Clyde Butcher: The Man Who Made America See the Everglades in Black and White

Most people see the Everglades from a car window on Tamiami Trail: flat, brown, and endless. Clyde Butcher sees it from chest-deep in the water, hauling a large-format camera that weighs as much as a German shepherd, waiting for the light to turn a cypress strand into a cathedral.

From Architecture to the Swamp

Butcher trained as an architect at Cal Poly, working on projects like the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco before leaving the drafting table for a camera in 1970. He moved to Fort Myers in 1980 and spent his first years shooting color landscapes. Everything changed in 1986, when his son was killed by a drunk driver. Butcher turned to black and white, stripping his work down to light and shadow, and found his life’s subject in the swamps and hammocks of South Florida.

Chest-Deep in the Big Cypress

His prints are enormous, some stretching eight feet wide, and they reveal a Florida most visitors never see: ghost orchids clinging to pop ash trees, cypress knees rising from mirror-still water, saw palmetto catching the first light of morning. Butcher and his wife Niki built a gallery on 13 acres along Tamiami Trail in Big Cypress National Preserve in 1992. More than 12,000 visitors have waded through the wetlands behind the gallery on guided swamp walks over the past three decades.

A National Treasure

In 2024, President Biden awarded Butcher the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor given to artists in the United States. The Florida Artists Hall of Fame inductee still shoots, still prints, and still lives on the edge of the swamp that made him famous. His work hangs in the permanent collections of major museums, but the best place to see it is where it was made: standing in his gallery with the Everglades stretching out the back door.