Between Two Cultures: A Photographer Among the Inuit

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This large-format, handsomely designed book provides a portrait through
photographs and words of a culture and a people in transition.

In the 1950s and 1960s, photographer and art dealer Charles Gimpel made
six trips in the Canadian Eastern Arctic. Gimpel, an unusual and
impressive man, called himself an amateur of the arctic. His family had
been art dealers for three generations, and Gimpel had the eye and the
intuition to see that Inuit art would become big business. His London
gallery was the first in Europe to exhibit Inuit carvings as art, not
artifact. Gimpel genuinely liked the Inuit. His friendly behavior opened
doors and opportunities. In striking, full-page photos he catches
interiors and the awesome land, along with scenes of boat-building,
sealskin-stretching, dancing—all the thrust and detail of daily life
and work. Best of all are the faces, lit by hope, anxiety, creativity,
reflection, joy.

Maria Tippett first encountered some of Gimpel’s photos in his
widow’s home. Seeing that they showed, over a span of some 15 years,
both a way of life and its erosion, she planned an exhibition, and then
the book. As late as 1993, she was able to find Baffin Island Inuit who
could identify people in photos taken 30 and 40 years earlier. Her
clear, factual text complements the 120 photographs and extends our
knowledge of the part played by non-Natives in the development of Inuit
art.