Evolution of a photo essay

July in Pikangikum is normally a time when few people go to the bush for more than a couple of days. Many are employed in the community, or are away firefighting. The constant hum of boat motors on Pikangikum Lake is contrasted with relative silence on traplines away from the major waterway routes which connect communities. When the opportunity came up for Catie and me to go with Timmy K. Strang to his trapline in the northwest corner of Pikangikum’s traditional territories, I felt the rising anticipation of travelling to areas I had yet only seen on maps, and heard about through interviews. I was also thinking about my approach to appropriately capture the travelling and seeing.
Research and photography have gone hand-in-hand as generations of researchers have taken their cameras into the field, whether working in the social sciences, natural sciences, or the humanities. This has become more ubiquitous with the availability of low-cost, simple to use digital media. It has become second nature to bring a camera. This has resulted at one end of a spectrum, in the ability to spice up dull posters, powerpoint presentations and publications, and at the other end, integration of the visual in research methodology. Through this spectrum, the camera, with its unique ability to represent people and the world has brought to the surface particular representational issues.

Timmy K. Strang met with us shortly before we left and we agreed it would be best to travel the trapline by motor boat and by canoe to try to reach as many sites as we could where he and his family practiced hunting, trapping, fishing, and harvesting of plants for food and medicinal purposes. I was interested in photographing Timmy as he moved through his trapline, as well as documenting the sites he took us to see. I began with the idea that by using my camera on Timmy’s trapline, it was just as necessary a step to document my research process as it was to create photographic representations of the people, things, and places. The gallery I have created has the purpose of showing a process of travelling through the landscape in which sites along the way became the parts of a teaching experience tailored to our interactions.

Cultural landscapes are understood to endow more meaning to a landscape than simply make us think about the interaction between humans and their environments. This means understanding culture as it is expressed by particular people at particular sites in the landscape. Culture is transmitted orally, but also through more intangible forms of expression. As Timmy moved across his trapline, an area he has known since before he could walk, I searched to develop a photographic journey which was to show my growing understanding of the way in which Timmy knew his trapline area.

In the visual representation of cultural landscapes, it is not possible to detach the knowledge holder from the learning processes. I subsumed photographing the “cultural landscape structures and elements” including habitations, trails, and sites of importance to capturing my experience of how Timmy had decided to present them to us. Whether it is our intention or not to integrate visual methods into our research, it is important to reflect upon the experience of making and showing images. Here I am representing Timmy as a teacher and as he undertook to guide us on a journey through a landscape, progressively unveiling layers of meaning, and helping us to see this landscape differently.