Dewitz - Blaze orange: whitetail deer hunting in Wisconsin

BLAZE ORANGE

Whitetail Deer Hunting in Wisconsin

TRAVIS DEWITZ

Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Publishers since 1855

Text and images 2014 by Travis Dewitz
Foreword 2014 by Thomas H. Garver
E-book edition 2014

For permission to reuse material from Blaze Orange (ISBN 978-0-87020-668-9, e-book ISBN 978-0-87020-669-6), please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of users.

wisconsinhistory.org

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Dewitz, Travis, 1979
Blaze orange : whitetail deer hunting in Wisconsin / Travis Dewitz.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-87020-668-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-87020-669-6 (e-book) 1. White-tailed deer huntingWisconsin. 2. White-tailed deer hunting WisconsinPictorial works. I. Title.
SK301.D42 2014
799.27652dc23

2014007113

I would like to express my most heartfelt gratitude to the following people:

First, to everyone at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, for seeing the potential in my book and choosing to publish it. A huge thank-you to all of those involved in its creation, in big or small ways.

And to all the people who gave permission to me to photograph them, for allowing me into your lives if only for a short time and letting me share in the various moments of your deer hunting season. Your cooperation and generosity made this book possible.

Finally, to my friends and family, for all the love, support, and encouragement you gave me throughout this process.

BY THOMAS H. GARVER

A lifelong resident of the Eau Claire area of west-central Wisconsin, Travis Dewitz is in willful possession of three seemingly conflicting professions. Through intensive study and regular training, he is an automotive diagnostic technician, one who is so knowledgeable of the computers in modern automobiles that he is busy both in the family automotive shop and on frequent calls to other mechanics to resolve complex electrical problems. Dewitz is also a full-time commercial photographer, an art in which he is entirely self-taught. He has developed through repetition, self-examination, and intense analysis a subtle skill at composition. He possesses a deep understanding of photographic vision, the awareness that what one sees and how the camera may record it can be very different and subject to careful manipulation. He photographs weddings, produces portraits for high school seniors, and documents places, people, and events as he is commissioned.

These two jobs provide a very full days work and reasonable remuneration, but it is Dewitzs other profession, perhaps better described as an obsession, which is of most importance here. Dewitz is a diarist-photographer, telling stories and sharing visual experiences as a way of diffusing his unique point of view into a wider field. He records places and events of deep interest to him, even when they are far distant from his normal sphere of activities, often posting his work on his website. These written and visual narratives range widely, from agricultural and industrial sites to subjects seen within a much smaller fieldthe record of a deteriorating Pennsylvania steel town or the fleshly intimacy of female tattoos. Dewitz creates these photography projects to fulfill his personal need to create. His mantra is, My best photographs are still out there. Im always chasing those images.

Whenever he can get awayand sometimes alongside his other work, as on annual training trips he takes to Kansas City for his automotive careerDewitz heads out in search of subjects for his camera. His time constraints demand that he know in advance what he wants to photograph and be prepared to work rapidly. One year found him in Williston, North Dakota, to document the oil and gas boom taking place in the Bakken formation. Another trip took him to the coal fields of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, and a third brought him to southern West Virginia, where he recorded derelict coal towns and the rail lines that serve the region, railroads being his favorite and most heavily photographed subject.

The Wisconsin gun deer hunt didnt fit Dewitzs daily schedule either, but it is an experience he remembers with nostalgia from his childhood. Each year, the hunt lasts only nine days, a moment in time at the end of November. Remarkably, Dewitz took just six days to capture the event in 2012, and each night he slept in his own bed. The efficiency and clarity of his vision are particularly marked when seen against the magnitude of the Wisconsin deer hunt itself, which is without doubt the largest statewide activity of the year. In 2012, almost 635,000 people bought a gun deer hunting license, donned the uniform of the blaze orange army, and headed out into the woods and fields of the state.

In contemplating and planning the project, Dewitz sought first to record it in as timeless a way as possible and to show a number of the ancillary activities that exist because of the deer huntbutchering, processing hides, making knives. But, for all of the people and movement and happiness and disappointment of this enormous event, what Travis Dewitz has created is a multifaceted portrait of intergenerational intimacy and comradeship. Hunting deer is a real experience, a blood sport (with a good deal of blood to be seen), conducted with ones friends and family. It may be a game, but it is one not played on the digital simulacrum of the screen. Today, the hunt is one of the few times and places, other than religious services or Thanksgiving, where generations truly mix with each other, and Dewitzs portraits of several generations standing together, or of young hunters with their guns, proud and shy and maybe just a little scared too, are among his best images.

Dewitz has also captured so well the muster points for this army, the country taverns, cafs, and grocery and general stores that are utterly devoid of any style, save what the powerful accretions of time have provided. All those antlers and heads on the walls are not there just to hold the Christmas lights; they form a skein of local history because each one marks a pinnacle moment for someone in the community, an icon of great personal importance and an object of reflection, there to be seen and remembered year after year.

The Wisconsin gun deer hunt is a deeply felt ritual in the state, one that is held in delicate balance by the conservation of wildlife, of which the hunt is one facet. But beyond that, Wisconsins Department of Natural Resources has found that the two most important elements drawing hunters back time and again into the woods and fields are seeing, and hopefully shooting, deer, and sharing in the community of family and companions assembled only for this brief moment each year. These are the memories of the hunt that Travis Dewitz recalls with nostalgia, and it is this record, in the field and back at the camp, or store, or tavern, that he has documented so well.

THOMAS H. GARVER has been involved with American art and photography for more than fifty years, most recently serving as organizing curator of the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia, the only museum in the United States devoted to the work of a single photographer. Prior to that, Garver was director of the Madison Art Center (now the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art) from 1980 to 1987. Now retired, he and his wife live in Madison, Wisconsin