Giving Compass' Take:

• Kate Yoder explains that Dudley Edmondson is working to increase representation in nature photography, where he felt unwelcome as a black man. 

• How can funders help to increase access to the arts for minorities? 

• Learn about the power of representation in the arts. 

If you’re under the impression that the great outdoors is a bastion of racial harmony, Dudley Edmondson would like to disabuse you of that notion. Edmondson, a longtime wildlife photographer and filmmaker who lives in Duluth, Minnesota, says he gets some, uh, interesting reactions to his outdoor pursuits because he’s black.

While Edmondson was taking pictures of wildflowers in his own neighborhood a few years ago, an elderly white woman came up to him, demanded that he hand over his film, and then called the police, convinced that he was casing houses. “You don’t look like any nature photographer I’ve ever seen,” he remembers her saying.

Weeks later, Edmondson was taking pictures of different species of flowers along the highway, lying down to get close-ups, when a state trooper rolled up and said he had gotten a report of a drunk black man on the ground. The trooper looked a little embarrassed when he learned the real story.

“Unfortunately in America, people still see color first,” said Edmondson. “It’s like, if I would have been a white guy with a beard and a mustache and a pith helmet, and I had all of this gear, you wouldn’t have asked me anything.”

Across the country, police are routinely called to investigate black people doing the most mundane things — waiting for a business meeting in Starbucks, delivering newspapers, and, no joke, golfing too slowly. It happens in parks, too. Last year in Oakland, California, a white woman dubbed “BBQ Becky” called the police on a group of black family and friends who were having a cookout at Lake Merritt, ostensibly for using a charcoal grill. And in Mississippi earlier this year, an elderly white woman pulled a gun on a black family at a KOA because they didn’t have reservations.

But Edmondson is part of a growing group of people who are working to create a more welcoming environment in the outdoors. Their joint efforts, through art, writing, and community building, seek to bring more diversity to parks and public lands, and to the images we see in movies, magazines, and advertisements.

Those images tell us “something about who we think actually has something to offer around new environmental ideas,” said Carolyn Finney, author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. “The majority of the time, what we see are white faces.”

Read the full article about nature photography by Kate Yoder at Grist.