BACK TO THE BADLANDS
Stark and surreal photos
In the essay that accompanies his photographs in a new edition of Robert Kroetsch’s seminal 1975 novel, Badlands, George Webber recalls the moment he realized the past was more interesting than the present. He was seven, searching for dinosaur fossils in the ravines and buttes that made up his enviable childhood backyard— the badlands surrounding Drumheller. “I spotted a thick leg bone in a mound of pale grey bentonite clay,” Webber writes. “My heart pounded. I called grandpa over. I wanted that bone. I really wanted that bone.” Webber’s grandfather said no, the bone was too big to retrieve or carry. The boy cried; the grandfather ( a foil to Kroetsch’s notoriously self- serving protagonist William Dawe) dug.
Like most kids, Webber eventually got over dinosaurs. He moved to Calgary and “sort of lost touch with the badlands.” In the 1980s, at the age of 30, however, his perspective as a documentary photographer compelled him to turn his lens on his former home, a place he’d read about in Kroetsch’s book when he was a university student. Through the lens of his camera, the badlands were once again magical to Webber. “I took those pictures with the eye and soul of a seven- year- old,” he says.
The resulting black- and- white photographs— surreal moonscapes captured in joltingly hard light— debuted at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in 1990, and were subsequently collected by museums around the world. From there, Webber moved on to an award- wining career as a documentarian of people and places of the Canadian West. His style changed along the way— the further he got from his badlands project, the “more measured and less emotional” he became as a photographer.
And then, four years ago, the badlands beckoned him back. “I got a call from a colleague at SAIT, who told me a storage room full of old photography junk was about to be tossed into a Dumpster,” says Webber. “I walked into that dark, dusty room and heard the whir of an old fridge. It was stuffed full of the same Kodak infrared film I’d shot the badlands on.” To Webber, the find was a miracle of sorts. “That film was discontinued in 2007. I thought I’d set that project aside completely, especially given that the technology wasn’t even available anymore.” Webber loaded his camera and hit the road, this time as “a seven- year- old in a 60- yearold body.” His artist’s perspective, honed and refined after 30 years in the business, “was uncannily the same as the first time— only a heartbeat’s difference.”
Shortly thereafter, Don Gorman, of Rocky Mountain Books, had the obvious, brilliant idea to use Webber’s collection to complement a reimagined edition of Kroetsch’s funny and tragic masterpiece. Hard- won rights were granted, and the book— a stunning, unusual hybrid of coffee- table book and novel— rolled off the press a few weeks ago.
Without the photos, Kroetsch’s book about a man obsessed with his own legacy as a fossil hunter is a classic— and not just a prairie classic. Webber’s photos add another stratum.
Sadly, Kroetsch ( a. k. a. Mr. Canadian Postmodern) was killed in a car accident in 2011. Webber counts himself lucky to have spent a day with the man, when he took his portrait the summer before he died, and fell under the author’s famously charming spell. “Even in his 80s, he was the most charismatic guy I’ve ever met,” says Webber. “I was smitten with him.” The book is a fitting testament to that affection.
“Lightning broke in and from the sky, lacing the clouds, the clouds like precious china for an instant fractured and broken, the perfection of dark blue laced with the lesions of light.”
“He believed for a moment he was losing his mind, in the aimless light, was fantasying the bones he had not been able to find in four days of searching.”
“Without a fragment to look at he tried to tell them of creatures no one had ever seen, explained how to watch for the brown concretion that wasn’t quite brown, the texture that wasn’t merely rock, the shape that couldn’t be expected to have been bone but wasn’t quite anything else.”
“The tabletop of the butte ended, trailed off as a ridge, a knife- back ridge of clay that angled downward, running like a dinosaur skeleton’s vertebraed back out towards a cluster of hoodoos, far below them. Dawe at first believed it was the illusion that compelled him, the ridge like a skeleton’s back, the slick mud softly purple, gently green, in the rain, like the imagined hide of a living dinosaur.”