Museum exhibit highlights Cache River beauty
Photographs documenting life in the Cache River basin -- captured this past year by one of the nation's top image makers -- will be featured in a free upcoming exhibit at the University Musuem.
An opening reception will be held at 6 p.m. Friday, May 3, in the museum's gallery. There, you'll meet the photographer and learn about the region's history and its vast changes when noted anthropologist Jane H. Adams, Gorton's wife, presents a 7:30 p.m. lecture complete with digital images in the Museum Auditorium. Admission is free.
Adams is one of several University researchers who've teamed up to take a close look at the sprawling Cache region thanks to a substantial, three-year-grant the University received from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She is an associate professor of anthropology.
In creating the exhibit, the husband-and-wife duo draw on three perspectives.
"We look at ' ... the social historian's perspective on farming and farm life, the cultural geographer's perception of the built landscape, and the photographer's sensitivity to the aesthetic and iconic imagery that gives the historical landscape meaning to those who inhabit and move through it,'" Adams says.
Funding for this exhibit is made possible in part through a grant from the Illinois Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Illinois General Assembly.
The Cache River region is one of most biologically diverse areas in the United States. It is particularly important as a habitat for waterfowl and shorebirds along the Mississippi Flyway.
In addition, the area is considered by the United Nations to be as vital as the Everglades and Okefenokee Swamp.
Besides its natural beauty, it holds an intriguing story of the people who came and altered it.
In the 18th century, European trappers and hunters moved into the area already inhabited by the native Shawnee and Kaskaskia peoples. They were followed by others who combined farming with hunting and timbering.
In the 19th century, the railroads brought more settlers. They drained land, established orchards and gardens and helped establish the distinctive culture of the Shawnee Hills.
"Everywhere one looks in the countryside is evidence of a brief but profound tenure on the land," Gorton says.
But the increasing human population, drainage and intense cultivation led to area's biological decline. Government and nonprofits have come together to buy back up much of what had once been private land.
"In the shifting values of land usage, the terrain appears more valuable as natural habitat than as farm and timbering land. The two centuries struggle for dominance of the land is ending," Gorton adds.
The exhibit will continue at the University Museum through Oct. 25.
- Paula M. Davenport
May 1, 2002
Photographer D. Gorton, whose work graces CD covers, movie posters, newspapers and magazines around the globe, will display 20 large infrared black-and-white photos focusing on the vanishing human presence in the ecologically diverse, yet fragmented, Cache River area of Southern Illinois. Preview Gorton's portfolio online at http://www.dgorton.com/.
