Melinda Blauvelt

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Melinda Blauvelt, Yvon & Yvette, Brantville, NB,” 1973

archival inkjet print, edition 1 of 8, printed 2022, 16" x 20" (©Melinda Blauvelt)

In the summer of 1972, Yale student Melinda Blauvelt volunteered with five other American students in Brantville, a small Acadian community on the Atlantic coast of northern New Brunswick. When she wasn’t running art classes and other activities for the local children, she was taking photographs with her 4 x 5 view camera. 

A student of the great modernist photographer Walker Evans, she took pictures that summer (and over several more trips in 1973 and 1974) that share her mentor’s interest in portraiture and in capturing day-to-day life. Many of her subjects, often children, seem to perform for the camera, and display an ease and a comfort with her, which helps to convey a touching sense of intimacy. 

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Melinda Blauvelt, “Winter, Brantville, NB,” 1973

archival inkjet print, edition 1 of 8, printed 2022, 16" x 20" (©Melinda Blauvelt)

Blauvelt captured a distinct moment in time, and a way of life in a tiny fishing village that has all but disappeared. Some of the Brantville photographs were included in her MFA thesis exhibition at Yale in 1973, and a few others were included in a 1975 gallery exhibition, but the majority weren’t even printed until 2022 as part of a pandemic project by the artist. Forty-two of those images were gathered for her exhibition, Brantville 1972-1974, on view until May 28 at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton. 

The images are remarkable. Yvon and Yvette shows two teenage siblings who look directly at the camera with pride and confidence (poignantly, their clasped hands display, perhaps, a certain nervousness). In Winter, a young child, clad only in rubber boots, long johns and an open winter coat, stands atop a rabbit hutch in a snowy yard – king (or queen) of all they survey.

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Melinda Blauvelt, “Breakfast, Brantville, NB,” 1973

archival inkjet print, edition 1 of 8, printed 2022, 16" x 20" (©Melinda Blauvelt)

A young woman in a housedress leans against a kitchen corner in Breakfast, her sinuous pose unconsciously mirroring Matisse’s La Serpentine. In Girl Holding a Duck, the titular subject is the only figure not in motion, a still point at the centre of an image bracketed by the blurred figures of other children playing and clothes blowing on a line.

Writing in the catalogue, Acadian poet and artist Herménégilde Chiasson places Blauvelt in the tradition of documentary photography, a practice “that didn’t need to borrow its aesthetics from painting.” This approach, he writes, “relied on its frankness and the sincerity of the medium to generate emotion and compassion.” It is this sincerity and frankness that come across so forcefully in Blauvelt’s images. Much as the subjects are stilled by the camera, we viewers are also stopped in our tracks, held by their gaze and that of the photographer. 

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Melinda Blauvelt, “Jeannette & Her Children, Brantville, NB,” 1972

archival inkjet print, edition 1 of 8, printed 2022, 16" x 20" (©Melinda Blauvelt)

There is much to see in these images – the people, of course, and their community – but, perhaps more importantly, their perseverance and dignity. “Making photographs,” Blauvelt says, “is a way to organize and extend looking.” In Brantville 1972-1974 that extension is emotional, as well as visual, as we are seemingly granted access to the subjects’ lives, both exterior and interior. What we see feels true. As Chiasson succinctly puts it: “These are images you can trust.” ■

Melinda Blauvelt: Brantville 1972-1974 at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, N.B., from April 1 to May 28, 2023. Curated by John Leroux.

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