{"id":42346,"date":"2019-01-20T13:19:53","date_gmt":"2019-01-20T19:19:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=42346"},"modified":"2019-02-13T22:46:57","modified_gmt":"2019-02-14T04:46:57","slug":"stephen-trimble-interpreter-and-messenger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/stephen-trimble-interpreter-and-messenger\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Trimble: Interpreter and Messenger"},"content":{"rendered":"

This profile was written in conjunction with Artists of Utah’s <\/em>Utah’s 15 program and appears in the <\/em>publication\u00a0<\/em>Utah’s 15: The State’s Most Influential Artists Vol. II\u00a0(order your copy here<\/a>). His works appear in the current exhibition by that name at Salt Lake City’s Rio Gallery, through March 8.\u00a0Trimble will also participate\u00a0as part of Artists of Utah’s READ LOCAL Onsite series Wednesday, January 23 at Finch Lane Gallery, 7 p.m.. He will be appearing with David G. Pace, and both writers will read from their works and engage in a discussion with each other and the audience.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Stephen Trimble out on his daily walk in Salt Lake City, 2018, photo by Simon Blundell.<\/p><\/div>\n

One snowy day in 2011, Stephen Trimble and his wife, Joanne Slotnik, arrived at a grove on the lower slopes of Mount Rainier with the ashes of his father. Trimble was born in Denver in 1950 to Don and Isabelle Trimble. Isabelle grew up in a small Montana town. Don was a geologist who worked his way through college and graduate school as a hard rock miner at the tail end of the Depression. He was responsible for Steve\u2019s interest in photography and the natural world, Isabelle for his interest in people, and both for his respect for storytelling. \u201cEvery vacation was a new national park, and on our road trips Dad kept up a running commentary on Western history and landscape,\u201d Trimble remembers. \u201cHis stories sounded more like parable. He retold them to communicate his values.\u201d With reverential regard, Don Trimble, who hailed from Toppenish, Washington, referred to Mount Rainier as \u201cThe Mountain.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Trimble knew that some of his dad\u2019s ashes belonged in that \u201cparadise of Paradises,\u201d the southern slope of Mount Rainier National Park. \u201cWe needed to leave some of him there. And we did.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a>Trimble is a humble force of nature. His 25th book, The Capitol Reef Reader, <\/i>will appear spring of 2019 from the University of Utah Press. He\u2019s been a freelance writer and photographer since the 1970s. His accolades include the Sierra Club\u2019s Ansel Adams Award for Photography and Conservation, the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum\u2019s Western Heritage \u201cWrangler\u201d Award, a Doctor of Humane Letters from his alma mater, Colorado College, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from the University of Utah\u2019s Tanner Humanities Center. His writing has received the <\/span>Benjamin Franklin Award for excellence in independent <\/span>publishing, New Mexico\u2019s Best Arts Book Award<\/span>, The Arizona Daily Star Best Southwestern Book, <\/i><\/span>the School Library Journal\u2019s Top Ten Non-Fiction Books, and the Utah Book <\/span>Award in Nonfiction, among others. His activism has brought him far afield: in 2018 he contributed an <\/span>online lecture, <\/span>\u201c<\/i>Community or Commodity? Why Utah Fails the Moral Challenge of the Climate Crisis,\u201d to The Permanent Peoples\u2019 Tribunal on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change. In this gutsy piece, Trimble explores what he describes as our \u201cchasm of values.\u201d
\n
\nBut none of this adequately describes who Steve Trimble is as a writer, photographer, naturalist, conservationist or artist.<\/span>\u201cI don\u2019t use the word \u2018artist\u2019 to define myself,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t use the word \u2018art\u2019 to describe what I make. It\u2019s up to you<\/i> to decide if my writing or photography is art. My job is to write well, to photograph well, to do my best work as a craftsman.\u201d<\/h4>\n

In person, Trimble is reflective and personable. He expresses a generosity of spirit capable of forgiveness but committed to accountability. He has a keen sense for words, realizes when he hasn\u2019t found the best one to describe what he wants to say, and measures breath in a way to allow time for his language of ideas to develop. It is difficult to contextualize, in so brief a profile, the life of a working artist who\u2019s been an active producer for five decades. One can speak of \u201cphases,\u201d \u201cperiods,\u201d or even \u201clayers,\u201d a term that initially seems to serve the purpose but proves incorrect because it suggests covering one thing with another. A more appropriate way to think of Trimble\u2019s development as an artist is to see it as extending through two concentric circles that fold into one another along a single plane. Space and silence dominate one arc, where the artist serves as interpreter of our natural world. The other arc envelops intimacy and relationships, where Trimble is the messenger between subjects and readers.<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a>Immediately following his days as an undergraduate<\/span> at Colorado College, Trimble worked as a technical writer for the BLM. His boss, more bureaucrat than writer, was <\/span>nevertheless a fierce editor. \u201cIt was the first time that anyone <\/span>took what I\u2019d written and tore it apart<\/i>,\u201d he recalls. \u201cHe understood clarity and precision. His criticism was a real gift.\u201d At the Museum of Northern Arizona Press, where he was director, Trimble learned about marketing, design, artistic collaboration, and editing.<\/span><\/h4>\n

Trimble\u2019s first saddle stitches were explorations of the natural landscape for the National Park Service while he worked as a seasonal ranger, beginning with Great Sand Dunes: The Shape of the Wind<\/i> (1975) and Rock Glow, Sky Shine: The Spirit of Capitol Reef<\/i> (1978). This natural history work culminates in his first freelance project, The<\/i> Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin<\/i> (1989), wherein Trimble proves himself a master of intimacy by capturing the natural essence of things in photographs up close and far away. His accompanying prose is elegant and muscular. \u201cI knew a lot about the Southwest before beginning the project,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I didn\u2019t know anything more of the Great Basin than headlights and late-night truck stops. I take enormous pleasure in learning about new country. I fell <\/span>in love with the Great Basin because it\u2019s so enormously wild.\u201d
\n<\/span>
\nTrimble\u2019s writing about Native people began in 1984, when the curator of anthropology at the Heard Museum (Phoenix) contacted Trimble about a new wing for the museum\u2019s permanent collection of Southwest Native American artifacts. The museum hired Trimble (partnering with New York photographer Harvey Lloyd) to record interviews and take pictures for an introductory slideshow about contemporary Native Americans. \u201cUp until then, I was a natural history writer. I was hanging out in the desert and writing in my journal about the land, not the people.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/h4>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Apache girl\u2019s coming-of-age ceremony, White Mountain Apache Tribe, Arizona, 1984, Stephen Trimble .<\/p><\/div>\n

That summer, when Trimble was on the road nonstop to talk to Native people throughout the Southwest, was transformative. It resulted in the slideshow Our Voices, Our Land<\/i>, which also became a book and calendar. Trimble expanded on this fieldwork to create<\/span> Talking with the Clay <\/i>(1987), a book about Pueblo pottery from the perspective of 60 potters, and finally, his seminal work on Southwest <\/span>Native Americans, The People <\/i>(1993), of which Tony Hillerman<\/span> remarked: \u201cIt may well become one of those classics that stay in print forever.\u201d The 496-page compendium (words and photographs by Trimble) \u201credefines American ethnography\u201d (Library Journal) and remains the best introduction to the 50 Southwest Native nations available.<\/span><\/h4>\n

While in much of his writing Trimble has acted as natural world interpreter, or messenger between peoples,\u00a0he also has used personal life experience as a catalyst for art. In 1994, while both men were young fathers, he co-authored with Gary Paul Nabhan <\/span>The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places<\/i>, a book that combines environmental psychology, gender studies, ethnobotany, and personal history to explore the relationship between youth and the wild.<\/span><\/h4>\n

All these skillsets coalesce in Bargaining for Eden<\/i>: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America <\/i>(2008). Here, Trimble combines the lessons of land and narrative to tell a story about conquest and identity in the American West. His parallel stories involve Snowbasin\u2019s privatization of public lands for the 2002 Olympic Games and Trimble\u2019s own issues as a land owner in Torrey, Utah. It won him the 2008 Utah Book Award for Nonfiction and represents, in his mind, his best writing. He calls The People<\/i> his most significant accomplishment. But his favorite<\/i>?\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cProbably the pottery book because it\u2019s such a privilege to hang out with the potters. I loved that experience.\u201d<\/span><\/h4>\n

In large part these projects were made possible by Trimble\u2019s work as a stock photographer. He\u2019d sell images to textbooks, guidebooks, and magazines, which gave him time to write. By the end of the 1990s, however, the internet had flooded the market with free images. \u201cI found myself scrambling to make a living because my income flow had all but disappeared. Eighty-five percent of my income had come from photographs. When that went away, I never really did solve the problem.\u201d<\/span><\/h4>\n

Or at least not decisively. Trimble taught writing at the University of Utah Honors College; he lined up speaking gigs; he worked as a consultant for the Nature Conservancy; he wrote copy for the (then) new Natural History Museum. He suffered an identity crisis. \u201cIt was very difficult, and remains so for all creative folks looking to be valued fairly in the world.\u201d<\/h4>\n

No matter where he\u2019s found himself in the world, Trimble has been politically active since the year he started college in 1968.(Think Vietnam War, draft cards, Kent State, and Abbie Hoffman.)<\/span> \u201cAmerican cities were burning. Our most charismatic leaders were being assassinated,\u201d he remembers. \u201cI might be drafted to go fight a war that was a horrific mistake. We were all activists about something. We protested. We held the powerful accountable. We joined groups to make waves. That said, I focused my activist energy on the land.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span><\/h4>\n

At 18, Trimble joined the Sierra Club just before the Board ousted Executive Director David Brower for his \u201cradicalism.\u201d An environmentalist and mountaineer from Berkeley, California, Brower had been placing full-page advertisements in The New York Times and printing \u201cbattle books\u201d with the specific purpose of engaging Congress on land-related issues. \u201cThe ads worked. Brower kept dams out of Grand Canyon, but the Sierra Club lost its tax-exempt status as a result, so they forced him out,\u201d Trimble remarks. Trimble decided Brower was his guy. He bought all the battle books and used them as models for his writing and photography. He began drafting letters to Congress. He urged legislators to proclaim the Escalante protected wilderness, spoke against coal mines on the Kaiparowits Plateau, and protested nuclear waste disposal at <\/span>Canyonlands.<\/h4>\n
\"\"<\/a>

The Henry Mountains from Panorama Point, Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, 2015, by Stephen Trimble.<\/p><\/div>\n

Throughout the 1970s and \u201880s, Trimble spent as much time in the wilderness as he could. He discovered Edward Abbey\u2019s Desert Solitaire<\/i> and the writing of Wallace Stegner. He also developed a network of lifelong relationships: Terry Tempest Williams, Dave Livermore (Utah <\/span>Director of the Nature Conservancy), and naturalist writer Ann Zwinger (1973 finalist for the National Book Award\u00a0<\/span>in science) among others. By the time he moved to Salt Lake City in 1987, he already enjoyed an established community of artists, environmentalists, and friends.\u00a0 <\/span><\/h4>\n

One afternoon in 1995, Trimble and Williams sat down over tea to brainstorm what they could do about an anti-wilderness bill proposed by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah. Their solution: Testimony<\/i>, a stunningly handsome chapbook of the best writing about Utah from writers and poets like Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Mark Strand, Ellen Meloy, and Rick Bass. Within two months of their call for submissions, Williams and Trimble were in Washington, D.C., delivering Testimony<\/i> to members of Congress. Their champions, Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Bill Bradley, D-N.J., moved to filibuster the bill. To buy time, Feingold read Trimble\u2019s essay on the floor of the Senate.<\/h4>\n

The bill was defeated.<\/h4>\n

When President Clinton declared Grand Staircase a National Monument, he told Terry Tempest Williams that Testimony<\/i> had influenced his decision to do so. There exist innumerable examples of art and literature created in response<\/i> to a social or political issue. But how many works can we name that are used as tools to defeat legislation?\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>Twenty years later, Director of Torrey House Press Kirsten Johanna Allen volunteered to publish a chapbook (2016) and subsequent trade edition for a second generation <\/span>Testimony<\/i> project in response to Republican Congressman Rob Bishop\u2019s Public Lands Initiative \u2014 legislation that Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance characterized as \u201cA pro-development bill disguised as conservation.\u201d Trimble volunteered to edit.
\n
\nThis second battle book, Red Rock Stories<\/i>, included a broader collection of Native American voices and a focus on Bears Ears. Although more difficult to trace the influence of this work in Washington, President Obama did<\/i> establish Bears Ears National Monument in December 2016. Trimble, along with other artists and conservationists, felt triumphant.
\n<\/span>
\nThen the world cracked: In 2018, President Donald Trump reduced the 1.35 million acre Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and <\/i>downsized Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument by half its 1.88 million acres.<\/h4>\n

Trimble remains persistent. In 1979, he published his \u201cfirst book with a spine,\u201d a guide to the national parks of the Colorado Plateau, The Bright Edge<\/i>. The work concludes with a plea to preserve wilderness, a passage too political for the superintendent of Zion, who refused to allow the park\u2019s bookstore to carry it. Forty years later, Trimble\u2019s voice remains central to our local, regional, national, and international dialogue of conservation and stewardship. His most current protestations against President Trump, environmental mismanagement and disaster, and the complicity of Utah legislators as well The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, appear in The Hill, the Los Angeles Times, Terrain.org, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Permanent Peoples\u2019 Tribunal, and elsewhere.<\/h4>\n

Whether beginning a conversation with a stranger on the Reservation or sitting on the precipice of some great expanse, Trimble\u2019s output as an artist speaks to where he\u2019s been; it touches what he\u2019s seen; it conveys what he\u2019s learned as a father, writer, son, photographer, activist, teacher, husband, and friend. The circles of his lifework broaden the circles of our lives by speaking to the messenger and interpreter in each of us. \u201cI\u2019ve maintained this notion since childhood,\u201d he says. \u201cThere exists the world, out there, and the world as we experience it. Between the two are the pictures and stories we share.\u201d<\/span><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Ancient bristlecone pine snag, and September supermoon. The Table, Mount Moriah Wilderness, Nevada, 2015, by Stephen Trimble<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One snowy day in 2011, Stephen Trimble and his wife, Joanne Slotnik, arrived at a grove on the lower slopes of Mount Rainier with the ashes of his father. Trimble was born in Denver in 1950 to Don and Isabelle Trimble. Isabelle grew up in a small Montana town. Don was a geologist who worked his way through college and graduate school as a hard rock miner at the tail end of the Depression. He was responsible for Steve\u2019s interest in photography and the natural world, Isabelle for his interest in people, and both for his respect for storytelling. \u201cEvery vacation was a new national park, and on our road trips Dad kept up a running commentary on Western history and landscape,\u201d Trimble remembers. \u201cHis stories sounded more like parable. He retold them to communicate his values.\u201d With reverential regard, Don Trimble, who hailed from Toppenish, Washington, referred to Mount Rainier as \u201cThe Mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1570,"featured_media":42360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,35,14],"tags":[1102,1400],"class_list":["post-42346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artist_profiles","category-literary-arts","category-visual_arts","tag-stephen-trimble","tag-utahs-15"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/Steven_Trimble-27.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-05 22:06:51","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1570"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42346"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42371,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42346\/revisions\/42371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}