New pictures guide captures the cultural landscapes of the Great Lakes shoreline | WUWM 89.7 FM

Photographer David Zurick grew up in a small city alongside Lake Huron, the place he spent his early life on the seaside, studying to ski, skate and swim.

Zurick left the Midwest to review Geography in Hawaii, which then led to his profession as a photographer touring all all over the world. Recently, he determined to show his lens again to his roots alongside the Great Lakes for his new pictures guide referred to as The Third Coast.

In Zurick’s guided picture tour by way of the seasons, there are over 100 photographs of Lakes Huron, Michigan, Superior, Erie and Ontario — from unbroken horizons of water and sky to coastal hometowns and remnants of trade.

Zurick says inspiration struck throughout the pandemic, as his globe-trotting pictures adventures got here to a halt. Upon returning to his hometown on the Thumb of Michigan, he realized he had taken the Great Lakes’ distinctive magnificence with no consideration.

“[When] I would go back and visit the Great Lakes, you know, I was always kind of confronted with the scale of the horizon, the scale of those lakes,” he says. “The spaciousness is what what I really came to appreciate about those great lakes.”

Beyond conventional nature pictures — or the “classic pretty picture,” as he places it — Zurick’s work tends to focus on the complicated interaction between water, land and the constructed atmosphere.

“I’m really interested in photographing places that connect in a certain way to human society,” he says. “That includes how we have transformed places — so I’m really looking at the landscape from a cultural landscape point of view, not a natural landscape point of view.”

Whether it is deserted homes, ice fishing shanties or an iron ore dock in Marquette Bay, Zurick is fascinated by the footprint that tradition leaves behind. In one picture he took whereas snowshoeing by way of Hiawatha State Forest, nonetheless, it was the absence of artificial noise led him to take the shot.

“You just had the flurries dropping down to these trees and I was trying to quietly walk through it and be there quietly,” he says. “So it’s the quiet of that image is what was most compelling for me.”

Zurick hopes that his images spotlight the variety of the Great Lakes, regardless of if the viewers grew up within the area or has by no means seen them in individual.

“Yes, they’re beautiful places, yes, they’re large places, but they’re incredibly diverse places and they’re important on so many levels in terms of the resources they provide. Certainly water, but other kinds of natural resources in terms of their recreational potential for people,” he notes. “So it’s really getting at these lakes as a geographic component of the larger American landscape, and it’s a place that a lot of folks, frankly, in the United States aren’t that familiar with, even though they’ve heard the name before.”