The work of Robert Glenn Ketchum at the Illinois State Museum

The eminent nature photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum has been photographing the Alaskan landscape for nearly 40 years and has become one of the most foremost photographers championing the environment. Audubon magazine listed him among the 100 people “who shaped the environmental movement of the 20th century.”

So it is a special occasion indeed for the Illinois State Museum to exhibit 30 of his large-scale photos in Springfield. Many of these are aerial photos, giving us a perspective on Alaska that we don’t typically see in travel magazines or books.

Ketchum’s “Rookery Cliffs at the Edge of Lancaster Sound” gives a dramatic sense of the vast space of Alaska. His photographs are so stunning and the scale is so breathtaking to a Midwesterner that one can look at each photograph for a long time.

Ketchum is surely a patient man. He must wait for hours sometimes for just the right light or atmospheric effect for a shot, as with “John Hopkins Island, Glacier Bay.”

Looking at some of the photos, one wonders if they are of Alaska. “Meltwater Flowing over Golden Sand and Silt Bars, Baffin Island” on first glance could be an aerial view of the Sahara Desert. And “Bear Trail in Old Growth,” a green woodland scene, could have been made in the Shawnee National Forest.

Ketchum uses color masterfully. The red, pink, yellow and green foliage pops from the black, brackish water in “Difficult Terrain for