“Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views” by John Conway

Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views contains 62 plates of colour photographs by John Conway, numerous associated short factoids and quotations, and three essays—two by established prairie writers and one by a long-time Saskatchewan-based curator. The photographs were made primarily in rural locations. Apart from some minor digital manipulation, all but three are straightforward views of human intrusions into landscape.

The Uncommon Views of the title recalls the work of American photographer Stephen Shore, whose influential book, Uncommon Places, was first published in 1983. Although formally less diverse and more confrontational than Shore’s, Conway’s photographs similarly exploit the power of the rigorously rendered banal to stimulate feelings of loss, nostalgia and unease. The title also challenges the stereotypical and preconceived, for while the subjects of Conway’s photographs will seem “common” enough to anyone who has driven prairie roads, to those familiar with the province only through exposure to other “Saskatchewan” picture books, his views will certainly seem otherwise.

Be it Saskatchewan, Ontario or Wyoming, the content of place-named photography books is seldom surprising; their images almost never coincide with actual appearance. Instead, they tend to offer successions of clichés, more testaments to topographic relationships conforming to pre-defined notions of what a good picture is supposed to look like than to any suggestion of a unique, experienceable reality. With such images it is easy to imagine, just outside the field of view, those small, orange and red “photo-spot” signs erected at tourist sites by Kodak to help neophyte photographers know where to point their cameras. Through endless repetition, given sufficient time, these pictures come to represent what a place is supposed to look like. A kind of visual namesake, they are the Holiday Inns of the armchair traveller; comfortable and undemanding, reassuring in their carefully calculated, inoffensive blandness. The “Saskatchewan” examples of the genre inevitably feature azure skies and glorious sunsets, either railway lines or telephone poles, or both, converging toward a distant horizon, fields of full-headed wheat, yellow canola or blue flax, close-ups of prairie wildflowers, plump deer in lush, green meadows, deserted farmsteads, falling-down barns, rotting wagon wheels and, always, grain elevators—even today when almost none remain.

To his credit, Conway eschews such things and when he does allude to established stereotypes, he does so within a context of modernist irony that characterizes a majority of his images. Contributor Sharon Butala overstates, however, when she describes them as being “startlingly original.” Collected together and published as a book, they may be, but other than the way all photographs are original, that is, in their specific relationship to a unique place and time, the individual images are not. Conway has his mentors and he acknowledges them, although the list is a puzzling one. With one exception all are, or were, American and to few does his imagery seem to owe any obvious, tactical or formal debt. More curious are the omissions; for example, Don Hall or the sadly deceased William Bosner, both contemporary, Saskatchewan-based photographers who have produced extensive bodies of work dealing with the same topography and the same issues. In fact, a number of Conway’s images are direct echoes of theirs; a result, I’m sure, of the tendency of globalized commonalities of influence and experience to produce homogeneous solutions to similar challenges.

By far the most obvious, consistent and interesting influence on Conway’s approach, though, is Humphrey Lloyd Hime, whose photographs are probably the first ever made of the Canadian prairie. Appropriately, Conway features Hime’s seminal print, The Prairie looking west, September-October, 1858, as the final image in the book. It is a small, rectangular photograph, the upper corners of which are rounded off. The horizon bisects the frame slightly below the midpoint. The sky is clear, no doubt a consequence of the photographic emulsion of the day’s exaggerated sensitivity to blue. Extending from the lower frame-edge to the horizon is an expanse of dirt, essentially featureless except for widely dispersed blades of stunted grass. In the immediate foreground is an artfully placed human skull. Conway tells us that even though he “could not get the image out of his head. … It’s not the skull that grips me, it’s the prairie.…” And yet it is the skull, or, rather, its equivalent, in a variety of guises, that recurs again and again in his own photographs. Conway also doesn’t mention—perhaps he is unaware—that presumably at the same time, Hime made a second, virtually identical photograph, but without the skull. The title, which I’ve always taken tongue-in-cheek, is The Prairie looking east, September-October, 1858. Together, these photographs clearly identify the pictorial challenge posed by such uniformly featureless landscapes and simultaneously offer a possible solution. Like all image makers, Hime recognized that without human reference, even the most picturesque landscape’s ability to carry meaning beyond the merely aesthetic is extremely limited. Hime’s response was to insert the skull into the frame, while, through the diptych, he acknowledged the utter impossibility of photographically describing the land itself. I can make a picture out of this place, he seems to be saying, but I cannot show this place with a picture.

Conway appears to agree, employing carefully framed variations on the Himeian gestalt to produce a series of consistently attractive pictures from the land. Time and technology advantage Conway, however, as colour, the balanced panchromaticism of contemporary film and, perhaps most especially, post-production digital imaging processes make possible extraordinarily accurate renditions of what, for landscapists, are the true, photographic madeleines: qualities of light, tone and hue recollective of times of year and times of day, of temperature and even humidity. Many of Conway’s images evidence this and at their best, when not subverted by his occasionally overenthusiastic use of Photoshop, they frequently come close to challenging the dichotomy between picture and place that so frustrated his predecessor.

This is, of course, primarily a book of photographs, but I would be remiss were I not to make some mention of the contributions of the three writers, Sharon Butala, David Carpenter and Helen Marzolf. As so often with Saskatchewan writers when they write about their home province, Butala and Carpenter make liberal use of personal anecdote to set its mythic subtleties against the equally mythic view that to outsiders, Saskatchewan is most readily characterized by cultural deprivation and topographic tedium. The approach may be familiar, but these are fine wordsmiths; the writing is lyrical, the stories interesting and, in conjunction with Conway’s photographs, their case convincing. In keeping with her profession, Marzolf’s essay is more curatorial and, as such, a rich feast indeed. On the one hand, she places Conway’s images as documents of a culture transitioning through the loss of cherished stereotypes, and on the other, she succeeds equally in placing his work within a larger, art historical context.

Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views is a fine piece of work. Even though ostensibly cast in a supporting role, the accompanying essays are all well worthy of reading in their own right. The photographs are an extended set of variations on a theme of how to photograph prairie, while, in their content, they succeed admirably in presenting a contemporary, ironic, humorous, semiotic tour of a people’s conflicted relationship with an always contrary, yet often starkly beautiful, land. ■

Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views by John Conway, University of Alberta Press, 2005, softcover, 156 pp, $29.95.

Richard Holden is a photographer who lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.