Steven David Johnson, a Visual Arts and Communications professor was honored at the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition in London. According to EMU’s Facebook, 50,000 submissions were entered, and Steve’s “Pool of Wonder,” image was one of 100 that made it into the exhibition. National Geographic selected the image as one of their 13 favorite images from the competition. The photograph of Steve’s that was chosen in the Wildlife Photographer of the year exhibition was from a vernal pool located in Augusta County, Virginia. This vernal pool is located on private property, and the property is owned for conservation purposes by a friend of Steve’s, who serves on the Virginia Wilderness Committee Board with Steve. He describes the “split horizon view.” “You see the terrestrial landscape and the underwater landscape at the same time, and seeing those mass of spotted salamander eggs in there is this fragile little world held up by moss.”
These salamanders breed in the aforementioned vernal pools, which are temporary, and can be found in ponds in forests around this area. Steve realized if he wanted to tell the story of these salamanders, he needed to get into underwater photography, something he has been doing for ten years now. For practice, Steve does lighting setups with his Star Wars figures saying, “they’re good stand-ins for salamanders, Yoda especially.”
At the National History museum, Steve talked about having an awards dinner in a “huge whale room.” Steve also talked about how usually, he dresses pretty casually, but for the event he had to figure out what it meant to dress “smart casual, party/black tie (dress to impress), and smart/party,” for different events in his time spent in the UK. He ended up buying a tuxedo, which a student has since convinced him to wear for the senior art exhibitions in the spring.
Steve did professional web and digital media marketing work for another college before coming to EMU.Steve got back into photography in a big way in 2003, around the time when Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras first came out. Once he got his own, he got back into capturing images of what was around him in our world. Steve mentioned how he “grew up in the country and spent a lot of time hanging out in ponds, and the woods looking at creatures.”
In 2005, Steve moved to Virginia to become a professor at EMU. He believes the switch to conservation photography also occurred around this time. As he photographed the world around him, Steve “became aware that there were a lot of environmental issues around here.” Two of the big ones being a series of fish kills in the north fork of the Shenandoah River, which Steve lives right across the road from. The other being the potential of hydrofracking in Bergton, which also is near where Steve lives. He began getting involved in efforts to show what some of the environmental issues would be if hydrofracking occurred. In the end, the hydrofracking project was turned down by local officials. While doing all of this, Steve began documenting biodiversity related to this issue, and showing “what’s at stake.”
While he began to get into “the world of environmental non-profits,” one of them sponsored a hike about salamanders, which Steve then learned was the “ big biodiversity story in our region.” In Virginia there are more than 50 salamander species, including some rare endemic species. Steve became interested in teaching a course on conservation photography, and EMU gave Steve a sabbatical. On this sabbatical, Steve spent a year teaching at the Oregon Extension located in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Southern Oregon. At the OE, he was also artist in residence, collaborating with his wife, writer Anna Maria Johnson, on conservation stories. One of the big early environmental concerns was a possible pipeline that would run through the Shenandoah Valley. Steve, and some of his students got involved in this by documenting Cow Knob salamanders in an area that could have been threatened by one of the pipeline’s possible routes. be threatened by the pipeline. Doing this led Steve to document different parts of the life cycle of salamanders, which led him to the “Vernal Pools” project. You can view this project, and others on Steve’s website https://www.stevendavidjohnson.com/.
