Photo Gallery
Rollin’ on the River: Artist heading down Tennessee River, documenting the lives of river people
Online
To see some of the photos on Wes Modes and his crew’s trip down the Tennessee River, go to flickr.com/photos/rthunder/sets/72157645247471388.
Life on America’s vast rivers always fascinated Wes Modes.
As a youth, Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer and Harland Hubbard’s “Shantyboat Journal” filled him with a desire to experience and document life on the river.
“After that, I started reading river memoirs because I had been traveling on major rivers in homemade boats [and] rafts,” says Modes, an art lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a summer curator at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.
Modes’ passion for this lifestyle and culture led him to create “A Secret History of American River People,” an archival history of individuals whose lives are centered around rivers. He used Kickstarter to fund the first three segments of the project, raising almost $6,000. His ultimate goal is to create a massive research archive, as well as short and feature documentaries and a book series.