Light On The Edge Of The Days

A disciple of Sleeping Bear’s beauty shares images bathed in rare light.

- Jeff Smith

PHOTOGRAPHER JULIAN BUNKER

Julian Bunker swims every day he can. The dive in. The shock of cold. And then the thing he seeks: the feeling of being alive. The feeling that the world is vivid and the reminder that he is in it, immersed. He swims in Omena Bay, the picture-perfect cup-of-an-inlet three-quarter of the way north along the Leelanau Peninsula. It’s the same bay he grew up on, the same bay where, at sunrise and sunset, he has watched the sky smear with rose and turquoise and peach and orange a gazillion times. It is that fleeting light that lives so briefly between day and night that he has chosen to chase, to try to capture and convey.

As Julian recalls it, he first picked up a camera when he was about 12. “My mom had a basic SLR, film, I carried it around with me,” he says. He had to be judicious about what he shot, because film was expensive and so was the processing, and he was only 12, so he couldn’t afford to be just racking through a bunch of film. But being selective made him think about every shot.