SHOOTING FOR NATURE
Ford worker Kaiser now defends Windsor’s wild space with his camera
Early mornings in the winter are Gerry Kaiser’s preferred times for photography. The longtime autoworker, shown here at Ojibway Prairie Reserve, is gaining recognition for his award-winning outdoor photographs and the natural beauty they reveal. He hopes they help spur public support to preserve the local environment.
For outdoors lover Gerry Kaiser, protecting what remains of the local area’s natural wonders once meant protesting — loudly and publicly.
The LaSalle Woodlot, a treed oasis developers yearned to bulldoze for housing, and Marshfield Woods, a large Carolinian forest near Harrow eyed by a Windsor industrialist for a top-flight golf course, were two of the biggest local battlegrounds for eco-activists in the late-1990s. Kaiser was drawn to such conflicts — during one call to action at the time, he shot off a Windsor Star letter to the editor, imploring readers to “feel the proper outrage necessary to stop this madness.”
That was then.
“I used to be that environmental activist. It took a lot out of me, always fighting everyone, constantly getting pushback,” said Kaiser, a Windsor autoworker with more than 34 years at Ford’s Essex Engine plant.
“Now, I create beautiful images to show, ‘This is what you will lose.’ Maybe it’ll get people to do something.”
Devoting more time documenting what makes the local natural landscape so spectacular, Kaiser’s outdoor images are getting attention and garnering awards. Now 54, Kaiser remembers growing up in Windsor and playing in wild spaces within the city limits. Windsor used to be filled with fields and “places to explore — we don’t have that today.” He’s now busily documenting what Windsor and Essex have left, hoping his audiences will see in his images something glorious and worth preserving.
Kaiser said he dabbled in painting in his younger years, “but I didn’t have the patience to continue along that route.” When it comes to his photography, however, he seems to exhibit plenty of patience. He’ll spend hours on the ice of frozen lakes to get the image he knows is there, and he will visit the same spot “a hundred times” to capture just the right shot. He works in the factory from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., but he’ll frequently be up before dawn to capture the best light of the day. He relies on weather apps to know, for instance, if winds are forecast to be hitting the Port Stanley shore in a certain way in the morning. Kaiser said it was at about age 50 that “it hit me, ‘I’ve got some great work,’” and he began seriously turning to photography as a new profession. After garnering media attention with a month-long exhibition in Toronto, part of a show called Wasteland, in which Kaiser depicted some of the post-recession decline in the auto sector, “I started getting bold and submitting my work to magazines.” Kaiser’s image of Old Woman Bay won a first prize and adorns the current cover of Lake Superior Magazine. His dramatic photos of the shoreline “ice volcanoes” of Lake Huron, taken on a bitterly cold and windy day, are part of a two-page spread in the winter edition of Mountain Life magazine, which also featured a double-page spread of his outdoor photography in its summer edition last year. In Port Stanley, he would brace himself and his tripod against the howling winds and capture wild Lake Erie wave action. Some of his dramatic photos looking like charging animals.
“The water, the ice, the waves, these forms show up ... there’s a mythic quality. The camera captures things the naked eye will never see,” said Kaiser. Winter is his favourite season, when “the light is absolutely beautiful in the early morning.” The way sunlight hits the shards of broken ice, “you think you can see people inside.” The key, he said, is always trying to capture something different in the lens but also being open-minded about the possibilities. “My philosophy is you never know what you’ll get,” he said. Recently, with his long lens staring down a wintry path at Ojibway in a -20C wind chill, a group of deer unexpectedly wandered into the picture.
With his work available for sale at Walkerville’s Urban Art Market, Kaiser said his income from photography covers his expenses. He’s got another year of helping turn out Ford crankshafts to pay off the mortgage on his Riverside home, and then he hopes to devote himself full-time to his love of photography. “Photography is not something I do, it is an organic part of my existence, an extension of who I am,” said Kaiser. He now has a website, www.kaiserphotography.ca.
The young guys on the bench are helping us win, but they don’t have egos. SERGE IBAKA, Toronto Raptors
Photography is not something Ido,itisan organic part of my existence, an extension of whoIam.