Editor's Note: This online tribute to photographer James Barker is a collaboration of KYUK and KNBA. Watch an episode of Alaska Backstory, produced by reporter Rhonda McBride and edited by KYUK news director, Evan Erickson. It features interviews with Barker's wife, Robin, and Fairbanks photographer Charles Mason.
If you want your ashes scattered into the Kuskokwim River, this is the time of the year to do it. The tundra in Western Alaska is ablaze with red and gold. The skies are silver-grey, and the silty Kuskokwim River mirrors the surreal light and shadow of the clouds overhead. Although photographer Jim Barker worked mostly in black and white, he would have relished the thought of his ashes making that final journey.
This weekend, his wife Robin and his son Eric will travel from their home in Fairbanks to Bethel, to carry out this final tribute to a man whose passion was photographing and documenting the life of the Yup'ik people, who have long called this land home.
Barker died in March at the age of 89. He had long struggled with his health, limited mobility and memory loss. Yet even in his last days, his wife says a camera managed to find its way into his hands.
"He was using a walker, but he could get himself out the front door and just photograph the trees right in front of the house," Barker said. "He just wanted to make images right up until he couldn't anymore, and yeah, he was alive behind that camera in a way that he wasn't at any other time."
Before he arrived in Bethel in 1973, Barker had been working as a freelance photographer. It was there that he met Robin, married and started a family with the birth of their son.
The Barkers made Bethel their home for nearly 15 years, a time when Jim created a remarkable body of work, a legacy that continues to grow in importance.
"I've never done what Jim did, even come close," said Charles Mason, a friend of Barker's, who recently retired from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he taught photography.
"One of the things you don't see young photographers, or any photographers doing these days, is living someplace like Bethel for 14 years or so," Mason said, "and just making your life work so that you can photograph and document a particular lifestyle anywhere in the world. The resulting photographs have a dimension to them that you can't get by parachute journalism."
The result of Barker's dedication was Always Getting Ready: Upterrlainarluta, a book which documented how the Yup'ik people live off the land and waters — a life in which people are always getting ready to hunt, fish or gather wild foods. Barker arrived at a time when many of those traditions had begun to disappear.
"It was the time when the seal gut was inflated and strung all over the village to dry, vibrating in the wind," Robin said, recalling a trip to Toksook Bay, where women in the village still stitched together waterproof strips of seal intestines into traditional raincoats.
It was there that Barker captured a photo of Frances Usugan, carrying an armload of inflated intestines. She stopped and turned towards the camera with a big smile, a scene that would nearly be impossible to capture today.
The Yup'ik people gave Barker extraordinary access. A group of men even let him inside a fire bath, a hotter version of a steam bath. They wore face masks woven from grass to protect their lungs. Everyone was naked, including Jim, who entered carrying only his camera.
What Barker soon learned was that for a white man to be invited into a steam bath was more than a gesture of friendship. It was a test of endurance. The goal was simple: drive the newcomer out with intense heat.
"It got smokier and smokier, and he thought he was going to die," said Robin, recalling their trip to Toksook Bay. "They did chase him out eventually."
"So there he was, right in the middle of the village, without a stitch on, but he's holding his camera, right?" Robin said. Later a group of women approached her laughing with knowing eyes and said, "We saw your husband."
But Jim Barker came away with more than just a story about a joke. He captured another iconic photograph of a way of life that has largely vanished, one of many moments that might otherwise have been lost to history.
Even today, fellow photographer Charles Mason still marvels at Barker's ability to photograph people as they truly were, unguarded and at ease before the camera.
"All documentary photographers like to claim they have this invisibility cloak they can put on and kind of be the fly on the wall, "Mason said. "Jim really did, and it gave his camera a real ability to capture truth."
Walkie Charles, a longtime friend of Barker's and a Yup'ik language expert, said Yup'ik Elders named him "Qucillgaq," after the sandhill crane. The name fit because Barker was tall and thin with long legs like a crane. But it was his modus operandi that made the name stick.
"That's the cool thing about Jim. He appears and disappears, just like a crane," Charles said. "He jumps around from one place to another, and then he's gone, and then he appears, and then he leaves, and he reappears, and then he's gone."
Charles, who recently retired as head of UAF's Alaska Native Language program, reflected on a chance meeting with Barker in the spring of 1977. He was on his way to the Bering Sea village of Stebbins, to help an elderly cousin with the herring harvest. Barker was on his way out of the village, after photographing that process.
To preserve the herring, the women tied the fish to strands of beach grass, to make long braids so they could be hung to dry. He recalls talking about the difficulty of their work with Barker, who he described as a "twig of a man."
Years later, when Always Getting Ready was published, he was surprised to find out he was in the book, along with photographs of the women braiding the herring.
"He quoted me saying, 'I'll never eat another herring without the gratitude of how much work women do to process these amazing fish,'" he said. "He didn't say, 'I'm an ethno-photographer.' He was just so nonchalant."
Barker didn't have a notepad. Charles thought that was the end of the conversation. But after the book came out, a friendship began in Fairbanks, where both had moved. For Charles, Barker's photographs always brought back a sense of home and identity.
"He somehow was given license by the Elders to take those photographs, as if with a blessing," said Charles, who wonders if the Elders foresaw their importance, as if to say, "I know what you're going to do with these. These are gifts for us from you through your lenses."
"I wish photos could speak," Charles said, because each one tells a story. "Jim Barker was such an ethnographer that he would take those times to just focus on the moment."
"Jim Barker's legacy is that he was preparing for a gift that we didn't know we were going to receive," he said. "How priceless that gift of photography that he has left with us, so that we could continue to recognize that beautiful moment in time."
A group of Barker's friends has organized a community gathering on Saturday, Oct. 3. The event is timed to coincide with a visit from Robin and Eric Barker, who will share photographs and memories highlighting another facet of Barker's talents: comedy sketches he created for KYUK, Bethel's public radio station.
Barker channeled a keen, deliciously Bethel sense of humor into his radio productions, featuring characters he created like Snow Machine Bob. He even staged a fake "honey bucket" relay, poking fun at Bethel's lack of plumbing. The memorial will be held in Room 118 at the Kuskokwim Campus from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
