Place: Lethbridge, a City on the Prairie
Description
$50.00
ISBN 1-55054-931-6
DDC 971.23'4503
Author
Publisher
Year
Contributor
Nora D.S. Robins is liaison librarian in the University of Calgary
Library.
Review
Place is a collaborative effort between Rudy Wiebe, who lived in
Lethbridge during his teens, and photographer Geoffrey James from
Toronto, who became fascinated with the “anthropomorphic forms” of
the Lethbridge area while shooting the landscape for an art exhibition
at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.
Lethbridge was founded as a mining town and is now the third-largest
city in Alberta, an energetic and vibrant place. One would not know this
from James’s images. People have no place in these 45 black-and-white
photographs. He has chosen to concentrate his efforts on old buildings,
main street commercial architecture, railway yards, and small
houses—places that he says have “ugly beauty.” In his photos of
the surrounding prairie landscape, his ability to capture the prairie
wind is remarkable; as Wiebe says, “The wind is a sea in Lethbridge
and usually by noon the tide rises and the city begins to flood.”
Wiebe’s short essays follow James’s photos. He writes of
Lethbridge’s history and of his memories as a teen.
Wiebe is a towering figure in Canadian literature, and James is a
renowned Canadian photographer whose book Paris won the Roloff Beny
Award for best work of photography by a Canadian. Together they have
produced a remarkable work that defines the concept of “place”
through this evocative study of Lethbridge.