, and sheet metal work there kind of died. So my dad started going to different work. So we spent two years here, one year there, and two years there. It was in Charleston, Paducah, Kentucky, and southern Ohio. Then we moved to California in 1956.”

Of course, California is the land of Ansel Adams, the landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black and white images of the American West. Legend has it that photographers used to go out into the national parks to try to find Adams’ tripod tracks in an attempt to capture images like his.

 "I have done that, too,” Butcher said. "I saw his work for the first time in 1962, in his Yosemite Gallery.”

Butcher had his eye on an Ansel Adams photograph but couldn’t justify the cost at the time.

“It was $75,” Butcher said. "I was living on $100 a month, so it was a lot of money for me then. I was going to college. I didn't have any money. I mean, I had just enough money to get through college."

So, was Adams a hero to Butcher?

“Oh, sure, sure,” Butcher said. "Unfortunately, when I got into photography back in the 1960s, I was in black and white. Then about 1972 we went to color. And as I got more involved, it was in color, and I never really got excited about seeing him because he was doing black and white and I was doing color. But about the year he died is when I wanted to see him. But I never did."

Butcher has received many honors for his black and white landscape photography. He places two honors at the top.

“Probably the Florida Artists Hall of Fame,” he said, “and the award from the Sierra Club, the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation and Photography in 2000."

Butcher is proud to have his name linked with Ansel Adams.

"Yeah, it's because of the quality of what we're doing,” Butcher said.

Butcher doesn’t mind comparing his work to the work of Adams, who was contracted by the U.S. Department of Interior to photograph the national parks. 

“He didn't know how to print,” Butcher said of Adams. “I know how to print. Very few people know how to get a good white, a good black and all the tonal grays. I feel my photography is quite a bit different than his. People think it's the same, but it's quite different because I feel my pictures draw people in. His pictures are mostly of things."

Butcher said his approach is a product of his education.

"I'm an architect,” Butcher said. "We were taught how to see. Most people don't know how to see. You only see four degrees. You perceive maybe 150, 160.  So, if you want to see a scene, you have to scan it. You use your eyes to scan it. I make my pictures large so you have to scan them to be able to see them. And that gives you a feeling of being there."

The only national park Adams didn’t photograph was Everglades National Park. Consequently, Ken Burns turned to Butcher for images for his famous documentary on the national parks.

“We gave him stuff on the Everglades for his documentary on the national parks,” Butcher said. "And we did a thing together in the Senate committee about what we could do to get more people into the smaller national parks. That's about it. He really loves my work.”

A career highlight for Butcher came when he was sought out by former president Jimmy Carter, who was 80 years old at the time.

 “It was kind of fun that we were able to take President Carter and his family on a swamp walk,” Butcher said. "Apparently, he wanted to get to see me. He'd heard about me. He was such a neat guy. We would sit down and talk, and it was just like talking to your old friend. The park people brought him down. We had a real interesting talk to kind of introduce him to the swamp. We gave him a tour of the gallery and I explained to him that I was using an 8x10 camera and some of the exposures were like six minutes long. And he said he had just got one of the brand-new Canon digital cameras. He was just a really active guy. He's just like a full ball of energy. I took him through the gallery and explained the pictures. We got to this last photograph and he said, 'Isn't it difficult? What you do isn't the easy way to do it.' And I said, 'Well, how was running for president? Was that difficult?' He broke up laughing.”

Butcher said Carter was surrounded by Secret Service agents. Butcher was concerned about the agents using their guns if they encountered alligators in the swamp.

“I told them that the most important thing for safety is a walking stick,” Butcher said. "And I said, 'Now these guns can be very dangerous out there. The bullets could bounce off and kill somebody. So the best way of doing it is just take a stick and knock the alligator in the nose. They’ll go away. You don't have to worry about it.'"

Butcher said the Secret Service wanted to limit the swamp walk to 10 minutes.

“We got to this point where we're supposed to turn right and go back in,” Butcher said. "And I said to President Carter, 'Well, you know, if we go straight, it gets darker and it gets prettier and it gets deeper. They want us to go back this way.' And he says, 'Oh, no, we'll go straight!’ So we went straight and the Secret Service turned right. And all of a sudden they realized that the president was gone. They panicked. I've got a picture with them coming back in from the swamp. Both he and Rosalynn were smiling and he said this was one of the best things he'd done since he was a kid. I thought it was really, really great because you can't see the Everglades from the road. You have to physically get into it.”

Butcher, 81, said his proudest accomplishment is his work with the Everglades.

 "I think my proudest accomplishment,” Butcher said, "is bringing people and politicians to the Everglades and getting them to understand how important they are. Opening the eyes of people about Big Cypress and the Everglades. When I first started, everything was basically pictures of birds and gators because people didn't want to get into the Everglades. It opened the eyes of both the people and the politicians to the beauty and importance of Big Cypress and the Everglades."

That’s a legacy to be proud of.

"It really is,” Butcher agrees. "I mean, before I started this, the Everglades was just kind of like a swamp to just get through to go to Miami, to get through as fast as you could.”

You could say Butcher has picked up where Marjory Stoneman Douglas left off.

“Yeah,” Butcher said, "it was basically over Big Cypress that she really got started."

Butcher had several interactions with Stoneman Douglas.

"She was a hoot, boy,” Butcher said. "I did her 100th birthday card. We had an opening to celebrate her 101st birthday and I had posters there that she was signing. She was sharp as a tack. I met with her again when she was 104.”

Butcher, a stroke survivor, was scheduled for prostate surgery on September 7, the day after his birthday. He vows to get back in the swamp. Don’t count him out. He’s no stranger to adversity. In fact his legacy was born of adversity.

 “In 1986,” Butcher said, "when our son was killed, that's when I went back to black and white. He was a passenger in a car. He was going to a movie and a guy ran the red light. He was the only person in the car who got killed. The other two guys just had minor injuries. That was actually on our anniversary—and Father's Day, June 15th, 1986.

"Then we had an art show,” Butcher recalls. "We were making a living doing art shows. We had a show in Ann Arbor, Michigan in August. We decided maybe it'd be good that we just go. I was doing color work then. I was sitting at my booth for three, four days, looking at the color, and I'm saying, ‘You know, this isn't really telling the story about Florida. You can't see it because of the color.'

"I said, ‘Okay, when I get back, I'm going to get an 8x10 camera. I'm going to take all my color work to the dump, and I’m just going to start my black and white.' And that's what I did. I took, retail wise, probably $40,000 of pictures, two full van loads, to the dump. I watched the truck run over them. It felt like I was committed. My wife, Niki, was doing art shows with hand-painted black and white, and she was making enough money for us to live on. I decided that's what I was going to do, because I think that's what I needed to do. I started photographing in Florida, not for what I thought would sell, but what I thought was important. And the first show, I did as well as I did in color."