CONSERVATION 5 © 2004

Everglades National Park

To get to this location, I traveled with individuals from the South Florida Water Management District on an airboat deep into Conservation Area 5, an area of land set aside to help clean the water before it flows south into the Everglades National Park. After riding through thick cattails for nearly an hour, the vegetation opened up and revealed this beautiful area of the Everglades. The River of Grass Standing in the center of the Everglades is the River of Grass, an expansive landscape with shallow grassy waters that extend in every direction. Within these vast areas of vegetation, the seemingly still water is a slowmoving, 40-mile-wide river. Individual wet prairies within the Everglades reach up to 140,000 acres. The over-proliferation of cattails is a natural response to pollution as the cattails filter pollutants out of the water. However, this image highlights an area where the Everglades’ wet prairie waters are near pristine, and the balance of freshwater provides an environment for native plants to thrive Conservation 5 was taken with a Deardorff 8×10 camera on T-Max 100 film. This photograph is hand-printed in Clyde’s darkroom on fiber-based paper, selenium toned, then mounted and matted to current archival standards. The photograph is a limited edition and signed by Clyde. Camera settings f/45 | 90mm Schneider Super-Angulon XL lens| orange filter | 1 second Disclaimer – Cropping, contrast, and image density may vary. To learn more about the darkroom printing process, click here.