Dancing with horses produces wild art
By KAREN BOSSICK
The Wood River Journal ~ Hailey
“The dance” became as important as adjusting the aperture or focusing the lens when Elissa Kline began pursuing wild horses.
“I'd drive as close as I could to them until I saw them begin to bristle. Then I'd stop. I'd get out and walk very slowly towards them, zigzagging. I'd click some pictures while the horses seemed to be unaware,” she recalled. “When I sensed they were getting nervous, I'd turn around and sit down and hang my head down like I'd seen colts doing when scolded. When they relaxed, I'd turn around and move a little closer, repeating the whole process.”
“The dance,” as Kline calls it, paid off with some stunning portraits of a group of wild horses known as the Challis herd that roam Idaho's high desert between Challis and Mackay.
She'll unveil some of those photographs, along with life-sized photos of horses printed on fabric, Friday night at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts' Hailey center at Second and Pine streets.
The opening reception will take place from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Friday. The exhibit, which Kline has titled “Herd But Not Seen,” will be on display through Jan. 12.
The daughter of a documentary filmmaker father and an art curator mother, Kline had taken plenty of pictures of horses prior to coming upon the Challis herd. Most were abstracts-close-ups of the horses that she took care of for 17 years as caretaker for singer Carole King's Robinson Bar Ranch.
Then a friend, Bonnie Garmin, insisted that she take pictures of wild horses. Garmin had accidentally happened upon a roundup of wild horses near Challis and was determined to bring the story to people's attention in hopes they'd press to get the roundups stopped.
“At first I resisted-I didn't have time,” said Kline. “But she said, ‘Try it once' and told me where to look. My husband and I and our son got in our 4-wheel drive jeep and drove miles and miles and miles and finally we saw what looked like little specks of gray, white and brown against the sage-covered plains.”
All it took was one sighting for Kline to become hooked.
“I saw them and my jaw dropped. These animals are different from domestic horses. They don't need us. They don't look at me and see food as domestic horses do. They're proud, self-sufficient, strong of hoof-they have to be-the weak ones die,” she said.
“I was also shocked at how beautiful they were. They're not a bunch of inbred brown horses-their palette is beautiful. And strong--the whole time I was out there I never found a water hole. I never found a creek. They're surviving in very sparse conditions.”
Kline sought out the elusive animals between 30 and 40 times over the next 2 and one-half years, wearing the same clothes so they would remember that nothing bad had happened last time they encountered her.
Sometimes she drove 90 miles into the areas like the East Fork of the Salmon River only to see none of the 250 wild horses believed to roam the high desert between Challis and Mackay. Other times she watched incredulous as foals grew into strong young horses and old stallions got pushed out of their herd.
“Their social structure is more evident than domestic horses,” Kline said. “You can see who the stallion is and who are stallions in training. You can see who are the older males who belong to a part of a bachelor herd that is no longer breeding and you can see who are the pregnant mares and nursing yearlings.
Kline photographed more than a hundred horses over time, some part of groups as small as three, some part of groups of 15 that stayed together year after year.
The closest she got was 15 feet. It came after a day in which her dance wasn't working and she had returned to her car. A horse followed her, apparently curious. Since it was too close to shoot with her 400 millimeter lens, she shot its face.
She named just one-“Iron Eyes”-after Iron Eyes Cody, the actor who was depicted shedding a tear after looking at a polluted river in a Keep America Beautiful public service announcement from the early 1970s.
“He looks as if he's crying a tear,” she said, pointing him out among the life-sized horse photos hanging from the ceiling at the Hailey house.
As she watched the horses, Kline understood her friend's desire to illuminate the struggle for survival of the wild horses.
It's thought that less than 25,000 of the animals roam the West today-a fraction of the 2 million wild horses that inhabited the West in the 1800s. More than 200,000 wild horses and burros have been removed since 1971, while 4 million head of cattle “enjoy subsidized grazing,” according to the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign.
And the helicopter has become a predator in the sense of the mountain lion and wolf, herding wild horses into pens where some have broken their neck, been kicked to death or been left to die on the ground after being injured during roping.
Some of the animals have been adopted into good homes and some have been placed in sanctuaries. Others have been bought expressly for the slaughterhouse.
“I can't believe people wouldn't want to protect them if they knew about them,” said Kline, a New York native who now lives in Hailey. “But I didn't even know there were wild horses out there until my friend told me about them.”
Part of Kline's exhibit-large-sized photos of individual horses printed on 7-by-3 pieces of somewhat transparent fabric--reflects her feeling that the horses will disappear if not protected.
“We really do need to protect them,” she said. “They're so beautiful. And they're not hurting anyone, nor are they hurting the land. Besides that, they're a symbol of our freedom and the American West.”
If you go...
The opening reception for Elissa Kline's “Herd But Not Seen” photo exhibit of wild horses will be held from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Friday at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Hailey.
The exhibit will run through Jan. 12 at the Center at Second and Pine streets.
Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays. There is no admission charge.
Kline will also teach a free workshop for teens titled “Exploring Nature Through Photography” from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Friday and from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the field. She will co-teach the class with Stacie Brew.
Digital cameras will be provided for use. To reserve a spot, call 726-9491, extension 10. Drop-ins are welcome, provided there is space.
Both the exhibit and workshop are part of a larger multidisciplinary projected entitled “Whose Nature? What's Nature?” The project includes photographs on display at the Sun Valley Center's Ketchum gallery, lectures by such noted writers as Terry Tempest Williams and a performance by the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company.