‘Walt Driscoll, Taxidermist’
DRISCOLL LAUGHS. “HE HAD ME DOING ALL KINDS OF CRAZY STUFF.”
IN THE TOP LEFT corner of Vermont is the Northeast Kingdom, three high, cold counties on the edge of America, where Walt Driscoll is under permanent observation. Glass eyes are watching him. “We do fish,” he says. “A lot of fish. Deer heads, moose heads, bear rugs, bobcats, beaver, ducks, grouse, turkeys. We pretty much do anything.”
Taxidermy began as a teenage hobby, pursued through a correspondence course in Field & Stream magazine. But 29 years ago, Driscoll went professional, opening a store in Island Pond, a town of 821 human inhabitants. It was a smart move: Industry was abandoning the Northeast Kingdom, leaving it with hunting, tourism and the romantic name it acquired in the 1940s.
That name brought the French photographer Stéphane Lavoué to the territory. (That and the diffuse gray northern light.) Lavoué, a former engineer noted for Rembrandtish studies of writers, athletes and big political beasts, made the trip in 2007, chugging around the mountains in a motor home, stopping at farms, forges and meat-cutting businesses, and photographing their occupants in the difficult act of making a living. The local mechanic bearing his monkey wrench like a defensive weapon. A teenage butcher, blood drying on her arm, waiting beneath an arbor of ruby-red rib cages. Landscape pictures document the Vermont ground’s slow shift from dirty sleet to dirty grass. “We get five months of winter up here,” Driscoll explains.
When Lavoué rolled up on the taxidermist’s doorstep, he brought, as his bona fides, a copy of Time bearing his portrait of Vladimir Putin. “I was a little reluctant,” says Driscoll. “He had me doing all kinds of crazy stuff.” He laughs as he remembers standing out in the cold air, cradling the head of a white-tailed deer—steadfast man and stuffed ungulate facing the future together. Driscoll asks: “Did he make a booklet out of it?” More than that, I tell him. A thick book. An exhibition in Paris. When he hears about the venue, he laughs again. The name of the gallery is Fisheye.