A Long and Lonely Border

by

You don’t need a tank to breach the world’s longest undefended border, the 8,891 kilometres separating Canada and the United States. Indeed, as thousands of refugee claimants have shown over the last year in Manitoba, Quebec and elsewhere, you can simply walk across.

Calgary-based photographer Andreas Rutkauskas captures that notion in a solo exhibition on view until Feb. 16 at the Canadian Photography Institute, a branch of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. His exhibition includes 44 colour images, collectively titled Borderline and projected sequentially on a wall measuring approximately 13 feet by 11 feet. Other walls offer six black-and-white photographs of cutlines, the 20-foot-wide corridors cleared through forests along the border, along with several maps to help locate images.

Rutkauskas, a photography instructor at the Alberta College of Art and Design, has remained true to his eternal search for “bucolic landscapes” by crafting images during a three-year period that are devoid of people and vehicles. “I’m a landscape photographer through and through,” says Rutkauskas, who grew up in Winnipeg.

This means scenes of a seemingly depopulated border, often with small, dilapidated or abandoned border stations. Flimsy rusting fences, a felled tree or other makeshift barriers prevent cross-border traffic in remote areas, from the Yukon-Alaska divide, to points along the 49th parallel and on to the forested New Brunswick-Maine border.

The border, as seen through Rutkauskas’ lens, is not just undefended but practically post-apocalyptic, although a few images of sensors, cameras and other high-tech equipment remind us that Big Brother is eyeing anyone who dares cross the line in the middle of nowhere.

Rutkauskas has met Big Brother. He found himself one day in a remote, unpopulated border area separating New Brunswick and Maine and was suddenly confronted by a truck driven by a U.S. patrolman suspicious of the photographer’s motives. Once he was detained for three hours trying to cross into Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, by guards worried about border chatter on his personal website.

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Andreas Rutkauskas, "International Peace Garden," 2012

Andreas Rutkauskas, "International Peace Garden," 2012

inkjet print, 52" x 65" (collection of the artist)

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Andreas Rutkauskas, "Cutline I," 2011

Andreas Rutkauskas, "Cutline I," 2011

selenium-toned silver gelatin print, 20" x 24" (collection of the artist)

So, why focus on rural border crossings? Rutkauskas says he could have shot scenes from bustling crossings in B.C.’s Lower Mainland or southern Ontario. But such images are already well known, he says. He wanted to present a different view. Hence, images from tiny Climax, Sask., Snowflake, Man., Pigeon River, Ont., and other little-known spots. Rutkauskas maintains his choices were aesthetic rather than political, although the entire series is political, he says, in that it makes viewers think about border issues.

Rutkauskas’ entire installation, including Borderline, is titled Between Friends, also the name of an iconic book of border photographs produced in 1976 by the National Film Board as a gift to the United States to mark that country’s bicentennial. People living in border communities featured prominently in that book.

Both the peopled and unpeopled versions of Between Friends contrast sharply with scenes of the American-Mexican border shown in the institute’s companion exhibition, Frontera. Several photographers in that exhibition depict a defended, unfriendly and violent border. By comparison, the border depicted by Rutkauskas remains bucolic, a place for family picnics rather than armed confrontations.

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