Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views

by David Carpenter, Helen Marzolf, Sharon Butala

Decidedly quirky in their vision yet punctuated with breath-taking beauty these photographs rejoice in a Saskatchewan landscape known only to insiders. From brash to subtle, John Conway's keen eye for unusual detail, colour, and irony celebrates an unsung landscape with warm affection and brilliant light. With essays by Sharon Butala, David Carpenter, and Helen Marzolf, this fine blending of text and image will both surprise and invite wonder on the occasion of Saskatchewan's centennial. "John Conway's photos, startlingly original in their view of this province, have captured exactly what strangers have failed to see." Sharon Butala "These images speak eloquently to me of the hopes of people like my grandparents, hopes dashed and tattered and rising once again, upbeat and sassy." David Carpenter

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 088864454X
• ISBN13: 9780888644541
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: University of Alberta Press
• Length: 156 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 10.9" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

A truly beautiful collection that instills a great appreciation for the wide open spaces of nature i

Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views is a stunning, full-color photographic gallery of Saskatchewan's countryside. Only the barest minimum of commentary supplements this collection of stunning images of grasses, open parklands, crop fields, prairie, snowfields, hills and more. A truly beautiful collection that instills a great appreciation for the wide open spaces of nature in the reader. Award-winning photographer John Conway proves his exquisite gift in this superb compilation particularly for those who appreciate the majesty of landscape photography.

Excerpts from review by Christopher Wiebe, Dec 4, 2005, Vue Weekly, Edmonton

...And now, the University of Alberta Press has published John Conway's amazing collection of photographs, Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views. The fruit of 12 years of photographing the province's changing countryside, the collection is an unlikely centennial gift that grapples with the tensions between the province's collective imagination and the testament of the land. Conway's photographs are driven by questions: there is beauty here, yes, but it is not a pretty postcard end in itself; rather, the beauty is a crowbar used to pry open our habitual ways of seeing-the way we edit and ignore much of what we see around us. The result is a book that is soul-searching, ironic, invigourating, depressing, demystifying, and yet, in the end, that celebrates the enduring power of place and the transformative potential of dreams. The first photograph depicts a Yellowhead highway billboard that read "Future Home of Something." It's a poignant beginning for the exploration of a province that in its settlement phase was figured as a blank canvas awaiting European narratives. After establishing the familiar pastoral genre (bison spread on bald, snowy prairie) Conway shifts to the unexpected, to Saskatchewan's recreation as an industrial/scientific landscape. Many of these photographs centre around a manmade object that dialogues with or "interprets" its landscape context: signs next to plots of experimental crops; a row of piebald, rusting oil tanks in crop of barley; a tousled, Edward Burtnysky-esque grain tarp on a desolate field. In another, a pile of rocks and glacial erratics, plucked by a rock-picker from a stony field, becomes a sort of modern drumlin left behind by modern farming ideologies. Elsewhere, an abandoned farmstead (covered with decades of high-school grad graffiti) becomes a stage for different rites of passage, while a landscape and animal mural in Duck Lake conveniently ignores the 1885 battle that put it on the map. Throughout, Conway records the land's exquisite, subtle range of texture, as well as the centrality of the sky where the drama of light and clouds plays out. He captures, as few others have, the gorgeous clarity of winter light on the prairies-the pinkish-white light at the horizon dissipating to powdery cobalt-a light that moves me in ways that exceed mountains or seascapes. Though Conway occasionally places short texts alongside the photographs, the reader for the most part is left to identify their own thematic progression. In the 1970s, writers asserted that Western Canada needs to be "written into being." This makes sense. But the visual representations of a place are of similar importance. Saskatchewan's image continues to be swaying fields of grain, hip-roofed barns and grain elevators, a land still knit together in a gloriously productive quarter-section patchwork. Fact is, family farms have dwindled and agribusiness now exploits the land on a mass scale-filling sloughs, bulldozing copses and shelterbelts... This disjunc