DULUTH — Tom Haas remembers his first summer on Isle Royale. He was 19 and scored an internship with the National Park Service to take photographs that might be used to document and promote the little-known park.

It was 1967, and his park ranger boss wanted photos of the island’s iconic wolves and moose. Haas was given a bulky, old-school, single-frame camera that had to be loaded with new film for each photo. Black-and-white film was far cheaper at the time, so that’s what Haas had to work with.

With the tripod required to keep the giant camera still enough to take in-focus photos, the contraption weighed 20 pounds. Moreover, the 135-millimeter fixed lens made everything in the distance seem small.

It didn’t take Haas long to figure out that it wasn’t working to capture candid shots of wildlife from afar. But the big, bulky camera, with its black and white film and decades-old technology, was perfect for capturing other magic on the island — portraits of its fascinating summer residents, still-lifes of boats, lighthouses and kitchen stoves, and dramatic landscape shots of shoreline, waves and rocks, plants and forests.

Haas didn’t know it, but that summer job in high school, and that old camera, would lead him on a yearslong adventure on and around Lake Superior’s largest island. He would go on to buy a large-format camera for $40 and spend the next 20 years kayaking around and photographing the island and its people, one frame at a time.

Haas took nearly 4,000 images on Isle Royale, most of them gathering dust for more than 30 years until he and his wife, Jeannie Thoren, decided some of those pictures needed to see the light of day again. The result of their effort is an unmatched, historical collection that captures both the island’s natural and cultural history.

From those 4,000 negatives, Tom and Jeannie made hundreds of prints, spreading them across the upstairs in their eastern Duluth home. Over an entire winter, they decided on 275 of their favorites for Tom’s new 240-page coffee-table-sized photo book, “Isle Royale, A Photographer’s Circumnavigation, 1967-1987,” available this month in bookstores and online.

If Ken Burns ever produces a documentary on Isle Royale, this is where he will get his historic photos. Because they are in black and white, and taken with a camera format designed a century ago, the photos have an other-worldly aura.

While taken 40-50 years ago, some of these photos seem to hark back to the 1800s, in part because of the old nature of the wooden boats and humble buildings on the island.

“Prior to working at Isle Royale, I had only shot with 35mm film, some for high school yearbook production, and some wildlife,” Haas explains on his website. “Once I discovered the clarity and detail a larger-format film can produce, I was hooked.”

Haas said the big camera’s limitations made him learn patience as a virtue in photography.

“You wait for the sun to get where you need it to be in the sky. Wait for the wind to go down,” he noted.

But it’s not just the mechanics of old film and old cameras that make the photos special. Haas developed an eye for subjects that make his photos pop with personality, from old kitchen wood stoves and wooden boats to water-worn rocks and the weathered faces of island fishermen.

Through the many years, Haas was on the island, only about 75 seasonal residents and maybe another 75 Park Service staff were spread across the 45-mile-long archipelago. Everyone knew everyone, and Haas fit right in.

“I lived with some of these people, and I’d come back every year to visit them. And some of them were alone by then and needed help just maintaining their camps,” Haas told the News Tribune in an interview in his living room.

He developed a special bond with several families and bachelor fishermen, widowers and widows who had no one else at their remote locations scattered across the island’s sheltered coves and bays. He helped them mend and set their nets for herring, Lake Superior’s small but tasty native fish that sold for about 50 cents per pound at the time.

“The islanders were extraordinarily welcoming, hospitable families, and the commercial fishermen and women knowingly risked their lives in simple boats every day they spent on the water,” Haas writes on his website. “Over time I also found myself serving as both an errand boy for and companion to these folks, performing plenty of odd jobs along the way.”

While Haas started his Isle Royale adventures in a Park Service-issued canoe, he eventually purchased his own folding, German-made, two-seat kayak called a Klepper. It served as his transportation but also had room for his heavy camera gear in the second seat. He found the craft was perfectly suited for the rough seas that could envelop the island. It was mobility and safety on a shoestring budget, Haas recalled.

Haas paddled up and down Isle Royale’s shore and wandered about the island’s interior, from Gull Rocks to Rock of Ages and everywhere in between.

“I paddled the entire length of the island in one day, just to see if I could do it,” Haas said.

But most of his travels were at a much slower pace, aimed at scouting photo subjects and memorizing the face of the island’s shoreline.

He became a mostly self-taught artist of photography, carefully setting up his contraption wherever his eye told him would best capture the moment and the place.

He later toyed with the idea of becoming a professional photographer, making a career out of it, but his early efforts to sell prints didn’t amount to much.

“I consider it a hobby,” said Haas, now 75. “Then it was fun, not work.”

Haas was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1948 and went on to attend college at the University of Connecticut. He intended to study science but used much of his time teaching himself photo-developing techniques in the biology department’s little-used dark room, where he developed his skills in turning negatives into prints.

Worried about being drafted into the Vietnam War, Haas said he hung around Isle Royale and the North Shore even after his internship, and kept returning, in part “because it’s closer to Canada,” where he planned to escape, if drafted, as a conscientious objector to war.

“I went to the island to wait out the draft … but after that, I didn’t want to leave,” Haas said.

But even when the draft threat ended, Haas knew he wanted to stay on Lake Superior. Most years in the 1970s and ’80s he was on the island from May into October, about the same time the island was visited by longtime summer resident families and with Park Service staff. The island essentially shut down, closed to people, in winter and early spring.

When Haas wasn’t on the island he spent time in Lutsen, working at Minnesota’s first big ski resort and learning how to cross-country and downhill ski. He then drifted down to Duluth where he’s lived ever since, landing a job managing Continental Ski Shop and eventually becoming a national representative for Fischer skis.

When he wasn’t taking photos, Haas could usually be found kayaking in summer and skiing in winter. He got so good he even won the 1972

American Birkebeiner ski race

in Hayward.

Haas and Thoren — a Marquette, Michigan, native enshrined in the U.S. Ski And Snowboard Hall of Fame for her pioneering work designing women’s ski gear — met formally at a ski industry convention in Las Vegas in the 1970s. They immediately struck a relationship over skiing and, even more so, Lake Superior and Isle Royale.

“Tom fell in love with Lake Superior, the North Shore, Lutsen, with skiing … with the island. … We both knew this area was home,” Thoren said. “There we were in Las Vegas talking about Lake Superior.”

Tony Dierckens, Duluth author and the owner of Zenith City Press, said he met Jeannie and Tom when they needed help bringing their photos together for the book. Dierckens has a side business, X-Presso Books, aimed at helping people self-publish their pet projects.

After seeing the treasure trove of Haas’ images, Dierckens knew it was a personal project that needed to go public.

“After I met them I just thought these photos needed to be out there, nobody else has anything like this. … Nobody else could,” Dierckens said. “I really think this is an important project. These are absolutely beautiful photos.”

Haas considers himself fortunate to have been in the right place in the right era. Many of the people, fishing camps and boats once familiar on the island are gone now. He eventually sold his $500, 50-year-old kayak for $1,400 in 2022, and he hasn’t been back to the island in a decade.

But Haas is lucky. He not only has great memories of his time on Isle Royale, but has a book with 275 of his best photos to help him, and the rest of us, remember.

“It was a great experience, not just as a 19-year-old kid,” Haas said. “But to be able to keep going back, year after year, and keep taking photos. … I was fortunate.”

• “Isle Royale, A Photographers Circumnavigation, 1967-1987”
• By Tom Haas
• 240 pages, 275 black and white photos
• Published by X-Presso Books, Duluth. Available at bookstores around the Lake Superior region and at

  tomhassphotography.com

  for $80.

Tom Haas will sign his books at Zenith Bookstore, 318 N. Central Ave., Duluth, from 1-3 p.m. June 15.