"That tree is part of my project," said the Riverton-based photographer who has logged countless days exploring Utah's enigmatic inland sea, so saline in places that the salt crystals precipitate out as the water cools every fall. Those crystallized precipitates, like the out-of-place tree, are among the "anomalies" Slade seeks out in his campaign to tell Great Salt Lake's hidden stories through photography. He suspected the tree marked the site of an abandoned homestead.

"I bet if we look around we'll find a foundation," he said. "There typically is something interesting behind an anomaly, like the three-eyed fish on 'The Simpsons,' and there is usually something ironic."

And irony is what Slade is really after. His "project" is a multiyear photographic study of Great Salt Lake, launched a few years ago when he became a Utah State University master of fine arts student after years as a commercial photographer. In all likelihood, Slade will be working on his "Great Salt Lake Photographic Survey" for the duration of his career, accumulating images he packages together for public consumption once in a while.

At Fort Douglas last month, about 40 people attended the public debut of his survey, which he hopes to exhibit in a museum or traveling show and publish in book form.

"The overall goal is to find as many stories as I can, a story of ancient man, a story of birds, a story of ladies riding horses on Antelope Island. For every species of plant there is a story. I want to tell the hidden stories that people step over to get to the stories everyone knows about," said Slade, a 39-year-old Logan native who served an LDS church mission to South Korea while a USU undergrad. "I want the survey to be more than a collection of great pictures. I want to delve deeper on so many levels. I'm just meeting the right people to tell me the stories I want to tell."

Going to extremes

The survey's images are presented in black and white in an extreme horizontal format, which requires him to crop the tops and bottoms from his images. Some are so full of mystery that you can stare at them for 20 minutes and still not be sure what you see. In one picture, you can't tell whether the image depicts a rock from 5 feet up or an isolated mountain from 5,000 feet up.

"Unless there's a car, a tree, or a road out there, you don't have perspective, so you get lost in the bigness or smallness of what you're looking at," he said. "I don't want my audience to be seduced by color. This project is not about pink, even though pink is an important color on the lake."

Slade wraps up his MFA this summer and recently began teaching photography full time at the Waterford School in Sandy. He also teaches at Brigham Young University as an adjunct professor. His primary tool is a Nikon digital camera, but he sometimes lugs along a vintage Korona ultra-large-format 12-by-20-inch view camera that costs $20 for every exposure.

A lure for artists

Slade is hardly the only artist obsessed with Great Salt Lake, which was first visually documented by the 1852 Stansbury Expedition, and later by painter Alfred Lambourne and numerous other contemporary photographers.

"It's the gateway to nowhere," Salt Lake City photographer Charles Uibel said. "It's so different than here, but it's close and beautiful. Every time you go there it's different."

Uibel, known for documenting the lake's sweeping vistas in color, admires Slade's images for their ability to rivet the viewer's attention.

"He goes about the lake as if it were a church and wants to approach it reverently and peacefully, something that is going to last forever and so he doesn't try to just blast the lake on you. He's very subtle," Uibel said. "He takes a certain part of the lake and does a study of it. His black and white makes you pause and look at it and be still."

Slade combines whimsey and deliberation to guide his forays to the lake, sometimes commencing after thorough research and other times just allowing his foot on the brake pedal to tell him where to go. But always he approaches the act of shooting with great care.

"My mind-set when I grab the digital camera is the same as when I use the view camera. It's to slow down and be aware of what's in front of me when I trip the shutter. It's easy with a digital camera to pop off a million frames. The idea is to pre-visualize the way Ansel Adams did."

But then images wind up in his portfolio that could only be the product of spontaneity. He organizes them in ways that open a new way of seeing. In one juxtaposition he documents the surprising similarity between a pelican carcass and a tumbleweed.

Nature's ironies

Slade finds inspiration from the lake's famous effect on precipitation. The lake presents its broadest aspect to those storms coming from the northwest, which scoop up the lake's moisture on their way to the mountains. Wasatch Front communities manage the resulting heavy snowfall with salt -mined, ironically enough, from the lake.

"Salt and weather combine and intersect in a magical way in Utah," Slade said. "There's this little circle going on where you see the snow fall and the salt pour, and you get it."

He captured another of the lake's ironies on the Southern Pacific Railroad causeway that is sinking under its own weight, requiring the railroad to heap more rock on the causeway, causing it to subside further. The result is a ceaseless effort to keep the rails straight and dry so the causeway can remain a conduit for Midwestern grain and other freight headed to West Coast ports.

"These trains drop a lot of corn, so mice go out and eat it. So there's a new food chain and on top are the coyotes and foxes that go out on the causeway to eat the mice," Slade said. The causeway was built in the 1950s to replace the Lucin Cutoff, a wooden trestle the railroad had to abandon after just 50 years.

"It's hard to be a physical structure on the lake and remain intact for any length of time," Slade said.

Among Slade's favorite areas to shoot is the lake's remote west shore and surrounding mudflats. On what proved to be his most memorable misadventure, his Land Rover sank in the sand while he searched for the spots where the Donner Party bogged in 1846. His leaky radiator forced him to carry 5 gallons of fresh water, otherwise he could have found himself in real peril. Whereas the Donner Party became snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and resorted to cannibalism, Slade was extracted by chopper after two days by Box Elder County search and rescue.

On the flight back to civilization, he realized they were flying over spots he wanted to photograph from the air. Too bad it was the middle of the night.

bmaffly@sltrib.com

Michael Slade file

Age: 39

Occupation: photographer

Day job: instructor, Waterford School

Primary tool: Nikon D2X

Major opus: Great Salt Lake Photographic Survey

Favorite color: green

Home: Riverton

Family: married, two kids

Web sites: www.tawayama.com and www.gslps.org

Number of Land Rovers he's owned: 8 1/2

Core philosophy: "Terrible weather makes for the best photographs."

Biggest regret: Not shooting the Lucin Cutoff while the historic rail trestle was still intact.

Biggest thrill: Being locked into the sites of "powerful military instrument" during a foray into Utah Test and Training Range.

Crucial lesson learned on the job: If you're stranded in a spot without cell phone reception, dial 911 anyway because another carrier may be able to pick up the call.