When the first European explorers saw The Great Lakes they called them les mers douces — the sweet seas. They had never before encountered anything comparable. For the First Nations the Great Lakes have long been places of wonder and mystical power. And today the Lakes still have an ability to fascinate. Acclaimed photographer Mark Schacter travels the Great Lakes system to produce a personal portrait of the lakes and their surrounding towns, cities, ports, industrial zones and landscapes.

Reviews:
Mark Schacter's Sweet Seas is a visual tour of the delicate beauty and intense history of exploitation in and around the five Great Lakes. . . Sweet Seas is a remarkable study of how nature and humans merge together and create ever-changing landscapes."
— Canadian Geographic

"Mark Schacter was blessed with a perceptive eye and a lens that captures the Great Lakes in so many ways."
— shelflifemag.com

I was born in Thunder Bay — a remote city in northwestern Ontario in the heart of the Canadian Shield. I left when I was 16, but the place has left a lasting impression on how I see the world and how I translate that vision into photography.
As a boy, accompanying my father on long road trips related to his business, I grew to love the rugged and empty northwestern Ontario landscape that was dotted with signs of feeble-looking human intervention. A lonely gas station, a makeshift paper mill town, an abandoned gold mine, the single-lane TransCanada highway: they seemed puny against the backdrop of billion-year-old pre-Cambrian bedrock, the big lakes and rivers, and the legions of blackflies and mosquitoes that were such an urgent reminder of nature's power over man.
Those boyhood impressions stuck with me for life. Much of my photography attempts to convey the smallness, frailty and transience of man's work in relation to the indifferent grandeur of the natural world.

Mark Schacter's profile page