EXPOSURE TO LIGHT
Rites of Passage
Bill Greene of The Boston Globe
NORTHEAST KINGDOM, VERMONT
While photographing
the financial collapse of a three-generation dairy farm in northern
Vermont, The Boston Globe’s Bill Greene came across a cluster
of secluded, run-down cabins. Each fall, generations of men travel
to an isolated area of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom,
a tourist-free zone that Greene calls “the last frontier
of New England.” There, for two weeks in November, grandfathers,
fathers, and sons gather to hunt deer. Greene, a seventeen-year
veteran of the paper, knocked on cabin doors and hung out at the
local country store, trying to convince the wary hunters that
he only wanted to portray their passion for the hunt. “I
wasn’t trying to do some undercover exposé on hunting,”
he says. Although not a hunter himself, Greene camps and fishes,
and says he has “a compassion for people who work close to
the land.” Eventually the men invited Greene to tag along.
For three weekends in November 2000, Greene followed five families
as they tracked white-tailed deer through the Kingdom. He photographed
the hunt in black and white. “Color tends to be distracting,”
he says. “Black and white cuts to the essence of the subject.”
The hunt is more than just a vacation; it is a rite of passage
into manhood for the younger boys. “It used to be about getting
food,” one hunter told Greene. “Now it’s a male
bonding ritual."
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