ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Blaze Orange, photographer Travis Dewitz captures the joy, excitement, and camaraderie of deer hunting in Wisconsin. A lone hunter in a tree stand as dawn arrives. A girl and her grandfather scanning a field in the fresh snow. Tired hunters laughing around the evening fire back at camp. These are snapshots of a culture touchstone. With more than 600,000 hunters taking to the fields and woods of the state each year, the whitetail deer season is by far Wisconsin’s largest sporting event. Dewitz documents the hunt and more as he rides along with hunters and a game warden, visits local mom-and-pop stores where hunters gather, and records the industries that operate alongside the deer season—a taxidermist and knife maker, butchers and sausage makers. The result is a stunning and keen-eyed chronicle of one season of the Wisconsin deer hunt.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Travis Dewitz is a professional commercial photographer based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. His work has been honored with multiple awards and displayed in galleries in Wisconsin and California.

REVIEWS

When Photographer Travis Dewitz set out to capture the essence of Wisconsin deer hunting in pictures, he took on an extraordinarily ambitious challenge. From blaze orange hung on the clothesline, to the patient expectations of first light, to bucks hanging heavy on the meat pole, Blaze Orange delivers what words often cannot, the true feeling of the Wisconsin deer season.(Bob Willging, author of History Afield: Stories of the Golden Age of Wisconsin Sporting Life and On the Hunt: The History of Deer Hunting in Wisconsin)

If you need to stir your hunting soul in the middle of summer, reach for Travis Dewitz’s Blaze Orange: Whitetail Deer Hunting in Wisconsin. Dewitz has created a soulful photographic account of deer hunting at its best, the quiet passion of rural folk for whom deer season is the heart of every year…Dewitz’s excellent images capture without fanfare what deer hunting is all about to rural America. Kudos to him and to the Wisconsin Historical Society for putting a slice of this tradition in print. ( Christopher Camuto, Gray's Sporting Journal)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

A Prepared Mind and the Blaze Orange Army

Introduction

Blaze Orange