Even at 94, a photographer to the end
Career spanned 50 years and 120 countries Best known for his work in the Canadian Arctic
He was a photographer to the end.
Richard Harrington sent one of his classic black-and- white Arctic pictures last week to be made into a Christmas card.
It showed an igloo, illuminated from within by a seal oil lamp, standing alone on the tundra beneath the northern lights.
“ It was the last thing he did,” his wife, Margaret, said yesterday of expediting the photo to a B. C. printer. On Tuesday morning, several days after banging his head in a fall, Harrington died at his Leaside home in his sleep, at 94.
Harrington enjoyed a long career as one of Canada’s top documentary photographers. He travelled to 120 countries, most of them more than once, taking pictures of world leaders, Antarctic penguins and remote tribal peoples, from the New Guinea rainforest to the Kalahari Desert. But he was best known for his work in the Canadian Arctic. Between 1948 and 1953, he undertook five epic dogsled trips through the far North, covering 4,800 kilometres. On one journey, in early 1950, he was travelling alone west of Hudson Bay when he came across the igloo camps of the Padleimiut people, who had missed the main fall caribou migration and were on the brink of starvation. He gave them what supplies he had, raised the alarm later in the Toronto Star, and in the meantime took a series of searing yet respectful photographs now famous as “ the Padlei collection.”
“ We talk a lot about our heritage and what it takes to be a Canadian,” said Lorraine Monk, founder of the National Film Board still division and one of Canadian photography’s foremost champions. “ But I don’t think anybody defined it more graphically, more permanently, or more universally than Richard Harrington did.
“ To me, his work is more important than the flag.”
“ He was a gentle man,” longtime Toronto gallery owner Av Isaacs recalled. “ He had an innate sensitivity to other cultures, a strong sense of esthetics and a human quality that was quite amazing.”
Harrington was always secretive about his early life. He never publicly revealed his original name, saying only that he was born in Hamburg, Germany, on Feb. 24, 1911. By his early teens, he had become a “ near orphan,” in his words: his father apparently killed while fighting for the Kaiser in World War I, his mother too burdened with her own troubles to care for him. When he was 15 or 16 — he later couldn’t remember exactly — Mennonite missionaries put him on a boat to Canada, where he took odd jobs washing dishes and working on a farm.
In his 20s, during the Depression, he rode freight trains across the country as a hobo. He came to photography in 1940, when he was 29. World War II had begun. Barred from the Canadian military because of his German birth, he was working as an Xray technician and medical photographer at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. As a sideline, he began taking pictures of babies from the maternity ward and selling the prints to parents. made four trips to Antarctica, including a 1981 visit to photograph a gathering of one million mating penguins. He published many books, among them The Face of the Arctic
( 1954), with photographs from the dogsled trips, and Richard Harrington: Canadian Photographer
( 1998), of his pictures from around the world.
In 2000, cultural anthropologist and Arctic authority Edmund Carpenter published Harrington’s Padlei collection in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, titled Padlei Diary, 1950.
“ The people didn’t get many caribou around here,” the entry to Feb. 11 reads. “By now, that’s frightening. Dogs are dying everywhere. Remaining dogs: skin & bones, shivering; listless . . . ( The people) cannot move around anymore.”
“ Those are the most important ( of my photographs),” Harrington said of the collection when it appeared. “ Not because I took them but because that way of life is now totally gone — the hunger, the isolation, the endurance. Their lives were brief but you can see what a remarkable people they are, how unique, to survive in that climate.” One photograph in particular stands out. It shows the mother, Keenaq, holding her son, Keepseeyuk, close to her and rubbing the boy’s nose. They have nothing but scraps of caribou skin left to eat and all she can offer the child is her love, which she does freely. American photographer Edward Steichen included the photo in his 1955 Family of Man exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and in the book of the same title, the only Canadian photograph to be included.
Harrington never knew what happened to the mother and child. A Star story about the photo last March, however, led to the discovery of Keepseeyuk, now Steven Keepseeyuk, alive and well at 57 in Arviat, on the west coast of Hudson Bay. His mother also survived the winter of 1950 but has since died.
In 1989, Harrington’s wife Lyn died. In 1995, he married Margaret Adair, then a librarian at Leaside Public Library.
In 2001, he was awarded the Order of Canada. Modest to the end, Harrington requested that no funeral be held. A celebration of his life, however, is to take place next Friday at the Stephen Bulger Gallery, 1026 Queen St. W. at 5: 30 p. m.
In 1942, he married freelance journalist Lyn Davis and, in 1945, when the war ended, they started travelling the country together by car. She wrote newspaper and magazine stories. He took pictures for them.
“Simple stories,” Harrington explained in an interview with the Star in 2000.
“ You’d stop in Medicine Hat, go into the newspaper office and the editor would say, ‘ Oh, go and see this farmer, or rancher, or cow- puncher,’ and we’d get a little story.”
His northern trips began in the
winter of 1946- 47. He
took a two- month assignment alone for the
Hudson’s Bay Company, at a Chipawayan
settlement at Manitoba’s northern border. Harrington loved the North.
“ I felt at peace ( there),” he once wrote, “ a clarity of thought, of mind.”
In the next five years, at his own expense, he undertook his five dogsled trips from the Western Arctic to northern Quebec, selling pictures afterward to mass- circulation New York picture magazines.
“It was easy going in New York,” he once said of those pretelevision days. “ You just took your work under your arm and knocked on the doors at Life or Look or Parade . . . no editor wanted to pass up a good photograph or picture story.” Soon he was travelling everywhere, sometimes with Lyn, sometimes without. He took pictures of Mao Zedong when rumours were circulating that the Chinese leader was dead. He took pictures of Fidel Castro in Cuba when nobody else seemed to gain access. And long before the recent hit film March of the Penguins, he