Thaddeus Holownia

“The Nature of Nature” is a compelling retrospective that covers 40 years of Thaddeus Holownia’s documentary photography. What becomes immediately apparent in this survey is the way Holownia engages in a direct dialogue not only with nature, but equally with community. These are not just snapshots, or Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moments,” but instead an affirmation of a permacultural vision in which culture and nature form an ever-changing context over time. Elements appear; others dissolve and disappear. Holownia’s photography is as much process as document, and remains attached to the evidence of life and it’s a bio-regional motif. Visually multilayered, a kind of photo-anthropology, Holownia’s persistent overview is a post-colonial reading of the nature/culture paradigm in a post-industrial era, and nowhere is the material as rich for this reading as Canada’s east coast. And yet Holownia ironically employs old-fashioned, panoramic, large-format view cameras, the kind early colonial travel photographers might also have used, including a 7 x 17-inch format Folmer & Schwing Banquet Camera from the 1920s and more recently a camera made in 1999 by Ron Wisner of Marion, Massachusetts.

Nature is omnipresent amid the chaotic clatter of rural and urban overlay. We see this in images from the “Jolicure Pond” series (1996–2004), a pond so close to where Holownia lives it could be his backyard. His is a photographic engagement with one place over time, a bio-regional vision of the photographer’s role and a meditation on how the seasons render this stretch of land exotic, eternal. The same goes for the “Dykelands” (1979–2009) series taken on the Tatramar Marsh, where culture and nature overlap, from Radio Canada International radio towers, to remnants of man-made structures, including some enduring traces of the early settlers.

History has continuity, just as nature does, for Holownia. Much of what he has photographed will disappear, leaving photos as the memory. The “Arborealis” series, captured during a residency at Woody Point in Gros Morne park on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula, has trees Holownia documented that are symbols of survival, of nature’s resilience, as well as the endless variability of nature’s patterns, shapes, essence. We see dwarf trees, only five feet tall and as old as 2,000 years, their growth stunted by the effects of unforgiving weather and rugged geography.

Icarus: Falling of Birds, 2016, a digital C-type print, recalls American bio-artist Brandon Ballengee’s documentations of aviary death in the USA. Holownia’s Icarus addresses a real-life eco-disaster. In 2013 migrating wood warblers were drawn “like moths to a flame” to the 100-foot-high flare of the Canaport Liquefied Natural Gas plant in Saint John, NB, and between 7,500 to 10,000 of them died instantly, killed by the flame’s heat. Holownia’s photo documents of individual birds that died from this disaster are presented in a scroll-like vertical format and we sense the inevitable descent, the power of gravity. The photographer becomes witness, as did 19th-century painters Albert Bierstadt and Lucius O’Brien to the then-promised land. The outrage of death by pollution fuses with a muted anthropo-Romanticism. We also see, in photos of decaying bridges, vestiges of industry from other times—the wooden frames of collapsed buildings in empty fields, all remnants of the past. They point to a vision of sustainability in which ethics is enabled, given a voice amid a capitalist cacophony. As the late John Berger often noted, the erasure of collective memory by global corporate capitalism is ongoing.

Photography becomes a ritual affirmation of place—of the intertwining of nature and community—in the “Rockland Bridge” series (1981–2003). These are images of a covered bridge on the coast that was taken out by a high tide in 1978. Eventually all that remained were the rock piles that filled the wooden crib supports. The trees in the “Walden Revisited” (2004–2007) series, in a place that was an idyllic inspiration for Henry David Thoreau, exist in what is now largely suburbia, the development encroaching and dwarfing Walden Pond.

“The Anatomy of a Pipeline,” 2001, series comprises colour coupler contact prints that evidence the scars of change on the body of the land. Seemingly unobtrusive images of road works, surveyor’s markers in the forest, trench lines or industrial oil piping all capture big oil’s incursions onto the land, just as Holownia captures the log pilings and stacks of lumber in other photos. The photographs are every bit as much about economies of scale as Edward Burtynsky’s are, but the approach is closer, more human in scale, a personal visual dialogue that might have taken place at your kitchen table. To see Holownia’s photograph of a dead whale being transported on a tractor trailer down a road is to sense the immensity and immediacy of this overreaching whale’s dimensions strung onto the steel arch support structure of a trailer. It’s a strange, huge, mechanistic and biological mix. The junctures are awkward, as with Holownia’s best photographs, for there are shards of Canada’s rural colonial past nestled in between the ghosts of a corroding industrial and agrarian life and nature. The medium is the environment, the artist a discoverer reaching out with his eyes and camera.

Holownia’s retrospective—the largest survey of his photography— witnesses humanity’s disruption and development of the land. It all overlaps, arrives as layers, as time past and present. For Holownia, the persistence of memory exists in his narrative, which unfolds slowly. The change in Canada’s Atlantic region is the result of demographic shifts and seemingly invisible, everpresent, global economic forces. How we live has much to do with how we influence and talk with the environments we inhabit. These photographs witness what Thaddeus Holownia calls “a history of the play between human intervention and the landscape” and they evidence a great awareness of the forces at work—both natural and cultural—on the places we live. He lives well. ❚

“The Nature of Nature: The Photographs of Thaddeus Holownia, 1976–2016” was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, from February 4 to May 28, 2017.

John K Grande’s most recent book is Nils-Udo; sur l’eau (Actes Sud, France, 2015). He recently curated “Small Gestures” at Mucsarnok/ Kunsthalle Budapest in 2016 and continues his World Walk project.