Teton Homestead

Do a search on Flickr for Cunningham Cabin and you will wind up with literally hundreds of images.  If you are not familiar with Flickr (flickr.com), it is easily the largest and most socially active site for photography out there.  It is fed by members who upload thousands of images every minute of every day.  Members run the gamut from novice photographer to accomplished professional, and the images posted clearly reflect those distinctions.  On the pages of Flickr, you will see fuzzy, poorly composed, blown out snapshots  right next to stunningly gorgeous landscapes and expressively soulful portraits.  It is the ultimate equal opportunity website.  Often,  I’ll do a search on Flickr to see pictures of a place I’ve never been, but plan to see at some point in the not too distant future.  It acts to familiarize me with the place and prepare me for what lies ahead, photographically speaking.  Before heading out to Wyoming and Montana last summer, I did a search on Flickr for the Cunningham Cabin.  I knew it was a very well photographed spot, lying as it does at the foot of the Grand Teton Range near Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  I was not disappointed, when the site quickly returned hundreds of images showing the cabin in every season of the year and from every conceivable position and angle.

Cunningham Cabin

The Cunningham Cabin is classified as a double-pen log cabin, a direct adaptation of an Appalachian building form brought westward.  Built by John Pierce Cunningham in 1885, it was the first home to the trapper who turned to ranching a few years later.  In 1895, Cunningham built a larger house for his growing family, but continued to use the cabin as a barn or smithy.  Along with ranching, Cunningham was one of the original county commissioners and would also serve at various times as justice of the peace, game warden and postmaster.  When the territory was absorbed into the Grand Teton National Park in 1928, the Cunninghams moved to Idaho.  Few of the original structures survived.  The cabin was one that did.

Cunningham Cabin & Teton Range

The cabin is certainly not a unique building.  I found that it is not particularly large or attractive.  If not for the fact that it is situated in one of the most beautiful valleys anywhere, it surely would never have garnered the attention that it has.  That it has survived all these years in one of the harshest climates in North America, is remarkable.  That it has survived the hordes of amateur and professional photographers who descend upon it each year, is truly amazing.  I can now include myself as a member of that horde, having followed the same beaten down path that leads from downtown Jackson Hole to the cabin.  Fully cognizant of the thousands of photographers who stood in the same spot long before I got there, I wanted to try to capture the cabin in a slightly different way.  Almost all of the renditions on Flickr are in color.  I thought maybe the subject could be successfully rendered in monochrome.  Although well familiar with black and white photography, having been a newspaper photographer for 20 years, I have not done a lot of black and white lately.  Digital photography made color so much better and easier that I naturally moved in that direction.  It is also more commercial, although that is beginning to change a bit these days.  Admittedly, both of these shots were originally taken in color and converted to monochrome in post-production.  Not every image works well in black and white, as I soon found out.  Those with a wide tonal range, and have good detail in both highlights and shadows work best, which is why I chose these two particular frames.  Nice clouds don’t hurt either.  Say, maybe I’ll post them to Flicker.

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