Derelict Farm Buildings – Valleyview, Alberta
Derelict farm buildings and an unused field on the road home, near Valleyview, Alberta.
Listening to – Concrete Blonde and ‘I Don’t Need a Hero.’
Quote to Inspire – “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” – Garry Winogrand
Hay River, NWT – Boats 1
Hay River, NWT – Boats 2
Hay River, NWT – Boats 3
Hay River, NWT – Boats 4
Hay River, NWT – Boats 5
In January’s winter, huge, huge boats – complex structures, rigged out with all kinds of equipment to make them self-reliant and useful upon the water – have been dragged to ground from the world’s largest lake – the Great Slave Lake; the boats wait, unused, boarded-up and dormant within acres and acres of Hay River’s boat yard. Canada’s Great Slave Lake is large enough to make transport of materials more efficient, faster and more direct when these boats are used than when moving materials around the perimeter of the lake by transport truck. These boats have names – Jock McNiven, Lister, Horn River, and Radium Empress – and in being named do stir curiosity about the origin of such reminiscence in each boat’s appellation. Snowy and overcast, the day yields -26C at 5:00 p.m. on a January winter day in Canada’s Hay River, Northwest Territories; overnight it will get colder. It’s the kind of day when a Hay River resident keeps an eye out for the potential of a stranded motorist, a neighbor, needing a tow from the snow bank or a boost of their car/truck’s battery. People living in Hay River know how to live in Hay River.
Listening to – Enrique Iglesias – ‘When I Fall in Love,’ with words on You Tube, a song our school’s custodian frets at this day’s end upon a Yamaha guitar … good, good schtuff!
Quote to Inspire – “I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work.” – Jim Goldberg
Saw Mill - Whitecourt
Different economic forces press on the development of Alberta’s natural resources. The fall-out can mean that resource development is postponed for better days. Twenty minutes north from Whitecourt, Alberta, down a long, winding hill into a valley, a sawmill sits in disuse waiting its return to operation. In my northward return drives to High Level through this year, I’ve been meaning to capture this image. On Sunday I found myself with time enough to halt my Nissan Altima along the side of the road and allow myself opportunity for looking through my Canon 70-200 mm F 2.8 lens.
Listening to: All This Time, Liberal Backslider and This Is Us from Martyn Joseph’s Thunder and Rainbows album on my return journey to High Level. My trip southward to Edmonton allowed for a six hour listen to Susan Sontag’s collection of essays in an audiobook version of On Photography, a good articulation and wrestling with photography issues.
Quote to Inspire – “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern organic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” – Susan Sontag (b. 1933), U.S. essayist. “In Plato’s Cave,” On Photography, Farrar, Straus (1977).
In My Back Pocket - Photography 
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