George Webber, “Woodrow,” 1988
George Webber’s Saskatchewan Book contains the kinds of photographs the provincial government would never use to promote tourism.
There are no shots of golden wheat fields, no elegant châteaux like Saskatoon’s Bessborough Hotel, and no water skiers at Waskesiu Lake. Instead, there are scenes from the province’s often-struggling small towns – the cowboy-style, false-fronted drug store in Fillmore, the once grand, boarded-up movie house at Grenfell, and a smashed Elks Lodge sign in Assiniboia.
The 255 colour photographs in Saskatchewan Book, to be published in September by Rocky Mountain Books, would seem better placed in an art gallery than in a coffee-table book. These are photographs that tell an often-sad story of a province that, back in the 1920s, was booming like no other, was then devastated by the Dirty Thirties, and has been trying, often unsuccessfully, to recover ever since.
George Webber, “Ernfold,” 1999
The province’s population of about one million has stagnated for 100 years. Cities grew, but at the expense of many villages and family farms. Many small communities became ghost towns. Others still breathe raggedly, their century-old Main Street buildings barely standing, held together with, as they say, chewing gum and binder twine.
There are no people in the book’s photographs. A few parked cars signal that people still live and shop in these communities. But a profound sense of emptiness prevails.
George Webber, Weyburn, 2018
In an interview, Calgary-based Webber describes the Saskatchewan photographs in this, his ninth book, as a mixture of “aspiration and disappointment.” The stores, houses and signs captured in his images were built amid great optimism, but have remained stuck in Next Year Country, where better times never arrive. Webber’s Alberta Book from 2018 offers similar sights.
Webber has mined some of the same territory as Saskatchewan painter David Thauberger, whose canvases often depict old, weathered small-town businesses. Thauberger’s paintings usually remove the rough edges from the dilapidated buildings. Webber is different. His images invoke neither romance nor nostalgia. He employs no trick lenses or lighting to transform the subject into something warm and fuzzy. There is just reality.
George Webber, “Portreeve,” 1987
Webber says he wants the photographs to offer the same unadorned view one gets as you walk down the street of these communities. In that, he is successful. I had a peripatetic childhood living in the small Saskatchewan towns of Grenfell, Ogema, Simmie, Carmichael, Strasbourg and Jansen. Webber’s photographs take me back to those communities, to silent, blistering, summer days, when I would walk past long-abandoned commercial buildings to buy an ice cream cone at some dilapidated, false-front cafe plastered with rusted, garish signs advertising Coke and fries.
George Webber, “North Battleford,” 1995
In discussing his work, Webber mentions the early 20th-century Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, most famous for his geometric abstracts. Webber loves to play with geometry. Consider his aforementioned shot of the old Grenfell theatre. The image is framed such that only the building is seen. There is no sky, no foreground nor neighbouring architecture. The image resembles an abstract painting, the geometry akin to Mondrian’s.
George Webber, “Scotsguards,” 1994
Saskatchewan Book begins with an essay by Lorna Crozier, a Victoria-based poet originally from Swift Current, Sask. Crozier says the photographs are a blend of memory and forgetting.
“The run-down, often boarded-up buildings and wind-eaten signs testify to the existence of these dueling divinities,” writes Crozier. “Through the accumulation of years, as the stores and hotels and cafes and garages sink into neglect, the unassuming structures undergo a transformation. Though they were not constructed with this in mind, through this artist’s eyes, they turn into shrines to an absence and a power that approaches the holy. This is what you will remember, one goddess says when we look at Webber’s photograph. And the other goddess adds, This is what you will forget.”
Crozier says she is amazed at how much narrative and emotion are contained in the sparse, stripped-down photographs. “The pictures do the work of poems and one of the briefest of poems at that, the haiku.”
There you have it: The aspiration and disappointment, the memory and forgetting, portraits of Saskatchewan, in three lines and 17 syllables. ■
Saskatchewan Book by George Webber: Rocky Mountain Books, Victoria, 2020.
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