Carla Wulfsberg, Project Director

My enduring interest in North Dakota, Norwegian heritage, historical photography, and oral history can best be credited to my father, Carl Wulfsberg. His passion for history, photography, and storytelling made a huge impression on me as a child.  I reveled in the stories he, his older sister, and brothers told that described their childhoods growing up in North Dakota. The stories were hair-raising and hilarious.

Carl Wulfsberg treasured his family photographs, especially the albums filled with small black and white snapshots of the homestead where he was born. One album has only a handful of snapshops of a ranch in Grassy Butte where his family lived during the bleak days of the Depression.  For decades, these photo albums were carefully tucked away in the closet of his home office.  Now, as the keeper of my family’s historical archive, I hope to share these snapshots and stories, as well as those of other families, through the project, Finding Fayette.

John S. Lewis,  Photographer

John S. Lewis grew up on a farm in the northwest corner of North Dakota.  In high school he started experimenting with his family’s Kodak camera.  One day he began to “see” creatively.  This experience not only changed his life, but it pointed the way to his future profession.  He later studied at  “The Center of The Eye” in Aspen, Colorado and at “The Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities” in Sun Valley, Idaho.

With each visit back to North Dakota, he photographed the changing landscape and made intimate portraits of people in his home town. He uses a large format camera and large format black and white negatives. His specialty is the art of creating mural size silver prints. John’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the Pacific Northwest.