`NED TROVILLION: PHOTOGRAPHS AT HOME AND ABROAD'

"Native Tourist" by Ned Trovillion

In more than 50 years as a photographer, Ned Trovillion has amassed a slide file of more than 200,000 images. Many of those photographs were taken in the exotic places: Tibet, the Galapagos Islands, or any of the 50 countries he has visited. But many more were snapped much closer to home and to his heart.

The Vienna, Ill., photographer's work will be on display at Gallery 100 beginning Friday and continuing through Sept. 26. The show is titled "Ned Trovillion: Photographs at Home and Abroad."

A reception for the artist will be held from 5-7 p.m. Friday at the gallery, located at 7 N. Sprigg St. in Cape Girardeau.

As a teen-ager growing up on a farm south of Golconda, Trovillion was inspired by the pictures in a new magazine called Life. Life debuted the same year Trovillion began taking photographs with his new $12.95 Argus 35mm Candid camera.

"I liked to see things and capture them on film," he says of his early interest in photography.

Trovillion continued taking pictures while he served in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II. After the war he became a high school agriculture teacher before beginning a 30-year career with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service.

Two circumstances boosted Trovillion's photographic stock during that period: His employer provided him with a large-format Crown Graphic camera, and he and his wife Jan began systematically traveling the world.

What Trovillion has amassed in 60 years of photography both documents those travels and the Southern Illinois landscape he knows so well.

He says Southern Illinois is extraordinary not only because of the convergence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers but because it was spared the flattening that occurred in the rest of the state during the Ice Age.

"It's very rugged territory," he says.

The state used a Trovillion photograph of Garden of the Gods in an advertisement that ran in national magazines and metropolitan newspapers. Congressman Glenn Poshard's office is decorated with Trovillion photographs.

Trovillion, who at 77 still takes photographs every day, is especially fond of the area's rocks and bluffs and swamps.

The most difficult photograph of Trovillion's career was a shot of Old Stone Face, an outcropping in Saline County shaped like a pug-nosed old man. Trovillion took the picture about 20 years ago while the bluff was covered with a glaze of ice.

"It was very hazardous walking on that ice and even more hazardous coming back down. I was by myself and was carrying a lot of equipment," he said.

Heron Pond in the Cache River Wetlands is his favorite place to take pictures.

He is a member of the Nature Conservancy, which is helping spearheading the drive to preserve land in the Cache River Valley. He is the organization's "volunteer photographer."

"I think we have a uniquely beautiful area here," Trovillion says of his photographic efforts to help preserve it.

This is Trovillion's first gallery show, but he does many slide presentations for churches, schools and other organizations.

"I present it to almost to anybody that invites me," he said.

Trovillion has published a book titled "Southern Illinois .... a photographer's love for the countryside and its beauty." The foreword was written Poshard, who wrote that Trovillion's photographs have given us "a sense of who we are and an explanation of why we love this land so much."