At first the family of three saw nothing. Finally, one of them said, "look over there. Could that be..." What looked like a swarm of flies miles away in the hills moved in their direction. The members of the family got in their truck and drove as close as they could. They got out and waited and walked and waited. The herd grew bigger until the one family was looking at another family, one led by a stallion, some mares, babies and bachelor horses.
"I didn't know what they'd do," Elissa Kline said. She was 90 miles from the ranch where she lived with her husband and son near Challis, and she'd been waiting for just that moment. "They were curious. I could not keep my jaw..." She put her hand on her lower jaw and shut her mouth. "From that day, I was hooked. I was compelled, and I watched over the course of a couple years."
Kline, a self taught photographer, late of the music industry in Los Angeles, is a self-professed horse junkie. In 1989, Carole King asked her to come to Idaho to help manage her ranch. Though born in New York, Kline grew up in Laurel Canyon in L.A. and was friends with King's daughters.
"I loved it from the start. Your life runs seasonally. It suited me," she said.
Her boyfriend at the time, Erik Gilberg, came with her to help temporarily. Seventeen years later, they are the parents of an 11-year-old son, Ian, and have just moved from King's ranch to Hailey.
Their time with King was a gratifying term, which culminated with Kline's obsession with photographing the wild horses and the subsequent exhibition with the Sun Valley Center for the Arts. Her work has been printed onto seven-foot panels of cotton voile fabric. When displayed at The Center, Hailey, they will duplicate the experience of actually walking through the herd. The exhibition is part of a larger multidisciplinary project titled, "Whose Nature? What's Nature?"
Kline was told about the herd by a friend who had witnessed a helicopter doing a wild horse round-up and encouraged Kline to go find them with her camera.
"She was so moved by what she saw," Kline said. "Her passion and horror pulled me in."
Wild horse round-ups are a controversial subject. In 2004, Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., inserted a last-minute rider as part of a 3,300-page budget appropriations bill. No one had time to read it, let alone debate it. The public was left out. The rider essentially gutted a law that had been in effect since 1971, safeguarding wild horses from inhumane treatment and slaughter. The rider read that wild horses and burros over the age of 10 or that had been offered for adoption three times, could be sold "without limitations" to the highest bidder. Generally, the highest bidder is a rancher who then sells the horse to the slaughterhouse for a profit.
Burns was not the first to attempt to try to remake the law.
It's an old issue going back generations to when the BLM began leasing rangeland. The BLM has claimed that horses destroy habitat, compete for grazing lands and overpopulate. But there has never been any evidence that horses destroy habitat, nor that their population levels are what are claimed, according to the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign.
In fact, the group asserts that after massive wild horse roundups, herd areas show little or no improvement, especially in instances when cattle numbers remain the same.
Also, the Government Accountability Office, in a study released in 1990, states, "wild horses are vastly outnumbered on federal rangelands by domestic livestock."
The Challis Herd is made up of multiple families, numbering approximately 175 to 250 horses. When it gets to 250, that is when the BLM does a "gather," Kline said.
"I recognized them and probably photographed a hundred horses over the course of a couple years. They were thriving. Their hooves were strong. They were beautiful beyond words. For me the driving force beyond my own attachment and curiosity was taking pictures of them in their natural state. I'd see the same family a year later and they were still together.
"I wore the same thing every time I went. The same jacket and hat. I like to think that certain horses knew me. I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to say they trusted me but they wouldn't run from me. I would talk to them and tell them 'I'm not going to hurt you. Maybe I can save you.' That was my goal, to bring more public awareness to their plight. They're being pushed off land that they're thriving on for reasons that are political and money based. For me you don't know what to do. I can only take pictures."
In fact, that desire to share the horses and their plight is what prompted Kline to seek a public venue for her work. She went to see Vickey Hanson-Williams of Mountain Dreamworks in Ketchum and asked if she could digitally reproduce the images onto large panels of fabric.
"She was intrigued with the project. We tried it, and it was beautiful with a little transparency and a little movement," Kline said.
She took the first fabric to Kristen Poole, artistic director at the Sun Valley Center, to ask her advice on where she might publicly display the images.
Ultimately, Poole realized that the panels would be perfect for display in Hailey during the "Whose Nature" What's Nature?" exhibition.
"It's a great opportunity," Kline said. "I can have my transparent ghost herd hanging. You can walk amongst them. When you stare at them it's a life size horse staring back at you."
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Kline will also teach a free workshop for teens, Exploring Nature through Photography, on Friday, Nov. 3, from 4 to 5:30 p.m., and Saturday, Nov. 4, from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Co-taught with Stacie Brew, the workshop will take middle and high school students to sites in the Wood River Valley where man's impact on nature is visible. Digital cameras will be provided for use during the class. Space is limited. Call 726-9491 ext. 10 to reserve a spot.
Elissa Kline hangs her printed wild horses at The Center, Hailey, in preparation for the show?s opening on Friday. Photo by Chris Pilaro
