Knoxville photographers Scott and Bernadette West span the globe—from earth to Old City.
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
Altitude sickness is a nasty thing. When you climb quickly enough up something very high—like, say, Mt. Kilimanjaro—the air thins faster than your body can adjust. Your head starts to throb from lack of oxygen, your stomach starts to churn, your face and hands and feet start to swell. It was at this point that Scott and Bernadette West began to think maybe this whole adventure photography career wasn't such a great idea.
"It's like 19,340 feet," Scott West says of Africa's highest peak. "Well, after 12,000 feet, your body starts getting a little nauseous. But at 15,000 feet Bernadette was at a point where she couldn't eat. She was on Diamox, Advil and Rolaids. That's what she ate that last morning."
"I think it was the Diamox that actually made me sick," his wife adds. "It's supposed to help against altitude sickness."
They were scheduled to head out from their camp at midnight so they could reach the summit of Kilimanjaro, the Tanzanian mountain Hemingway called "[a]s wide as all the world, great, high and unbelievably white in the sun," and make it back down by nightfall. Their guide suggested pointedly that Bernadette should stay behind. The Wests refused.
"The truth is, I was feeling pretty nauseous too. But I was like, 'No, I will not leave my wife,'" Scott says. They both laugh about it, but at the time they weren't sure they'd actually make it all the way up. Eventually, they struggled to the mountain's "false summit," 1,000 feet or so from its actual crest. The guide again suggested they'd come far enough.
"Bernadette starts heading on up," Scott says. "So they've gotta go on then, the guide can't force us back down. We suddenly got our second wind, felt really good, got our jubilation, hurried up there, and [then] we busted down the mountain in about four times the speed.
"I still intend to climb more mountains," he concludes. "But Bernadette doesn't."
High sierras may be the only thing off the agenda for Knoxville's intrepid nature photographers, though. Over the past decade, the wandering Wests have dived off the Great Barrier Reef, witnessed volcanic eruptions by Hawaiian moonlight, watched a rhino chasing a pride of lions away from a Namibian water hole, and braved the local cuisine in Bali. They've also done plenty of trekking closer to home, in the Smokies and Big South Fork and Cherokee National Forest. Along the way, they've amassed a library of fairy tale images evoking the spirit of the places they've been. The gallery they started in 1993 to display their work, Earth to Old City, has grown to a family-run network of three stores selling everything from Beanie Babies to Indonesian carvings.
Scott, who's also the bass player for on-again off-again local punk-poppers Boy Genius, says with a grin, "My brother-in-law accuses me of somehow managing to create business out of my hobbies."
The traveling came before the photography. Bernadette was born on the move, an Army brat from the Midwest who spent time in Germany and eventually ended up pursuing a Masters in Fine Art at the University of Tennessee. She is now a flight attendant with Delta Airlines, a position that allows both the Wests to globe-trot on the cheap.
Scott's from Kentucky, a fast talker whose sometimes stream-of-thought conversation belies his creative writing degree (also from UT). Sitting at a table in the Old City's Java coffeeshop—a suitable setting, given their tireless promotion of the arts-and-dining district—they're an arresting pair. He's sloe-eyed, with a mischievous laugh and long blond-streaked hair pulled in a tight ponytail. She's a curly brunette and more reserved (if only incrementally), wearing a floral print dress with matching scarf and a light dusting of glitter on her arms and cheeks.
On their first trips together, they took pictures. And like most amateur photographers, they were frustrated by their inability to make the camera see what they saw.
"You come back from your trip, and you get the images back from the photographs, which don't look like what you remember," Scott says.
"Exactly," Bernadette says. "So we started putting more effort into getting the images, capturing more how we felt or what it was like to travel to those places."
Scott became especially focused, eventually working as an assistant to legendary outdoor photographers like Galen Rowell, John Shaw and Art Wolf while on the road with a seminar series called the Great American Photography Weekend. He learned about lenses and light and having the patience to wait for the right shot. Even so, the Wests' early expeditions, including that Kilimanjaro climb, had a high ratio of shutter-clicks to successes.
From the beginning, their interest was in something more than simple naturalism. Although they have had traditional outdoor photos printed in Sierra Club calendars, their most striking images have a near mystical quality. In Scott's widely reproduced photo of Knoxville's World's Fair Park during a thunderstorm, lightning flashes around the Sunsphere while the Tennessee Amphitheatre glows ghost-white against the purple sky. Bernadette's most familiar local image is probably the cover of this year's Knoxville Yellow Book, a Polaroid of Patrick Sullivan's in the Old City rendered impressionistic by a surface scratching technique.
"Lighting is key," Scott says. "The subject's got to be good, but it's interesting—you can have a fairly poor subject and great lighting will overcome that. But if you have poor lighting, then no subject can overcome that. So light is almost more the subject than the subject [is]. But of course, if you have a great subject and great light, that's your print photographs."
The Polaroids are a fairly new addition to their mostly conventional 35 mm arsenal. Scratched carefully with a chopstick or anything else that happens to be available and then blown up to frameable size, they look more like paintings than photographs. They're also a good ice-breaker with reluctant subjects.
"I take extra film, and I like taking pictures of people, so I can give them a picture and keep whatever I need for myself, and they're happy to interact," Bernadette says. "In Transylvania, some of the people I took pictures of had never had a picture of themselves. We don't speak any Romanian, and they didn't speak any English whatsoever, but they were so happy to get a picture of themselves."
Those kinds of interchanges dominate discussion of their travels. There was the time on a bus in Africa, for example, when the driver, some miles out of town, suddenly demanded more money from the Wests—on the evident grounds that, as Americans, they had more to spend. After stubbornly haggling for many minutes, Scott finally paused to convert the additional cost to his native currency. It added up to one dollar.
"I said, 'Take the dollar!'" Scott says, laughing in disbelief.
"Everybody on the bus was so happy," Bernadette says. "They passed that dollar around the whole bus, and everybody would look at us and wave and say, 'Thank you!'"
"And they're not the bus driver, they're not going to get the money, they're just people riding the bus," Scott says.
In Nairobi, a teeming "surreal" city, they found other manifestations of the First World/Third World gulf. Walking the crowded streets, they were the only Caucasians in sight. But when they turned off into a restaurant for dinner, they found all the other customers were American or European, while the staff was all African. "Colonialism is evident, still," Scott says.
In Transylvania, they found grimness and poverty lingering after nearly 50 years of oppressive Communist rule. Staying at one bed and breakfast, Bernadette had her dietary habits questioned. "This guy spoke English pretty well, and he said, 'How do you like the food?' I said, 'Well, you know, the food's good, but I really don't eat much meat.' And he goes, 'Only a rich, spoiled American can afford the luxury of not eating meat.'"
Food plays into many of their on-the-road stories, often in unpleasant ways. Scott spent most of a 19-hour plane ride home from Bali locked in the bathroom, dealing with the effects of the native cuisine.
But as their photographs attest, the voyages are full of magic moments. They talk with lingering awe of a cavern roof studded with constellations of glow worms in New Zealand, of the small and large temples that blanket the Balian landscape, of a Smoky Mountain trail suffused with fireflies. In fact, some of their best-loved (and best-selling) scenery is close to home.
"There's nowhere in the world that's more beautiful than the Smokies or anywhere on the Appalachian Trail in this area," Scott says. "In late May, you get flame azalea, which is unbelievable. In June, you get the rhododendrons, which are world-class."
"I like the Chimneytops during the fall," Bernadette says. "I like the hike. It's hard, but it's not long in duration, it's a good day-hike. You get great views from the top there."
One of their most popular photos, a maple leaf by an autumn stream (featured on the cover of this issue), is from the Chimneys. Other favorite spots include Mt. Cammerer, Gabes Mountain, and the wilds of Big South Fork. (You can see the Wests' work at the Gateway Regional Visitors Center—most of the photos of the regional parks in the exhibit area are theirs.)
Toting cameras everywhere they go could be a burden, but they say they find it liberating—it forces them to pay attention to things even most hikers ignore.
"When we go hiking with friends in the Smokies, a lot of times it's just about the hike—they want to get to the campsite," Bernadette says. "They get so bored of us, because we stop everywhere to take pictures: 'Oh man, look at this mushroom on this tree,' and they're like [snoring noise]."
"When you first start taking the photos, they're like, 'Man, that is really cool, I didn't even see that,'" Scott says. "So they stop. But after about an hour or two, they're ready to die."
At the end of the hikes, though, their friends usually ask for copies of the prints.
So where to next? The Wests' wish list is long, maybe endless. Morocco, Peru, Fiji, the Czech Republic, back to Africa and Australia... In the meantime, Scott's working on a new series of giant prints on vinyl, which now cover the wall at Earth to Old City. The gallery he and Bernadette started in 1993 is still their biggest outlet, even if the photos have had to make room for the store's mushrooming selection of handmade soaps, imported collectibles (many of them purchased during the couple's overseas trips), and, of course, Beanie Babies.
With his parents and both of their siblings keeping the business running, they plan to continue traveling pretty much forever.
"You kind of ask yourself, what is the most meaningful thing in life?" Scott says. "Of course, your human relationships, people you care about. And then you want to experience things, do things. I feel like Bernadette and I are at the beginning of our travels and tales. I hope when we get to the end of it, we have this really cool portfolio or library of images that present this interesting story."
They have a plan for the end, too.
"If we don't die at the same time," Scott says, "we're going to each have 12 destinations, [the other one] will have to take their ashes 12 different places, spread their ashes. You'll have one year and you'll have to do some kind of journey where you have to take their ashes all these special places we've been."
"And Scott's not picking easy ones," Bernadette says, laughing. "He's picking mountains for me to climb."
September 28, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 39
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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