When I went to Alaska this past December, it wasn’t the cold that surprised me, but the light. The sun still rises in southern Alaska during winter, but it lies low in the sky, making long shadows, and the short days are bookended by stretches of cerulean twilight. It’s a dream for filmmakers and photographers: the golden hour lasts most of the day.
I was in Alaska to visit Whittier, a small town on the western side of the Prince William Sound, with my friend Reed, a photographer who shoots portrait series of communities all over the world. It was our third trip together. Earlier that year we’d photographed people in an El Paso neighborhood, and in 2010, we traveled to a fishing town in Alabama that had been affected by the BP oil spill. It’s not the type of work I usually do, but Reed needs someone to write profiles of his subjects and I need an excuse to get out of New York. He also needs someone to hold the lights. (...)
Over the past few years, the number of reality television shows set in Alaska has skyrocketed. In 2012, more than a dozen aired on major cable networks. Most of the programming is of the “man versus nature” variety: shows like Deadliest Catch, Gold Rush Alaska, and even Ice Road Truckers tend to focus on the strange and dangerous professions of the Last Frontier. But forays into human drama have been made. This past fall the Military Wives series held a casting call in Anchorage, and in 2011, TLC aired the short-lived Big Hair Alaska, a show about Wasilla’s Beehive Beauty Shop, where Sarah Palin used to get her hair done. The film and television industry in Alaska has grown so rapidly that in 2010 the Anchorage Daily News started a blog called “Hollywood Alaska,” which reports on the latest industry news and routinely asks whether the state is getting enough return on this media gold rush.
The Lower 48’s obsession with the Last Frontier isn’t the only cause of the boom. In 2009, the Alaskan government began offering subsidies that allowed producers to recoup up to 44 percent of their spending in the state. The subsidy program—one of the most generous in the country—has been controversial. Before 2009, shooting an entire feature film or TV series in Alaska tended to be prohibitively expensive. (Northern Exposure, the famous 1990s show about a Jewish doctor from New York who moves to a small town in Alaska, was shot entirely in Washington State.) More filming means more out-of-state film crews spending money on food and lodging, and could potentially be a boon for tourism, but the latest reports from the Alaska Film Office show that only around 15 percent of the total wages paid by these tax-subsidized productions have gone to Alaskans over the past three years. On the 2010 season of Deadliest Catch, Alaskan workers earned less than $20,000, while out-of-state workers took home more than $1.3 million. And although an Alaskan setting is central to the plotline of most of the films and shows that are shot here, some production companies have come under fire for abusing the subsidy. Baby Geniuses 3, a movie about crime-fighting babies and toddlers, paid less than 6 percent of all wages to in-state employees, and its plot brought little attention to “Alaskan issues.”
Even when money or recognition does reach Alaskans, its effects are uncertain. Audiences typically tune in to Alaska-based reality TV for “real men in danger,” not upwardly mobile characters. “Suddenly there’s a lot of money floating around Tanana,” a woman told us of the village where Yukon Men is filmed, “but no one can go out and buy a new Carhartt jacket, because on the show they’re supposed to look like they’re just barely hanging on.” The Discovery Channel synopsis claims that Tanana is “part of an unknown America where men hunt and trap to survive, subsisting like modern day cavemen.” One of the stars complained that after he brought home a deer he’d slaughtered, producers asked him to empty his fridge and freezer, so that when he filled them with meat it would look like he’d had nothing to eat before.
At first I was surprised that people in Whittier were so nonchalant about being documented—media-savvy, even. When we told one man with a Santa Claus beard that we’d like to take his portrait, he suggested he get a haircut first, but then his friend jumped in. “No, they want that swag. They want to see a guy who can hold a job with a beard like that. It’s so Alaska.” As long as the town of Whittier has existed, outsiders have been fascinated by the way its citizens live, but with the current glut of reality television in the state, it seemed that everyone we met knew someone who’d recently been on-camera. The mayor had a friend on the taxidermy show Mounted in Alaska. A local had worked as a deckhand on a boat that was chartered for The Last Frontier, and when she tuned in, excited to see her boat on TV, she was surprised to find that she herself was on the show. The day after the episode aired, someone belatedly called to ask for permission to use her likeness.
Our first week in town, we hurried to finish as many portraits as possible before the production companies showed up. We weren’t exactly in competition with the TV crews, but we did worry that people would tire of interviews and cameras. “Are you the TV people?” they asked. So many residents were relieved when we said no that we began to introduce ourselves by saying, “Hi, we’re from New York, and we’re not with a reality show.” Most of the town, it seemed, was murmuring about TV. Some feared they’d be made to look stupid. Others worried that onscreen drama would cause rifts in the community. Most thought the town was too boring for anyone to actually go through with a show. “People get scared about who will be picked to be on the show,” said the city manager, “because they all think their neighbors are idiots.”
by Erin Sheehy, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Reed Young
