Acacia Johnson: photographing the pilots connecting rural Alaska

Glaciers, mountains, forests and Arctic tundra all contribute to an Alaskan wilderness that's only habitable in pockets, with just 20% accessible by road. Travelling over this wild terrain and supporting the state's far-flung communities is a network of light aircraft pilots, known as bush pilots.

The 2021 Canon Female Photojournalist Grant winner, Acacia Johnson, was raised in a family of bush pilots in Anchorage, Alaska. It's the city with the largest private seaplane base in the world. Yet Acacia found that many media representations about Alaskan pilots conflicted with her own experiences.

With the €8,000 grant, she will spend this winter finding and photographing the faces that challenge stereotypes of who and what an Alaskan bush pilot is, focusing on creating a new narrative of diversity and safety in aviation. "Less than 6% of pilots are women," she says. "I think, to a certain degree, that has to do with the effects of long-term stereotypes." Also important to Acacia is documenting the vital role the bush pilots fill, transporting food, medicine and emergency access to people in the state's remotest parts.

Acacia spent most of her twenties working as a photography guide on ships in the Arctic and Antarctic. "I think that the distance from home made me realise just what I love so much about being in Alaska, and what I would like to document," says the 31-year-old writer, artist and photographer.

Romanticised legends of bush pilots largely stem from what's considered to be the golden age of bush flying, the 1920s to the 1950s. "In the early era, there were these daredevil men who took crazy risks with the planes and the weather – surviving multiple crashes, or being stranded alone for weeks in the wilderness," Acacia explains. "That led to a certain kind of cowboy attitude, and some of that is still around today."

Despite advances in safety technology, plane crashes are still more frequent in Alaska than anywhere else in the United States – a fact Acacia thinks is partly attributable to this idealising of the "dangerous escapades of men".

"My goal is to honour and preserve the colourful history of bush flying in Alaska, while looking forward to focus on aviation as an essential service," she says. "It's an incredibly easy subject to glamorise, so that will be part of the challenge." But it's also why she's interested. "I want to look that romanticised image straight in the face and figure out what's actually important. What are the stories that aren't being heard?"

This grant has come at just the right time for Acacia, allowing her to tell the many stories that might otherwise have been lost. "A lot of the pilots who have such amazing stories are near the end of their lives – we're at the end of an era," she explains. "I don't think that I would have been able to pursue a project of this scale without funding."

And it's a story that she wants to be the one to tell. "I'm always very excited by projects that I see from other photographers in their home communities. I think that it opens up other opportunities and a different kind of storytelling than it would if you're coming in as an outsider."

It's also a way of working that's increasingly sought-after. "I talked to a number of editors from some influential publications at a portfolio review earlier this year, asking them what they were excited about. So many editors said they were excited about local, smaller stories that were close to the photographer's communities."

The project will consist of a series of large-format portraits of pilots and planes. Bush planes are often single engine aircraft equipped to land without a formal runway on gravel, water, sand or snow. "The planes that are still preferred today were built between the 1940s and 1960s," Acacia explains. "My aunt describes the feeling as flying around in a cardboard box – they're very fragile, some of them are only stretched canvas over a very light frame. They're beautiful and delicate."

Portraits will be set against the dramatic landscape, with the winter ocean, vast tundra and Denali mountain in the distance. "Seeing the whole Alaskan landscape from above is just breathtaking," says Acacia, who in addition to a large-format film camera, will use her beloved Canon EOS 5D Mark IV to shoot the project.

Moving from community to community around Alaska with camera in hand, Acacia anticipates meeting a fair number of family connections, as well as people who remember her grandfather. She explains his significance: "As well as a bush pilot, who himself survived multiple crashes, he was an artist and was always pushing me not towards technical excellence, but to pursue my creative vision. It's cool to have a photo project that's related to that."

More than her other work, this project is personal for Acacia. It's a lasting contribution to her home community and "might only be the first chapter".