James Andersen’s vast photographic archive combines vernacular documentation with the familiarity of a family photo album to create an intimate portrait of life in Nunatsiavut. These unscripted moments represent a vibrant, rich community and make a compelling claim for self-determination and autonomy.
Five young men sit casually perched upon a worn wooden railing. Snow covers the ground around them, yet there is little indication of a chill in the air. They wear light jackets and look relaxed: one is smiling, two are smoking and three wear sunglasses. There is a sixth man, sitting on the ground and nearly out of frame. It’s difficult to discern what occupies him. Unlike the row of young men whose heads turn toward the photographer in unison, he is unaware of, or uninterested in, the presence of the camera. His disinterest suggests this is a casual moment, a purposeless or unremarkable occasion. Perhaps the low sun indicates it’s the end of a workday or perhaps it’s a midday break in the diffused light of winter. The direct gaze of these young men back towards the photographer, and by extension the viewer, frames them in a perpetually atemporal state, the ubiquitous “moment” of mid-century photography. The image is not cropped to show only this collective look, rather we see the entirety of their bodies, faced away from the camera and engaged with the space adjacent to our view, a late winter landscape that extends well beyond the frame. Their looks suggest both an invitation and a denial. As viewers, we are prevented from entering this group even while the gaze of each subject meets ours. What do we learn from looking at an image such as this, taken across an immeasurable distance and so simultaneously familiar and unknown?
Portrait of James Andersen (n.d.)
My introduction to the documentary photography of James R. Andersen (1919–2011) came remotely, by looking at images that cross time periods and span significant geographic distances. For over five decades, beginning in the late 1940s, Andersen photographed every aspect of daily life in the harbor community of Makkovik, Nunatsiavut, NL. A small fishing community whose population fluctuates in the hundreds, Makkovik is revealed throughout Andersen’s substantial photographic documentation in a manner more akin to a family photo album than to a traditional archive or image repository. At ease with his subjects, there are photographs that capture important community events, including weddings, funerals and competitions, combined with more mundane activities, such as playing games, posing outside houses, arrivals and departures, revealing both the joys and struggles of familial life. Constructed through mid-century photographic typologies of the slide and Kodachrome film and frame, the visuality of such familial, intimate, unscripted moments raises questions about the formulation of citizenship and belonging, particularly during the post-WWII period for northern communities. These images of the connective tissues of family make self-determination and autonomy a visual claim, suggesting, as photography theorist Ariella Azoulay and others have argued, that photography has the capacity to make claims on behalf of its subjects and expresses the rights to sovereignty and citizenship in a way that other modes of visual production simply cannot. [1]
James Andersen Makkovik Summer Take Out (n.d.) Slide transparency
Combining the eye of the documentarian and the casual intimacy of the family photographer, Andersen’s strong sense of composition consistently frames his subjects against and within the landscape. His photographs function as hybrids: each is both a portrait and a document of the land, of a community and of its individual inhabitants. The carefully framed, often subtle images are expansive enough for the viewer to visualize the activities of daily life and close enough to capture the personality or expressions of the subjects. The activities photographed are often structured around labour, equally showing individuals at work—skinning animals, fishing or boating, preparing hides—as well as work interrupted for a posed shot. Community gatherings capture the action of participants alongside the inaction of viewers. Deploying a wide frame to show subjects within their environments, frequently suggesting action just outside the photographic frame, Andersen’s work reveals the people of Makkovik within and part of a home—whether inside or outdoors, at the harbour or church or on the ice or water. Such unscripted moments were possible because “Uncle Jim,” as he was affectionately known, and his camera were such fixtures in the town. These photographs come alive in their representation of a community from within.
James Andersen Untitled (Girl Sleeping) (n.d.) Slide transparency
Because Andersen worked within a community of which he was an integral part, intimately connected to the land, his family, neighbours, friends and colleagues, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that his archive operates in much the way a family’s archive would: recording the major events of the family for posterity, noting who was where and when and documenting the changes to the town over time. Ably capturing moments of casual intimacy, Andersen offers a family portrait that bears the collated yet loose narrative structure of a photo album. And like an album, when preserved outside its original context of shared family heritage, the consumption of images requires a narrator or an authority, in other words, a storyteller.
Photographic historian Martha Langford argues that family photo albums are uniquely performative documents, “instruments of collective show and tell” that perform their visual qualities through the orality of storytelling. Langford elaborates: “The photographic moment and speech have much in common; visual literacy and memory less so, though they are complementary. The accumulation of photographic moments does not replace memory; rather, it overburdens recall with visual data that explodes in retelling.…To speak the photographic album is to hear and see its roots in orality.” [2] In Andersen’s work, these accumulated photographic moments can’t replace individual memories gathered over decades of life in a changing community, rather the photographs spark the telling (and retelling) of stories. The intimacy required to share a photo album with family or friends is writ large across an archive that contains not only photographs, but also slides, Super 8 films, journals and interviews annotating several images. Indeed, in the 2008 exhibition James Andersen: Over 50 Years of Taking Pictures / James Andersen: Jâret 50 Ungatâni Adjiliusimajangit and accompanying catalogue, many of the most striking images were accompanied by stories. [3]
Top Left: James Andersen Susie Andersen Spreading a Harp Skin (n.d.) Slide transparency.
Top Right: James Andersen Untitled (Makkovik Water Front) (1952) Slide transparency.
Bottom Left: James Andersen Joe Edmunds in a Row Boat (Makkovik Bay) (1954) Slide transparency.
Bottom Right: James Andersen Susie’s Kitchen (n.d.) Slide transparency.
For a viewer from outside this tight-knit community, the slides more so than the prints offer evidence of the presence and power of community bonds. Annotations, handwritten in cursive and scrawled across the cardboard slide mounts, denote the casual intimacy between the photographer and his subjects, nearly all known by name or occupation. Some notes are quite prosaic—“School Children,” “Makkovik Dock,” “Susie’s Kitchen”—while some describe with precision the action of the inset transparency, for instance, “Susie Andersen spreading a harp skin.” Others are completely at odds with the image: one caption states clearly “Makkovik on water front” and is signed “1952 Jim Andersen,” but the inset image shows a man in a flower-filled meadow with a thick forest behind him, no water or shoreline in sight. Not all, but many bear textual markings that encircle the image, serving to shift and alter our interpretation of the image contained within.
James Andersen Deer Hunt (1960) Slide transparency
By attending to a reading of these personal notations, other marks on the slide mounts become apparent, occupying equal space alongside the penmanship of the artist. Several icons of nationalism are peppered throughout: flags, Expo 67 logos, insignia and stamps bearing the words “Made in Canada” or “Made in USA.” Of course these are not the conscious production of the photographer but are the result of the commercial distribution of photography supplies. Regardless of origin, such visual marginalia produces an unexpected juxtaposition between the ideology of a nation and its “new” subjects. [4] While oblique to the content of the image, these stamps and marks suggest the visual enforcement of regimes of statehood upon the lives of its subjects—a trick of national ideology that is hidden within the slide carousel.
The 1950s and ’60s were a period of intense national interest in the Arctic and, as a result, Inuit came under photographic scrutiny. In part, this interest was a result of the militarization of Canada’s northern regions during the Cold War. Under the guise of national security, the state increased its presence through a series of surveillance stations meant to intercept Soviet intelligence. The rapid building of this infrastructure meant that the nomadic Indigenous peoples and Inuit that inhabited many communities across the North were quickly and forcibly relocated or “settled” into permanent villages. Makkovik is one such village that welcomed part of the Inuit population. [5]
James Andersen Lizzie Mitchell in a Running Race (Coronation Day) (1951) Slide transparency
Perhaps to mask the geopolitical nature of the new sovereign interest in the Arctic region, the Canadian government began to use the tools of the documentarian—photography in particular—as a way to produce, or reproduce, Canadian national identity. As Carol Payne outlines in her scholarship on the National Film Board’s Still Photography Division, during this period the project of constructing a national identity came not through the grand gestures of public monuments or speeches but instead through representations of the everyday. She argues that “in their routine, unobtrusive, and yet ubiquitous ‘flaggings’ of Canada, the [division’s] hundreds of thousands of photographs naturalized governmental attitudes about nationhood.” [6] In effect this naturalizing of attitudes served to produce a normative generalizing of Canadian identity, one that internalized representations of the North for communities in the South, to which “the North” was nothing more than an image-fantasy.
Given that photography was deployed as part of the production of a nationalist ideology, it is unsurprising to encounter that ideology repeated visually in the form of corporate insignia. If we think of the collected archive as an album and, as such, one that demands a telling, it is worth considering that these insignia, minor as they may seem, also orate a story of subjugation within a state. During a period of heightened geopolitical strategizing across Northern Canada, the presence of such marks remind a contemporary interpreter that even the intimacy of a family is not immune to the long arm of state ideology.
James Andersen A Whale Drifted into Harbour (1945) Slide transparency
Storytelling through images is also, of course, grounded in the documentary tradition. What makes Andersen’s body of work so compelling is that it operates outside the formal, and often problematic, documentary traditions of ethnographic photography across the North. [7] As Amy Adams and other critics have demonstrated so well, the history of documentary photography in Arctic communities has largely left those communities without representation, save stereotypical depictions or, worse, erasure from traditional territories. Andersen’s work is not intended to express a representational critique but, as an inference of the family document it does just that, offering a powerful counter-narrative to the representation of Inuit and Arctic life as homogenous, simplistic or, worse, “ancient” and therefore not contemporary. Through combined portraits and landscapes, Andersen shows a hybrid community that resists visual stereotyping. His photographs are not particularly self-conscious or over-determined; they are, in essence, just life. But in the living photographic archive that he created, the family album that charts five decades of communal memories and shared events, his work lays claim to the history of life on a land that is physically as well as socially changing. Set against the contourless horizon of the Arctic snow, a self-determinate claim exists here, both in the space and in the bond between subject, viewer and photographer. As interest in national sovereignty in the Canadian Arctic is renewed, Andersen’s charting of an affectionate history reminds viewers from the South that the North is not, and has never been, merely an expanse of resources across open land, air and frozen sea. The warmth, strength and genuine connection of this community is revealed in the radiant light of snow and sun and is reflected by the tools of the documentarian and the familiar stories of an old friend.
Jayne Wilkinson is a Toronto-based writer, editor and curator. She holds an MA in art history from the University of British Columbia and her research focuses on photographic and lens-based practices, with specific attention to contemporary issues of surveillance, security and representation. Her critical essays have been published in a variety of journals and publications, including C Magazine, Prefix Photo, Drain Magazine, InVisible Culture and others.
This piece was originally published as “A Living Archive: The Photographs of James Andersen” in the Winter 2016 issue of the Inuit Art Quarterly.
NOTES
1. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
2. Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
3. James Andersen: Over 50 Years of Taking Pictures/ James Andersen: Jâret 50 Ungatâni Adjiliusimajangit. The Nunatsiavut Government in association with The Rooms Provincial Archives, 2008.
4. For a preliminary discussion on the politics of Confederation in Newfoundland and Labrador and its impact on Inuit artists and others, see Heather Igloliorte, “Change on the Horizon: The Intertwined History of Politics and Art in Nunatsiavut,” Inuit Art Quarterly, vol. 28, nos. 3-4 (Fall/Winter 2015), 22-29.
5. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, conducted in the 1990s, concluded that Canadian sovereignty and military interests were a factor in the relocations. As a result, in 2010 the Canadian government issued a formal apology for the High Arctic relocations during the 1950s. Makkovik received Inuit families from Hebron, in northern Labrador, in 1957, which contributed to its history as a town of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry. See Bill Curry, “An apology for the Inuit five decades in the making,” The Globe and Mail, August 18, 2010; René Dussault and George Erasmus, “The High Arctic Relocation: A Report on the 1953–55 Relocation,” Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (Toronto: Canadian Government Publishing, 1994): 135-146; and for a specific account of the effects of Cold War infrastructure, see Matthew Farish and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, “High Modernism in the Arctic: Planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik,” Journal of Historical Geography 35 (2009): 517-544.
6. Carol Payne, The Official Picture: The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003).
7. Amy Adams, “Arctic and Inuit Photography. Part One: An Accurate Representation of the World?” Inuit Art Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2 (Summer 2000), 5-15; and Amy Adams, “Arctic and Inuit Photography. Part Two: Through the Looking Glass: The Photographs of Robert J. Flaherty and Peter Pitseolak,” Inuit Art Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 3 (Fall 2000), 4-19; and Amy Adams, “Arctic and Inuit Photography. Part Three: Contemporary Inuit Photography,” Inuit Art Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 4 (Winter 2000), 4-11.