Saskatchewan: The Luminous Landscape [Hardcover]

Graham Osborne and Courtney Milne are known and moderately renowned Canadian landscape photographers. They’re good at what they do, which is to shoot glamourous landscapes that create the impression that the world is very thinly populated with human beings. Presumably there are enough human beings around who buy these kinds of books and set them on coffee tables to make this sort of thing a viable enterprise.
But really, I’m only presuming this because I don’t actually understand either the commercial genre or the cultural allure. Is this waiting room fodder for dentists and doctors wanting to calm their frantic patients? Are they meant to give dinner guests something to talk about before dinner parties sensible people wouldn’t want to be invited to? Or is this how we’re supposed to understand the landscapes in which we live our lives, and imagine the lives of others? I honestly don’t know what these books do, or are intended for.
I understand that these books are beautiful objects and/or contain beauty. Milne’s photographs in particular, which characteristically conflate macro- and micro-environments, reveal the frequently startling beauty of an often-overlooked-by-postcard-manufacturers region of our home and native land. What’s interesting about Milne’s photos is that it doesn’t matter whether we’re standing-imaginatively-in front of a distant vista or are bent over, peering at a lichen crazing a rockface. Milne makes driving all those obscure Saskatchewan backroads superfluous, and Osborne makes climbing Vancouver’s mountain vistas equally so. I mean, quelle utility!
Plus-and not in an incidental way-they sweep all those messy fellow humans out of the way. I counted, for instance, just thirty-two human beings in Osborne’s photographs. I might not have noticed any humans at all except that a slightly irritating stylistic tic of Osborne’s alerted me: twenty-five of the humans in his photograph were in silhouette. Six more were so far in the distance it was hard to distinguish gender, and the only human being who made it to the foreground in the entire book was, alas, too blurred to recognise. Richard Canning’s matching text had a similarly “distancing” quality, as if life was best regarded from a garden chair, not down in the bottom corner of the cosmic picture but physically situated atop tall mountains overlooking creviced ravines, etc.
It’s all fine stuff, except that my coffee table tends to be covered with Lego and soon-to-expire house insurance policies I never quite get around to examining. And anyway, I tend to gather dinner party guests in the kitchen, where I serve them complicated seasonal hors d’oevres and the like while I question them about current events. I suspect I live in a world that has never been still, and so I haven’t developed a taste for still life. I may even have a small prejudice that what I see in those books has no practical existence except to the environmentalist aestheticians we’ve substituted for God.
Then there’s Regina’s Secret Spaces, which seems to be a collaboration between four of that city’s more public-minded artists-one writer, one ceramicist, a visual artist, and a photographer. At first it seems to be local history in photographs, and thus a companion-book to Saskatoon: A History in Photographs, which Coteau Books also published in 2006. If all Regina’s Secret Spaces aimed at was that sort of documentation of local history, it would have been useful enough-every city should do it with the relative lack of booster-bombast the Coteau editors deployed. But Beug, Campbell, and Mah had a considerably more ambitious agenda, and their collaboration even exceeded their collective intentions and became something more-a fusion of intelligence, and a frisson of sensibilities.
What they were after was Regina’s unique civic narrative: the synapse paths that make the city what it is in its particularities. Thus they pretty much bypass “big-box” history-settler accounts, entrepreneurial bullshit, and the standard capitalist/corporate/celebrity themes that can make any community look like a lineup of turnip trucks to an outsider. Instead, they sought to capture what Regina became when people living there consciously thought about their lives and what sort of city they were living in-an act that is rarer than you’d think, and is becoming rarer by the hour. The result is mostly interesting and only occasionally silly.
Where Osborne and Milne seek out and document the nonhuman, that which is divorced from, and tacitly hostile to, humans, Campbell and her colleagues embrace the constructed human world. More interesting still, they do it essentially without any distancing rhetoric. The Osborne/Milne approach harbours parallel strains of nostalgia and Puritanism, a longing for an environment in which messy human presences are subsidiary or non-existent. Their nostalgia is not likely to be gratified in our time, unless a social and environmental cataclysm occurs that will do away with coffee table books, and quite probably with nature photographers and even photography itself. I don’t even want to think of where the underlying Puritanism, if gratified politically, would take us.
What Regina’s Secret Spaces sets out to capture is neither disengaged or aesthetically clean, but messy, dynamic, and particular. All of those things are hard and sometimes impossible to capture with either language or images, but that’s okay. Particularity, we should remind ourselves, is the only thing that corporate capitalism can’t manufacture more cheaply in a Chinese factory. It’s something precious, and worth the effort. The authors of Regina’s Secret Spaces may have provided a new blueprint for getting at it.
Brian Fawcett (Books in Canada)

"Milne's book is simply splendid. Glorious color, sensitive prose, and marvelous images fill every page."
--Library Journal

"Far more than mere depictions of the land, Milne's pictures evoke its spirit, the mystery that made people kneel there in worship and prayer and awe."
--Canadian Geographic