Lake

Video, 32 min. 38 sec., 2025

About 20,000 years ago, glaciers retreated from the Midwest. When they melted, they filled enormous basins with water, creating the Great Lakes — including Lake Michigan. With a surface area of over 22,000 square miles, Lake Michigan contains nearly 1,200 cubic miles of water and has a maximum depth of 925 feet. It is immense and nearly incomprehensible in scale.

For most of my life, I’ve lived fairly close to Lake Michigan. My dad, brother, and I used to fish for salmon and trout from a long pier that extended out into the lake and my sister still goes to Bradford Beach to hang out with the beach crew. When my mom was one year old, her dad died on the Great Lakes when he either fell or jumped from a steamer ship he was serving on. Today, I live in a house that’s only about a ten minute walk to the lake.

Despite its enormity, my personal history with it, and my proximity to it, I’d always taken Lake Michigan for granted. It was always there, but I never really saw it. That changed when the pandemic hit in early 2020. Unable to travel to make work, I found solace in a set of hiking trails that skirted the bluffs on the lake near my house. Starting in 2023, from a vantage point on those bluffs, I filmed the lake over the course of a year — just water and sky, each image framed exactly the same.

With this film, I’ve reminded myself of the power, beauty, significance, and timelessness that the lake possesses. From the first indigenous inhabitants of the Great Lakes basin, throughout European settlement, and up to the present day, Lake Michigan has provided subsistence, commerce, transportation, power, recreation, and a sense of awe for those who have lived near it. Its future as a source of fresh water — especially in light of climate change — is of utmost importance to the region. It is in turns both calming and terrifying. Its moods are infinite. While it’s a source of life for millions of people, it’s also a wilderness.