Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views

Michael Payne is the City of Edmonton archivist and the co-author of A
Narrative History of Fort Dunvegan.

Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views is a collection of 62 remarkable
photographs by John Conroy. The images are accompanied by four engaging
essays. Conroy himself contributes one of the essays, while Helen
Marzolf provides a curatorial perspective on Conway’s art. David
Carpenter and Sharon Butala, two of Saskatchewan’s finest authors,
offer some well-considered insights into the place and its people.

The images are not just finely composed photographs or conventionally
beautiful landscapes. In almost every image, the beauty derives from an
intriguing—sometimes almost imperceptible—human impact on the
physical world. Arguably, the most conventionally beautiful image is a
sewage lagoon at Waskesiu.

In his essay, Conway discusses a photograph by Humphrey Lloyd Hime.
Titled “The Prairie looking west, September–October 1858,” this
19th-century photograph features a vast expanse of sky and prairie and
an artfully displayed skull in the centre foreground. Conway confesses
that what makes this image stick in his head is not the skull, but the
prairie.