Thelma Pepper
Centenarian photographer celebrated for her images of Saskatchewan's elderly farm women.
Thelma Pepper, “Thankfulness,” 1985
gelatin silver print, 15” x 15” (collection of the University of Saskatchewan)
By the time she was 14, Thelma Stevens was a pro in the darkroom, printing her father’s photographs in Kingston, N.S. But it took another half century for the woman now known as Thelma Pepper to start working seriously on her own projects, often about elderly Saskatchewan farm women, and exhibiting them to acclaim in Canada and beyond.
Now, at age 100, this remarkable photographer is drawing renewed attention with both a hardcover book that was released this fall and an exhibition scheduled to open Feb. 13 at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon.
The gallery is still finalizing the line-up for Thelma Pepper: Ordinary Women, a Retrospective, but it’s expected to include more than 100 images, including photographs by her father, as well as some by her peers in Saskatoon and elsewhere, including famed Depression-era American photographer Dorothea Lange, who embraced similar subject matter and influenced Pepper.
Thelma Pepper, “Evangeline’s Mother,” 1993
gelatin silver print, 15” x 15” (Mendel Art Gallery collection at Remai Modern)
“Thelma is not just a little old lady on the Prairies,” says Sandra Fraser, the Remai curator organizing the exhibition alongside Leah Taylor, curator of the University of Saskatchewan’s art galleries and collection. “She really does belong to this art history.”
Pepper’s centenary is also being marked by Thelma: A Life in Pictures by Saskatoon writer Amy Jo Ehman. The book, published by MacIntyre Purcell, includes photographs of Pepper, from childhood to the present, alongside scores of photographs she took of others.
Pepper does not create conventional portraits. Her pictures are more like biographies.
“She looks below the surface of her subjects,” says Ehman. “She sees them for who they are, where their spirit is and what motivated them to smile or to feel good about themselves. She just seems to capture that on film.”
Pepper never told her subjects to smile because she wanted people to be natural, says Ehman. While some do, indeed, smile, others seem serious, strong, determined or wistful.
“I wouldn’t say they are pretty pictures,” says Ehman. “I would call them profound pictures.”
Thelma Pepper, “Christina Driol,” 1984
gelatin silver print (courtesy of the artist)
Pepper’s life took a dramatic turn as she approached age 60. She had given up a promising career as a botanist and her interest in photography to raise a family with her husband, Jim Pepper, a University of Saskatchewan chemistry professor. It was a choice she made deliberately and willingly, Ehman writes. But after her four children left home, she fell into a serious depression. What was she to do now?
“I spent my whole life not really doing anything for myself, didn’t I?” Pepper told Ehman. “And now that life was over at the stage when my children left home, I felt I had nothing of my own. I knew I had to find something that made me feel good about myself.”
Thelma Pepper poses with a Rolleiflex camera in 2018 at a seniors' home in Saskatoon. (photo by David Gutnick)
Pepper found that something at 58, when she inherited thousands of her father’s negatives. Revisiting her teenaged darkroom skills, she printed many of his photographs of rural life in Nova Scotia. With 100 of the images, she created an exhibition, A Visual Heritage, for the Macdonald Museum in Middleton, N.S., and later the Diefenbaker Centre in Saskatoon.
“She put her heart and soul into it and was rewarded with a creative energy she had never known,” writes Ehman.
Around this time, Pepper was a volunteer at a seniors’ home, where she read books aloud to residents. She discovered they had fascinating stories of their own about homesteading in Saskatchewan and surviving the Dirty Thirties. So, instead of reading to them, Pepper listened to them, gained their trust and started photographing them to honour their histories. In some cases, Pepper photographed them at their family homesteads.
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Thelma Pepper, “Memories Come Flooding Back” (diptych), 1989
shows Grace Bolton on a visit to her childhood home near the town of Outlook, Sask. (courtesy the artist)
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Thelma Pepper, “Memories Come Flooding Back” (diptych), 1989
shows Grace Bolton on a visit to her childhood home near the town of Outlook, Sask. (courtesy the artist)
“Thelma is deeply interested in other people,” says Fraser. “So when you meet her and she gets talking, you feel at ease. She has a way of drawing out stories from people and making people feel heard and important. This to me is such a gift.”
Pepper started hanging out at the Photographers Gallery in Saskatoon and was encouraged to create an exhibition of her portraits. Decades of Voices, the first show of her own work, opened there in 1990, when Pepper was 70. The show toured Saskatchewan for five years and was shown in galleries in England and Scotland.
Thelma Pepper, “Winnie and Child in the Sunflower Patch,” 2002
gelatin silver print (courtesy of the artist)
Pepper’s next major body of work captured the lives of people in various ethnic communities along Highway 41 east of Saskatoon. That exhibition also toured the province, including a stop in 1996 at the Saskatoon’s Mendel Art Gallery. The Mendel acquired that body of work, now part of the Remai’s collection. It will play a prominent role in the upcoming exhibition, which will be on view until Aug. 15.
But it is Pepper’s portraits of elderly Saskatchewan women that seem to have had the most lasting impact.
“These settler women – their role has not really been acknowledged in the history of this province as it should be,” says Fraser. “So, what we see in Thelma’s work is this making visible these ordinary people.” ■
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REMAI MODERN
102 Spadina Crescent E, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7K 0L3
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