Alaska News

The Last Road North

Ben Huff has spent half a decade patiently documenting the precarious life on one of the world's most remote roadways, Alaska's James W. Dalton Highway, a barely improved gravel road that runs from just north of Fairbanks to the Arctic coast.

Huff's project won partial funding from the Rasmuson Foundation an opened at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau at the beginning of February. It features 29 color photographs varying in size and taken with a rather large, cumbersome camera.

"All the shots (in the series) were made with a 4x5 film view camera, you know with an accordion and a hood," Huff laughed. "The process (of making photos this way) is quite slow and deliberate and kind of unwieldy, but it served the work really well." The result is, as Huff describes, "an untreated exploration of people and place" in which the viewer is exposes to an "apocalyptic kind of look."

But the idea behind Huff's project looms larger than its often quiet, subtle images.

READ MORE: Documenting the Dalton Highway, beautiful warts and all

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