PRAIRIE SENTIMENT
City photographer captures spirit of Saskatchewan
Twenty-six years ago, George Webber was in Scotsguard, Sask., on one of his many image-scouting expeditions through the province's small towns.
By 1994, Scotsguard had long been considered a ghost town. In fact, Webber remembers only one man living there at the time.
At one point, the Calgary photographer went into a long-shuttered general store and took a picture of a slowly disintegrating magazine lying on the floor. A portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth was on the cover, which also revealed that 10 pages of pictures from her 1953 coronation were featured inside.
The magazine's regal cover photo was still bold enough that it made for a startling image when set against the faded and stained tiles on the floor. It was also in good enough shape to suggest that it had only recently been placed there. What strange circumstances had led to it being dropped there?
“There's a phenomenally interesting subtext going on,” says Webber from his Calgary home. “That photograph was made and that magazine printed, by my estimation, in 1953. That was in somebody's possession for the better part of 40 years. They treasured it, they packed it, they moved it and, at some point, they just couldn't hold on to it any longer. It became this discarded little artifact on the floor of this abandoned general store in Scotsguard. There's that impulse and yearning to hang onto things but coupled, and I guess we've all seen this in the last nine months, with that great sense of vulnerability. Some people say, and I concur, that photography is really a little battle against time.”
In her introduction to Webber's newest collection of photography called The Saskatchewan Book, Swift Current-born poet Lorna Crozier marvels at the poignancy Webber can pack into his carefully chosen images.
“What's amazing about these photographs is how much narrative and emotion are contained in the sparsest, most stripped-down of the found remnants of men and women who are not onsite,” she writes.
The Saskatchewan Book taps into more than 30 years of Webber's trips into the province's small towns. He first encountered some of these places in the mid-1970s, when he drove through Saskatchewan for the first time while travelling home to Calgary after studying journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa. This fleeting glimpse of scenery stuck with him and he returned more than a decade later with a camera.
Those familiar with Webber's work will recognize the iconography and imagery as similar to that found in his 2018 collection, The Alberta Book.
If photography is a “little battle against time” in and of itself, Webber also seems attracted to subject matter that is engaged in its own little battle against time. Both books are filled with images of abandoned buildings and cars, cracked billboards, boarded-up storefronts, broken signage, weed-filled lots and other remnants of fading small-town life.
Still, Webber saw specific details in Saskatchewan that he didn't see in Alberta and vice versa.
“The thing about Saskatchewan that I found so fascinating and interesting was that the pace of change, the size of it and the, quote-unquote, sophistication made it much less prone to the onset and onslaught of time than Alberta,” he says.
“So there were things that you would see or situations you would encounter in Saskatchewan that, even back in the late 1980s, were gone from Alberta. So I developed a great affection and fascination with the place because of the slower pace of change and that the little false-front stores and communities and streets that were disappearing super-quick in Alberta were still there in Saskatchewan.”
Webber offers hundreds of stunning, powerful images in dozens of small towns.
In 2018, he took the picture of the theatre marquee in Weyburn with its simple “for sale” message. There's a boarded-up farmhouse set against a big blue sky that he took in Griffin in 2012. There's an endearingly crude do-it-yourself advertisement for homemade pie in Creelman taken that same year. There's a slightly ominous “no trespassing” sign in Maymont, circa 2014, and a once-bold and colourful advertisement for Red Bull Family Restaurant fading into the weeds in Radisson.
On one hand, many of the images seem to convey loss and sadness about people and places slowly disappearing from the landscape. On the other, they could also be interpreted as conveying defiance.
“The thing that really torques up the narrative or emotional quality is that profound, heart-wrenching, touching thing that, (as a) canvas, Saskatchewan is horizontal,” Webber says. “But all of these structures are vertical. There's something optimistic, there's something courageous in that you're running vertically against a relentless horizontality of this place with this understanding of who is going to come out on top. What's going to prevail? Will it be this vertical structure or the relentless horizontality of this place? That reality, that knowledge, is always part of the narrative.”
Webber's photographs have found their way into the collections of museums in Canada and beyond. He was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1999 for his contributions to the visual arts. Many of the photographs found in Saskatchewan Book were recently made part of the national archives of Canada. All of which confirms Webber's reputation as one of Canada's most celebrated documentary photographers. Saskatchewan is his ninth book of photography and he has hosted many exhibitions.
A common theme of his work is capturing subjects that seem poised to disappear, whether it be his 2016 exhibit of industrial machinery found in the Turner Valley Gas Plant or documenting the final days of a community about to be displaced in his 2005 book, A World Within: An Intimate Portrait of the Little Bow Hutterite Community.
Timing is everything for an artist obsessed with chronicling structures and remnants standing up to, or succumbing to, time. That 1953 magazine found in Scotsguard, for instance, has certainly turned to dust by now. It only became that photograph because it was captured at a very specific time. Sometimes the timing can be even more delicate and precarious, Webber says.
“I've had the experience of driving by something and then driving for five or 10 minutes and thinking `Jeez, I should go back to that thing,' ” he says.
“I turn around and I go back and it's different. It's always different. It's the light and the circumstance. When you happen to be at the right place and you've figured out where to stand and the light is right, that's where the photographs come from.”