ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM is ranked among the most successful landscape photographers in America. Top natural history magazine, Audubon, lists the 52-year-old as one of the top 100 champions of conservation 'who shaped the environmental movement in the 20th century'.
His string of national and international honours include the United Nations' Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award. His photos have appeared in more than 250 shows, including exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art and the National Museum of National History, both in Washington.
His photographs, of mountains, rivers, forests and other natural landscapes, are usually breathtakingly pretty, seldom unusual or shocking - the sort every calendar photographer dreams of taking. What has won Ketchum a place in photographic history is his ability to jolt people into recognising just how fragile beauty is, and also how much care we must take of it. His shots particularly of the Hudson River, and the Tongass, Alaska's vanishing rainforest, have documented and in some cases averted destruction. In 1987 Robert Redford even gave Ketchum a three-year residency at his Sundance Institute in Utah. 'I was very tired when he rang,' says Ketchum, 'and I thought it was someone playing a joke on me. I hung up on him.' After all that recognition, it was more than a little odd, when Ketchum first came to China, to find himself kicking his heels in a hotel room in Suzhou for 10 days, waiting to see if anyone wanted to work with him on a demanding new project. Although that was 18 years ago now, it clearly still rather shocks an older Ketchum, passing through Hong Kong on his way to Suzhou again this month as he now regularly does.
Ketchum had been fired for years by the thought that his photographs of nature and its destruction would be ideal subjects for embroideries. Clearly not born to tiptoe through life, he had in mind works like the 1,000-year-old Bayeux Tapestry - a 10-year labour to embroider the tale of the Duke of Normandy's conquest of England in 1066 on a piece of linen as long as a football field. 'The large wall tapestries of medieval Europe have always appealed,' he says, 'because they so successfully addressed my visual interests in representation, scale and texture. They were also laborious works that demanded great skill and years of devotion to complete. I found myself increasingly drawn to the idea of translating my complex and highly organic images into a similar textile form.' Nowhere else in the world has matched up to his needs as well as Suzhou, China's most famous embroidery school. But the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute (SERI) wasn't, initially at least, playing along. Talks were getting nowhere and this hadn't exactly been a spur of the moment visit. Way back in the late 70s when Ketchum had spotted a Los Angeles Times picture showing a rally in Beijing, with a gigantic banner featuring the face of Mao Zedong and a credit line that identified it as silk hand embroidery done by SERI, he started negotiating with the institute. It took two years - just to get a meeting.
The mainland was only just beginning to admit foreigners, travel limited to organised tour groups. So when he did finally get an invitation to Suzhou, it was a surprise to find himself spending a week sitting waiting for a response.
At the outset, the main problem, he suspects now, was that he was stepping all over the toes of the institute's famous designers. What they did was traditional: drawing stylised and simplified natural subjects for embroiderers to work on. Ketchum wanted them to translate complex photography, like those of the Sun-dance Institute's spectacular autumn leaves, into embroideries - and they were sceptical. Why should China's most famous needlework school alter its ways for a Westerner who knew nothing about embroidery technique? 'It was also felt I could not appreciate the time and work necessary to complete an image,' says Ketchum.
He was actually being escorted back to the airport when the SERI staff finally agreed to attempt an embroidery from one image. They chose his Winters portfolio: simple pictures that seemed more approachable than highly detailed full-colour landscapes. It would need only a few of the embroiderers and would take no more than a few of SERI's more than 40 different kinds of stitches.