Hello, my name is Ed Wargin.

I am a photographer, and I grew up in the small town of Hermantown, Minnesota, which is about ten minutes outside of Duluth.

Our two-story farmhouse was framed against two rows of tall pines perched on top of the tallest hill in town, and the open rolling fields beyond our barn were our de facto 40 acre backyard. Just beyond the fields were woods dense with cedar, birch and pines, and these woods stretched completely over a perfect square mile bordered by the roads called Ugstad, La Vague, Arrowhead and Miller Trunk. Many summer days were spent playing in the tall grasses near our barn, and as you might imagine, autumn was the best time for  long walks in the woods and hunting for grouse. During the long Minnesota winter months you could find me hurdling down one or more of those hills on a sled with my brothers. And of course, spring was never to be outdone, the low lying part of the fields would fill up with small pools of water, yielding tadpoles and water bugs for us to capture and examine in glass jars. 

One  summer day in 1971 my mother organized a rummage sale, and everything was placed on tables in our garage. It was an exciting proposition, anticipating the on-comers who would arrive to gobble up all of our treasures. I was almost 8 years old and most everything in life was an exciting proposition, but on this shining day I had no idea just how my life would change.

On one such table sat a camera. I had never seen this particular camera in our house before, but apparently it had belonged to my oldest brother and he had grown tired of using it or not using it - as either case may have been. It was an Argus 127 camera kit. It nested inside a beautiful gold and green box with instructions and even a strobe. I begged my mother not to sell it. She said if it's still there at the end of the day you can have it.  I must admit it was an awfully long day. Anybody who even so much as looked at the box was given a look by me that would have scared a bear. By the end of the day my luck prevailed and the camera was mine.

Not long after, our family made the long trip to the Twin Cities to experience the Minnesota State Fair. Before getting to the fairgrounds we made a stop at the Como Zoo in St.Paul, Minnesota, and I spotted a male lion just like the ones in the Tarzan movies I used to watch after school or like the beasts that graced nearly every page of our National Geographic Magazines at home. That's when I made my first picture. It was of that male lion. The photograph is still with me to this day, to help me remember that first experience and to remind me why I fell in love with this art form all those years ago. 

I still have the camera with its gold and green box. As mothers will  often do, mine had kept it for me all these years and recently sent it to me.

Sadly, everything I once knew about my childhood home is mostly gone now. The house. The barn. The pines. Even the hill. It has been flattened, literally, for progress, and so goes life. A lot has changed since my younger days in northern Minnesota.

Photographs have always been a passport for my imagination, and a compass for the direction I would take in my life. Becoming a photographer was always my career goal; I  hoped it would provide me with the medium to tell and preseve stories like the ones I am working on now in The Fresh Coast Project.

The Fresh Coast Project and my life as a boy in northern Minnesota both remind me of one thing - how fast things change. The only items remaining from my childhood home are the photographs, paintings and pictures that I made as a young boy. And of course, my Argus127 camera.

At its core, the Fresh Coast Project is about capturing things before they change and trust me, they will change. With the physical scope of the Great Lakes, it is sometimes hard to see the changes but when you have spent as much time in and around them as I have, you see such changes happening all of the time. 

Garden-variety pollution seems to prevail a little more than usual. No trespassing signs and for-sale signs are seen far more today than the wildlife signs we use to see years ago. There are physical changes such as arched rocks which arch no longer. High dunal bluffs have fallen to the shores below. Change is inevitable.

One of the goals behind this Great Lakes project is to capture the story of these great waters before the next great change takes hold. Sound strange to you? When I was a young boy our family home was steeped in stories about lumber camps and fishing boats, mostly because my grandfather was a lumberjack and fisherman. He shared this folklore with us, and it seemed commonplace.

Lumber camps? Fishing Villages? Lighthouses?

The Fresh Coast Project asks some pretty simple questions, such as when is the last time you have seen a working lumber camp, a working fishing village or commercial fisherman or a lighthouse keeper? The landscape is changing and so are its stories and the goal for the Fresh Coast Project is to capture this on film before it all goes away forever, almost imperceptibly, in front of our very own eyes.

Speaking of forever, I am attempting to capture the story of the Fresh Coast on archival E-6 film commonly known as slide film or transparency film, the medium that I have worked in as a photographer since the mid-1980’s. 

The closet thing to being archival in photography today, is film. E-6 film to be exact. It is a photographer's canvas, capturing saturated landscapes with a distinct crispness and the ability to tell smaller stories in its shadow areas. It has been a beautiful medium to work in and it too, will be gone in a few short years from now. 

The aim of the Fresh Coast Project is to capture the story of the Great Lakes on film, before film is gone and the story of the Great Lakes enters its next great phase. No one knows the future of the Great Lakes. I surely don’t anyway and I believe this is a story worth sharing and telling the rest of the world. 

Consider the following.

Zebra mussels. Quagga mussels. Asian Carp. Piping the waters to the desert southwest. Over building. Unnecessary erosion. Will any of these things impact the Great Lakes? The Fresh Coast Project simply sets out to answer the “what if” questions that sit in front of it today. What if just one of these things happens and it changes the lakes forever, wouldn’t it be worth it, knowing we captured the story of the Great Lakes at this point and time for all posterity? 

The project is not so much about telling you the story of the Great Lakes, but it is about telling your grandchildren the story of the Great Lakes. 

When I was in my mid-teens and still in school, I had another event that would impact the rest of my life. I was at a cross-country running meet in Cloquet, Minnesota and I spotted a photographer taking pictures of the other runners. I don’t know why to this day, but I summoned my courage and  introduced myself. He was Bob King, photographer for the Duluth News-Tribune. I don’t recall what I said or how I must have said it, but somehow I managed to wrangle my way into meeting Bob every Sunday at the newspaper for nearly 2 years. He allowed me to come along and take pictures. Sundays were most often his feature-story day, which allowed him to research and find a story of Duluth and make it into pictures. I couldn’t have dreamed of a better mentor than Bob. He quietly answered my questions without fail. He taught me how to develop film. He taught me how to print beautiful prints in the darkroom. He taught me how to be a storyteller. All of this happened by simply getting out of my comfort zone and saying hello. And it happened because Bob was kind enough to share his knowledge, talent, compassion. To this day, Bob is a dear friend and one that I am most grateful for having in my life. Besides, how do you not like a person who after making pictures all morning would drive you up the shore near the Knife River on Lake Superior, stop in at Russ Kendall’s Smoked Fish, buy you a smoked herring in wax paper, a small box of Kavli crackers and a 7-up for lunch and find a spot along the shore to talk about photography? 

The Fresh Coast. The Great Lakes.  Someone once said, the best journeys answer questions that in the beginning - you didn’t even think to ask. 

This is the Fresh Coast Project.  I hope you’ll be part of the journey.