MARQUETTE, Mich. — Michigan-born photographer and author David Zurick has released a new photography book, The Third Coast, published earlier this month by Northwestern University Press. The book explores all five Great Lakes through a mix of landscapes and human-centered stories.
Zurick began working on the project during the COVID-19 pandemic, when global travel restrictions paused his international assignments.
“When COVID hit and the pandemic closed down international travel, I’m spinning my wheels thinking about what I can do closer to home and I took a trip along Lake Huron where I was born and raised and took my camera to get a feel for whether a project was there or not, and it led into a series of trips along the lakes,” Zurick said.
While the Great Lakes are known for their natural beauty, Zurick said his focus was on the relationship between the environment and the people who live near it.
“I focus on this human landscape because I kind of see it as a mirror that reflects the lives of the people who lived in that place,” he said. “So for me, if I try to make an image of that, what I’m really trying to do is visually capture that human story.”
Zurick said he was struck by how deeply connected residents are to the lakes and how that connection shapes their identities.
“Folks who live along these lakes have a real affinity for the lakes. Much of who they are as a person is shaped in one way or another by those lakes,” he said. “It was that connection to the lake that was always coming out, so in my photography I was trying to capture that.”
For Zurick, the project also proved that adventure and creative inspiration can be found close to home.
“I had as big an adventure doing this work as I have any other place in the world, and I’m talking about Tibet, and the Himalayas, and remote islands in the South Pacific, and that was a great joy for me to realize that I could have just as much fun and be just as creatively engaged tooling along the Great Lakes as I could anywhere else in the world,” he said.
The Third Coast is available online through Northwestern University Press and at local bookstores.
