THE NATURE OF HIS CRAFT
Photographer Bill Lea reflects on 'chasing the light' in the Smokies
Bill Lea
A bull elk nuzzles a young calf.
Bill Lea's best-selling print, called "The Kiss," shows a young cub leaning down from a tree to kiss its mother on the nose following the loss of its sibling.
When viewed from above, mist filling the valleys resembles an enormous lake.
Bill Lea was photographing this sleeping bear cub when a tufted titmouse landed on its shoulder and began plucking hair from his back to use in her nest.
PURSUITS
Bill Lea says he's not a morning person. Yet many days, he's up before the sun, hurrying toward the western part of Foothills Parkway to catch its first rays as they light up Rich Mountain.
"This is what I love doing: chasing the light," Lea says. "All the subjects we shoot, everybody shoots — the only thing that makes the subject different is the light that you capture."
This day's forecast calls for sunny skies and warm temperatures that will verge on hot by afternoon, but the early morning air is chilly. The moon hangs large and milky in the sky, the newly risen sun saturating every crater with illusory warmth.
Lea sets up his camera and points it toward a vista of blooming dogwoods, emerging leaves and long shadows, careful to shoot so the sun shines at a 90-degree angle to his subject.
Side lighting gives depth to the image, he says, and he plans his morning outings with the sunrise's orientation in mind — along with many other factors, such as cloud cover, humidity and seasonal progression.
"That's why you concentrate on your own backyard," he says. "Chances are you know it better than anywhere else you can go."
Reframed along the Mississippi
In a way, Lea, now 73, owes his photography career to the muddy waters of the Mississippi Delta. An avid fisherman throughout his childhood in Illinois and Florida, Lea didn't expect that inclination to change after moving to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he landed his first job out of college as a forester for the International Paper Co. But he just couldn't get used to that murky water.
"One day, I put down the fishing pole, picked up a camera, and fell in love with the adrenaline flow of photographing wildlife," he said. "I never looked back."
That was nearly half a century ago. Since then, Lea has published multiple photo books and calendars, sold thousands of photographs to an array of publications and become more familiar than just about anybody else with the way light brushes the animals and landscapes of Cades Cove, his favorite place in the world.
Lea first experienced Cades Cove while traveling with his wife, Klari, shortly after their wedding in 1975, and he immediately knew it was special. From then on, Lea filtered every job opportunity that came his way through one lens: proximity to the Smoky Mountains.
Lea was "never good at wanting to cut trees," and at the first opportunity, he left International Paper for the U.S. Forest Service, landing a job with the Ouachita National Forest in Arkansas.
Then he began looking for positions near the Smokies. In 1983, Lea moved to Brevard, North Carolina, to work for Pisgah National Forest, and he finished his career as an interpretive specialist for the National Forests in North Carolina stationed in Franklin — about 45 minutes from the nearest park entrance and less than three hours from Cades Cove.
Now retired, he lives just 20 minutes away from his favorite spot.
In recent years, Lea's become enamored with landscape photography, but he's perhaps best known for his work with bears and other wildlife, creating iconic photos that offer a window into the everyday lives of these magnificent creatures.
Though snapping the shutter takes only a moment, making a photograph can take all day.
"So many of my best photos are just pure luck — being at the right place at the right time," he said. "But you have to be out there for the luck to occur."
Bearing witness
Lea prefers to wait for the cloudy days, the rainy days, the days where the air is so humid you could just about wring it out like a rag. That's when he drives to the cove, finds a place to park and walks through the woods, hoping to see a bear.
Lea became acquainted with his first black bears in 1993, when a friend told him about a place in northern Minnesota where he'd be sure to see a lot of them. The homestead of a retired logger, the place is now known as the Vince Shute Wildlife Sanctuary, which Lea co-founded. He and Klari stayed two weeks, and it was a transformative experience.
"I guess because bears kind of look alike to the untrained eye, you tend to think that they're all alike," he said. "But they're individuals as different as every human is different. And so we just came to know them. When each one is such a unique individual, then that gives value to that life, because he or she is one of a kind."
Lea says he's "never met a bear I don't like" and can tell story after story of the animals he's known over the years.
One "sweet, easy-going bear" he calls Hazel is the subject of his best-selling print, titled "The Kiss." Lea began photographing Hazel and her two cubs in spring 2015, but when he returned a couple days later, one of the cubs was missing. The remaining cub slept in a walnut tree while Hazel, still on the ground, made a "soft little grunting sound" intended to call her cub down to her.
"When the cub got to a crotch in the tree, Hazel stood up on her hind feet and the cub leaned down and kissed mom on the nose," Lea recalled. "Coming from both mom and cub, the feeling was, 'Oh man, I am so glad I have you,' because they had lost such an important part of their life, the loss of that other cub. It was just such a special moment."
