Tom Haas and his camera. Photo provided. 

From Tom Haas Photography - August 21, 2024

Duluthian Tom Haas spent 20 summers kayaking along Isle Royale’s shores and smaller barrier islands and hiking its mainland, hauling along a 12-pound large-format camera and an 8-pound tripod. Throughout that meandering circumnavigation, he captured over 3,000 black-and-white images of the islands’ harbors and bays, rocky shorelines, abundant flora, historic fisheries, and legacy-family cabins as well as the archipelago’s summertime residents, a mix of commercial-fishing families and the descendants of those who first visited as far back as the 1890s. 

More than thirty years after the project ended, Tom and his wife Jeannie Thoren—who has been enshrined in the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame—sifted through Tom’s work, selecting 275 of their favorite images from the collection, each at once an artistic expression and a document of Isle Royale’s rich cultural and natural history. Last year they began assembling them in a book titled “Isle Royale: A Photographer’s Circumnavigation 1967–1987.”  

 Image provided. 

The book was published by Tom and Jeannie with the help of Duluth’s X-Presso Books, a subsidiary of  Zenith City Press operated by Duluth author and publisher Tony Dierckins, and Duluth’s own J.S. Print Group coordinated the book’s printing and binding. The result is a massive 240-page hard-cover book measuring nearly a foot square and, of course, containing those 275 photographs.

You can find the book locally at Drury Lane Books, Sivertson Art Gallery, Lake Superior Trading Post, Johnson Heritage Post Art Gallery, and the North House Folk School. 

Learn more at www.tomhaasphotography.com.