‘Do you have hope for your children?’
Spotlight is a weekly look at some of the people who are part of the Ottawa area’s arts community. This week Bruce Deachman talks with photographer J.A. Lamont, whose current exhibition, Hurricane, continues at Exposure Gallery until April 10. Visit exposuregallery.ca or jalamont.ca for more information.
“I got my first single lens reflex camera in 1977, an Olympus OM1. I got it because I was going into the Arctic — we did a long ski trip across Bylot Island, just north of Baffin Island. At that time I was in love with the Canadian wilderness and mountains and the Arctic, so I got the camera to document that. I’d been doing a lot of mountain travel, but just with the equivalent of a point-and-shoot. It was a way of bringing back some of what I had been seeing.
“Then I had the good fortune that Canadian Geographic published some of my articles with my photographs after that, so that really hooked me. And from there I grew increasingly interested in photography as photography, and instead of photographing to document the travel in these beautiful places, I started to travel specifically to photograph certain things and spend more time in certain places. And more recently I’ve moved, to a certain extent, into what is sometimes called conservation photography, hence the global climate change shows: the Glacial Flows: Notes for a Requiem, before Christmas, and, now, Hurricane.
“Those were prompted, yes, by my love of those environments and, yes, by my love of photography, but equally by my realization that if I loved these places, I should try to protect them. And the reality is I think we are an increasingly urban culture, and most people I don’t think are aware of the situation that’s going on in the Canadian north with respect to the glaciers. These aren’t things that just affect us in an esthetic sense; they’re things that will have terrible implications for our children. I sometimes say to people who say that they have no hope to stop global climate change: ‘Do you have hope for your children?’ And universally they will say yes, and I will then say: ‘ Well, if you have hope for your children and your children’s future, then you must have hope that you can stop global climate change. Because there is no hope for your children if we can’t.’ So that’s been a theme, although by no means my only interest. I’m not a terribly politically motivated person, but my last few shows have been that way.
“In the Glacial Flows: Notes for a Requiem show, about what’s happening to the glaciers of the world, this is not just my assessment; this is the assessment of scientists and an eminent glaciologist that we had, in conjunction with the show, talk about what they ’re seeing. And glaciers around the world are declining at an unprecedented rate, at a terrifying rate. And most of the major cities in Southeast Asia — and elsewhere, such as Calgary — are fed by glacial waters, so this is going to have major practical implications as well.
“Also I’d been observing things. I did a trip to central-east Baffin Island with a friend in 1997, and then essentially the same route in 2013. And in that 16 years, an entire gla- cier simply vanished. We had gone through a very narrow river valley in 1997 — the glacier was 100 feet high and kilometres long. In 2013 it was simply gone. And in 2014 in northern British Columbia, Salmon Glacier — one of the great glaciers of Canada; it’s got two arms that bisect — and in 2014 the north arm was gone. Just a few gnarled, twisted blackened remnants.
“And the current show at Exposure Gallery — Hurricane — I had the good fortune to work with Environment Canada, off the west coast of B.C., in the Scott Islands, in 2011, and I was invited back in 2015 and had the very good fortune to be there when there was a hurricane in the spring.
“Around that time I’d heard Stephen Lewis say, in his speech to the NDP, that the world is fairly soon going to be facing, I think he called it “hallucinatory climatic convulsions.” And that agreed with what I was hearing the scientists saying.
“And I thought ‘Wow, I was right there.’ And the thing that struck me was not only is it hallucinatory, but it’s terrifying. And yet, in the midst of this chaos, there were signs of life, which to me was a sign of hope. So this combination of chaos and order, terror and hope and attraction, that’s almost the definition of the classical notion of the sublime. And that’s been an interest, in part, that grew out of my interest in mountains, and most of what I do ultimately stems from that. I’m motivated by the beauty and the power of what I’m seeing, and the futile desire to somehow capture something of that beauty and power.”