Uncle Bob Part I: The Photos

The quiet photographer and his breath-taking work

Self-timed photo of Bob and his car.

The perfect picture is priceless, worth much more than a mere thousand words. There’s a certain eternal magic in capturing a moment in time, forever freezing the place, ambiance, and people. We now take digital photos for granted, but have you ever sat and wondered at what a miracle it is that light-sensitive chemicals can even color and arrange themselves in that way on paper? 

We all have that photo, the one of our mother, father, or loved one, the photo that shows their true essence and expresses exactly who they are or were. While there may be other snapshots of them, that particular photo somehow captured the perfect facial expression, clothing, and time period, preserving their soul in a four-by-six picture. For me, it’s the title photograph of my dad for 18 Uncles. The light, his mustache, and baseball cap… it’s perfect. I remember tearing up and staring at it on the twenty-year anniversary of his death in 2022, not knowing a year later—almost to the day, it’d be the photo I’m trying to build a whole new phase of my life around. 

The perfect picture is priceless. And one of the many amazing things about doing 18 Uncles is that I have been looking through everyone’s photo albums and hearing stories over the warmth of nostalgia and coffee. 

I’ve noticed that just about every picture featuring Uncle Bob shows him holding his camera and pointing it right back at the person taking the picture. And when I think about Uncle Bob, I can’t help but imagine him with a camera in his hand. 

Then I went into Aunt Debbie’s attic. Like any attic, it’s dark and cold, dust covers the creaky wooden floorboards, and the rafters are visible overhead and slope down to the edges where the walls are lined with square plastic tubs, a long-forgotten crib, Debbie’s wedding dress on a lonely metal rack, and layers of labeled cardboard boxes. 

In one corner are some things Uncle Bob left before moving to Switzerland for the love of his life, Bridget fifteen years ago, including twelve photo albums and a forty-pound plastic tote with hundreds and hundreds of developed yet seldom-seen pictures still in their bright envelopes from Walmart and the now-closed K-Mart. 

I took all of them, every last photo, brought them home, and went through them, and they blew my mind. 

Whether he fully realizes it or not, my uncle Robert Peterson is a natural-born documentarian who captured Upper Peninsula and American culture through an astute lens for decades. 

Uncle Bob prodigiously captured the '90s to early two 2000s on film. And they tell a lot, the thousands of pictures that he left. I can see the times he was alone, bored, and taking photos in his bedroom, roaming the forest getting nature shots, or parking his car to watch the sun dip behind Lake Superior. Other times, he was with our family or a group of friends, in the background, observing and snapping candids. 

And it’s evident throughout it all that he was experimenting with the camera, as a true artist would, having fun, and trying new things. Shooting a river or a street with heavy traffic, he played with the shutter speed to get the motion blur of the water or streaking tail lights. When it was foggy, he wandered the Laurium streets to capture shafts of street light shooting through the trees, then he put a bright light on his car, grabbed an ax, and took a self-timed photo of himself stalking out of the misty night in a scene that looks like the cover of a horror movie. 

That’s Uncle Bob. Always thinking creatively, always with his camera in hand, and capturing the unexpected.

He took pictures of everything: his parents’ cat, close-ups of many varieties of flowers, old barns, rusted cars left in the forest as nature reclaimed them, many varieties of clouds, snow-covered birch trees, farm horses, wild deer, waterfalls, beaches in the summer, those same beaches in the winter, sunsets, sunrises, full moons, lighthouses, churches, Christmas ornaments, little town streets, the WinterFest snow statues, fireworks exploding over the lift bridge, cool cars, his cars, his trips to concrete conventions in Las Vegas with Somero Enterprises, various professional sports games, and he took a lot of pictures of people. 

And I think I’m speaking for everyone when I say, thank God he did. 

It may not have been his goal, maybe just a function of always having a camera in hand, and a photographer’s soul, but over the years, he documented life in the Keweenaw Peninsula: watermelon eating contests on the Fourth of July, infants stuffing their hands into birthday cakes, camping with his friends, BridgeFest parades, little league games, dad-league softball, high school football in the fall, hockey and basketball games in the winter, events at Michigan Tech University, the local dog sled, snowmobile, and cross country ski races, classic car shows, ferris wheels and monster trucks at the Houghton County Fair, ice fishing tournaments, boot hockey games, beach days, weddings, hanging out with a large group of young Apostolics—or what is referred to as “kyds”—my dad building the sauna in our basement, and any other time our extended family got together. 

Robert Peterson was there, camera in hand, documenting it all. I’m sitting at a table surrounded by thousands of glossy photos and feel like I just traveled through time, like I just got to relive the nineties through his work. 

I hadn’t seen Uncle Bob, the quiet photographer, for over thirteen years until I visited his new home near Zurich in December. While I was there, he told me he largely put his camera down since the death of his three-year-old son Skylar back in 2018… but that’s a story for a later date.

For now, I want to share what he captured. It’s all too good not to be shared. For all my fellow Yoopers, you will know the scenes well. For all others, here’s a wonderful window into our world.

The perfect picture is priceless, and my Uncle Bob took a lot of perfect pictures. 

So, enjoy.

And if the work speaks to you, please reach out to Uncle Bob with a ‘thank you’. He’s a private man and not on social media, so I will not put his email or contact information here publicly. 

But he deserves to hear what an amazing thing he did for all of us, so if you do would like to contact him, DM me on Instagram, message me on Facebook, or email me at mgpeterson11@gmail.com, and I will let you know how to get in touch with him.

Finally, here’s a link to the breath-taking gallery and some of Robert Peterson’s work:

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Bob (far left) with his camera in hand.

Uncle Bob (far right) pointing a camera back at the camera.

Bob and I in Switzerland.