George Webber's Prairie Photography Exhibitions
Photos Show Traditional Albertans in a Transformed 21st-Century
Mar 15, 2009
2009 has been busy for photojournalist, George Webber, whose iconic silver-prints have depicted mainly rural Albertans in marginalized settings, as the social and economic fabric of the province changed past recognition, often abandoning and/or obliterating both these people and their homes in the process. Webber has had two exhibitions. Portrait: George Webber, a semi-retrospective, ran at The Art Gallery of Calgary from September 2008 to January of 2009. Hutterite Traditions, a mixed show of artifacts and photos, runs until April 15th, 2009 at the Glenbow Museum. The Glenbow also archives a collection of Webber's photos for interested visitors who missed the shows.
Stark Emotional Truths About Change
People, the focal point of Webber's images, are charged with quiet, yet emotionally fraught, intensity. They are deeply vulnerable, connected either through belief, cultural habit or addictions to a past which is often wiped away by modern changes. Few of his shots are candid, although people are shot in the midst of daily activities: at play, grooming, sitting in their homes, during or after spiritual pursuits like pilgrimages or the sundance. Yet, even then, they are conscious of Webber's lens.
His camera does not intrude without their permission, but rarely do the subjects appear to accept without question that a photographer would want to capture such private moments. The Hutterite children who became subjects of Webber's Glenbow Museum exhibition show this contrast:
- The Hutterites, an Anabaptist Sect, live communally.
- Segregated and sheltered from modern society and media, they leave for cities and towns only in groups and for the purpose of enterprise, and only listen to broadcasts or read texts which are in accordance with their religious doctrine. Yet they welcome visitors.
- They practice plain-dress and have strict rules regarding modesty, gender segregation, marriage, and responsibilities to their communes.
- Unlike the Amish, a similar religious and cultural group, they use modern farm machinery and electrical labour-saving devices such as deep-freezes and light-bulbs, so their sect is not Luddite.
- New members have not been attracted to their communes. Since they intermarry between colonies, the shrinking population presents other problems.
George and Maria in the Sunlight shows two small Hutterite children at play. They are too young to be segregated. Maria, mimicking the feminine role, nurtures a doll. George stares at the camera, measuring its intrusion.
In The Hutterite Boy, a 1992 photo from the AGC show, the boy's face is completely obscured by a bare electrical lightbulb. He holds up a duck by its wings for Webber to take its picture. The shot implies that the boy considers his identity unimportant, but the bird--raised possibly as a pet--to be worth attention.
Webber's subjects are not limited to Hutterites.
Wing Yee--shot as he stood behind the counter at his empty diner in Medicine Hat, a scattering of tins behind him--and Nelly Hong--beside her cash register at her general store in Cluny, Alberta--struggle with Webber's presence. Yee fails to hold together. Hong's face is stoic and firm. A single keychain dangles from a racket meant to support dozens; a few tobacco tins and bags of potato chips are all that line the empty shelves around her. It is as though the camera has provoked a jolting realization of their marginalization, their faces reflecting the emotional cost.
Inorganic Settlement of Western Canada
Many of Webber's subjects are shot within physical settings and places--their homes and workplaces--which have since disappeared, been abandoned, or altered beyond recognition:
- Chinese (Canton and western hybrid) restaurants, once major landmarks in small-town Alberta, are going out of business as outlying farms and support industries failed to prosper. There are too many factors to list in the decline of the family farm or ranch and its cost on small towns, but the end of these once-thriving businesses indicates the larger social cost.
- In downtown eastside Calgary--infamous for its transient, indigent population--Webber photographed people living and working in resident hotels like The St. Regis, just before developers pulled down the hotels. The fallacy was that the destruction of these hotels for massive civic and cultural projects would draw people from the suburbs into the city at night. Not only does the city core continue to empty itself of affluent citizens at night, but now the former residents of those hotels are often homeless.
- The Little Bow Hutterite Colony is defunct, its members now dispersed throughout other colonies.
- A group of Métis attend the annual Catholic pilgrimage to Lac Ste. Anne. Many of northern Alberta's lakes are disappearing as the aquifers are drained for secondary oil recovery. Others, like Lac Ste. Anne and neighbouring lakes are filled with weeds, soiled by run-off from surrounding farms.
- At the Blood Indian Reserve near Standoff, the corpse of the late elder, Morris Crow, lies in state, open coffin, at the town's hockey arena. Horace Shouting is shown both in his home, the walls covered with calligraphic style marks in permanent ink, and after a Sundance ritual to shift the spiritual problems symptomized by addictions which caused his marriage to break down. Frank Smallface, Randa Weaselhead and their daughter, Kyla, are shown in front of the fireplace in their living room. First Nations are frequently the bellwhethers of social breakdown in Alberta, often relegated to reservations on inferior land; struggling with addictions, domestic violence and poverty; and unable to offer young people an attractive future.
George Webber catches images of people at emotionally volatile moments, where their ways of life are shaken by the disintegration of the world around them. He does so with a respect and sensitivity that elevates his subjects beyond the trappings of their physical existence. Through them, he records a world built by pioneers which prospered for such a short period of history, then started to vanish under material forces too large and strong to sustain communities: environmental degradation, industrial monopolization, addictions and poverty, and the breakdown of families.
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