THE MAN WHO CAPTURED CANADA.
OVER A CAREER SPANNING 70 YEARS — AND WHICH SENT HIM CRISS-CROSSING THE COUNTRY MORE THAN 100 TIMES — GEORGE HUNTER HAS GIVEN CANADIANS THE GIFT OF A DIVERSE LOOK AT WHO WE ARE. NICHOLAS KLASSEN EXPLAINS.
Nobody took more photos of 20th-century Canada than George Hunter. But you’ve likely never heard of him.
As one of Canada’s most published photographers, his photos are in atlases, textbooks, encyclopedias and magazines. They’re in galleries, museums and public archives, on old postage stamps and currency.
Maybe you remember the salmon fishing boat on the old $5 bill? The oil refinery on the $ 10 bill? Those are his. The RCMP Musical Ride photo on the old $50 bill is ... well, sort of his. After George had lined up the shot, a Mountie flashed his badge and demanded George move so that the Mountie could set up his camera in the same spot. Sometimes George gets credit for the $ 50 bill image, but he confirmed it wasn’t his by superimposing his photo over the one on the bank note. The horses’ legs didn’t line up exactly.
The most remarkable thing about that story is how unremarkable it is — by George’s standards. For a man with a 70 - year career photographing Canada and the world, being elbowed aside by a police officer was nothing compared to being charged by a moose in Banff National Park while waiting to photograph a CPR train. Or catching the last flight out of Kabul the day the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Or deadstick landing his Cessna 180 in Rimouski when the engine quit.
George’s favourite story — the one he apparently told the most — involved being thrown out of a plane over Edmonton.
He was leaning out the door when the pilot lurched to avoid a bird and George’s camera clipped his buckle and opened it, ejecting him. Astonishingly, he caught hold of the struts under the wing — all while maintaining his grip on his camera, too. After some frantic gesturing back and forth, the pilot eventually rolled the plane. George dropped his camera in first — priorities, you know — and then lowered himself back into the cockpit. He carried on with the photo shoot.
I heard that story from George’s long time accountant, Gary Landa. I get the sense Gary enjoys telling it as much as George must have.
Gary is also the custodian of George’s vast collection of photos, artwork and antique camera equipment.
Before he died in 2013, George created the Canadian Heritage Photography Foundation to ensure his collection would be available to the public. With no children of his own, George asked Gary to run the foundation, and it’s housed in an undistinguished office building in Mississauga, Ont.
His personal mission state- ment includes this: “A country without appreciation of its heritage is not a country.”
It continues, “My mission is to show Canadians, and the world, a little of our country. The more they see something of Canada’s grandeur and diversity of its people, the more they will appreciate it. I will not rest a minute until my mission is accomplished.”
This lifelong pursuit began when George was a teenager. In 1939, at age 18, he sold his first photo — it was of King George’s procession through the streets of Winnipeg. After stints as a staff photographer at the Winnipeg Tribune and the National Film Board, he went out on his own in 1950, at a time when independent commercial photographers were extremely rare.
Over the span of his career, George criss- crossed Canada more than 100 times. He documented everything from wideopen spaces to intimate, everyday moments in family homes.
He never let the specifics of his assignment restrict the scope of his photo shoots — every assignment was an op- portunity to document Canada. He treated the iconic and the ordinary as equally worthwhile, and he was comfortable in every community in every region.
He shot in kitchens, on fishing wharfs, in artist studios and along country roads. He shot underground, in the deepest mines, and overhead from helicopters, planes, and an eightmetre ladder he had mounted on a rock star-style customized bus.
Because of the length of his career, George’s catalogue represents a chronology of postwar Canada, beginning with horse- drawn hay wagons and ending with modern tractor-trailers on multi-lane highways.
Many of George’s aerial and high-angle shots were for government and corporate clients who wanted to showcase a young country maturing into an industrial force. Billowing smokestacks, open- pit mines, newly opened expressways, vast log booms — Canadians were proud to project this image of machine - made “beauty” to themselves and the world.
But this work ebbed in the 1970s and ’80s when mindsets shifted and industrialization became associated with scars on the land rather than improvements. So George shifted, too, focusing more on idyllic portrayals of Canada and travel photography from around the world.
Technically, he was consistently ahead of the game.
When experts and all 46 staff photographers at Time magazine insisted nighttime aerial photos “could not be done,” the art director turned to George.
By stalling his plane just long enough for an exposure, he was able to capture night-lit cities for the first time. The results were so exceptional, Time ran them as the largest photo spread in the magazine’s history.
Those photos exemplify George Hunter’s ultimate contribution: creating images viewers had never seen before. He shaped the way Canadians saw themselves and their country. They just didn’t know it. Part of George’s anonymity is explained by Canadians’ underappreciation of photography in general.
In 1977, he was one of the first photographers admitted to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and today his work hangs in the country’s most prestigious art galleries, but during his career, photography was often seen as a lesser-than art form. Canadian photographers didn’t have many exhibition opportunities outside small camera clubs and workshops.
Friend and former Art Gallery of Ontario photography curator Maia-Mari Sutnik struggles to reflect on George’s individual legacy because of the lack of a larger national consciousness of photographic activity.
“So far, we have skimped on this topic. Without publishing that captures George Hunter and other contributors to Canada’s visual history, there will be no awareness — and we will be all the poorer for not documenting Canada’s legacy in the field of photography.”
George was acutely aware of this. He told one chronicler: “Canadians don’t appreciate photography as art. You rarely see it hung on walls and there are few collectors in Canada. And that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to elevate its stature in my own country.”
George spent his twilight years compiling heritage prints, captioning each image, and donating them to public galleries and museums across Canada. Before he died, he had several hundred prints in at least one public gallery or museum in every province and territory, except Nunavut.
His mission statement proclaims: “I will not give up until every prominent public art institution across Canada has at least one of my heritage prints in their permanent collections.” The day he went into the hospital for the last time, he was preparing for an exhibit at the RCMP Heritage Centre in Regina.
This resolve was borne not of vanity, but rather a deep and abiding love for his country. Those who knew him best praise George as an unpretentious, humble man. So perhaps it’s fitting that so few Canadians know who George Hunter is.
He doesn’t need your praise. He just wants you to see his photos and appreciate this: “Almost every part of the country has some magic to it when you look through a camera.”