How photography taught Eldred Allen to see his Labrador home differently
The self-taught photographer's work is being showcased in Toronto
Photographer Eldred Allen says picking up a camera for the first time in 2018 made him look at the world in a different way, right down to the birds he hunts near his home on Labrador's coast.
"It was always a matter of 'I want to kill this bird to feed my family,' so it would be as fast as I could get my gun to shoot it," said Allen, a self-taught Inuk photographer from Rigolet, N.L., a small community of around 300 people, about 160 kilometres from Happy Valley-Goose Bay.
But learning to compose images through a lens helped him look past the "blinders" of his day-to-day routine, he said.
"I would take out my camera and I would just sit and watch it. I would watch it feeding and eating off of the willows and walking through the snow," he told The Current's Matt Galloway.
"And I'd never, ever seen that before because I never stopped to watch."
Allen's solo exhibit Scenes From Labrador is at the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto until Feb. 22, his first exhibition outside of Newfoundland and Labrador. Speaking with Galloway, he shared the stories behind some of his photographs — and what they mean to his home and community.
Being there for each other
Every winter the people of Rigolet wait for Double Mer, a nearby body of water, to freeze so they can use it as an ice highway. Allen explained that it's always the same family who ride out first to test that the ice is firm enough for travel to cabins and hunting grounds.
"Once they safely cross, they come back and everybody's all excited," he said.
In late December 2021, the ice broke beneath a member of that family, who was taking that first test ride out on his snowmobile. He managed to jump off but his vehicle sank into the water, leaving the man to walk back.
"My father and another gentleman were on the shoreline watching him," Allen said.
"When he broke through … [they] walked out to meet him."
Allen captured that meeting in his photograph Support, an aerial shot that shows a single snowmobile track streaking across the snowy landscape. To its right, a set of intermingled footprints show how the men walked out to meet their neighbour and escort him home.
"You can notice some of the footprints are going in one direction, but then they all turn around and come back," Allen said.
"When things happen in small communities, everybody is always there for each other."
The threat of climate change
Allen said that Support also hints at a theme in a lot of his work: climate change and its "dramatic impact on our region."
In the aerial photograph Broken Road, he shows the fragmentation of an ice sheet, with shards drifting away from one of the ice highways his community relies on.
It's a problem that's growing every year, he said.
"It's becoming unpredictable. Our ice is not forming the same way that it used to," he said, adding that higher temperatures this year meant freezing conditions came weeks late.
Allen said he worries for his kids, who are seven and nine years old.
"I want them to be able to enjoy the lifestyle, the traditional lifestyle, of getting out and harvesting from the land … and enjoying the land that I'm used to, and generations before me are used to," he said.
"It's really worrying because the lifestyle that we live is going to be completely changed."
Labrador, through a lens
As Allen started to learn about photography via YouTube tutorials, he noticed that a lot of the videos suggested saving up to travel to beautiful locations to take amazing photographs.
"Fortunate for me, I just have to go out on my doorstep," he said. "We live in such an amazing landscape."
In his picture Tickle, he photographs his cabin against the backdrop of a stunning display of northern lights. Allen's family are hidden away in the cabin; his wife is reading, his kids are asleep.
"If you look closely in that image and look at that cabin window, you can see the foot of my son. He's just there sleeping on his bed in a bunk bed," Allen said, laughing.
The photographer said he wants his work to help people see a different side of Labrador — even if they already live there.
"I really enjoy that, when people from home also get excited because they're seeing things in a new way they'd never seen it before," he said.
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Audio produced by Lu Zhou
