Fault
Lines: Life and Landscape in Saskatchewan’s Oil Economy
Photographs
by Valerie Zink, Text by Emily Eaton
University
of Manitoba Press
Published
September 2016, 108 pages
“As
spectators, we need to recognize our participation in photography’s
representation of the real and, especially, the oscillation between acts of
memory and acts of imagination that make photographic experience matter,”
writes Martha Langford near the end of the chapter “Memory and Imagination” in
her book Scissors, Paper, Stone:
Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art. But it’s the final
paragraph of that chapter that sprang to mind when I finished Fault Lines: “The photographic spaces that we create between the original and
translation are filled with purposive imagining: we are sometimes pointed
toward change. Works such as Wall’s and Yoon’s want us to reimagine our
communities,” Langford writes. Taken as a whole, the images of Valerie Zink and
text of Emily Eaton in Fault Lines seem
to want us to do the same.
Such a call to our imaginations comes in “A Note on
the Photographs” at the beginning of Fault
Lines. Valerie Zink, a photographer living in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan,
whose seventy-seven striking and evocative full-page black and white images
grace the pages, ends the brief note with this: “More than a lament for a
pastoral plains, these images testify to a moment of transition and urge
viewers to consider the complex consequences of rural communities’ engagement
with the oil economy.”
A distillation of a research project, the accompanying
text “is based on more than seventy interviews” conducted by Emily Eaton, associate
professor of geography at the University of Regina and author of Growing Resistance: Canadian Farmers and the
Politics of Genetically Modified Wheat. In the introduction she gives a
brief overview of the “boom-bust cycle of the oil economy” and
states “This book explores the contradictory nature of the recent oil boom in
Saskatchewan and examines how individuals and communities living amid oil
struggled through a mix of engagement, celebration, ambivalence, and resistance
to oil economies.” And Fault Lines
does this, using select examples from the interviews as snapshots to illustrate
her points.
What Fault
Lines does not do is give us a good sense as to who Zink and Eaton are in
relation to the places explored and this question haunted me throughout the
book. Whose gaze are we considering, whose vantage point? In the introduction
to Forest Prairie Edge: Place History in
Saskatchewan, Merle Massie introduces herself. She tells us who she is,
where she comes from, her relation to the place under examination, and why the
research is important to her. This context makes it easy to understand why people
would invite her in and why they’d open up to her during interviews. Thus she
establishes a level of trust in the reader. No such information is given in Fault Lines, though one must assume that
the more than seventy people interviewed must have asked questions of Eaton
before they consented to interviews.
Like the last sentence of Zink’s note, the second
last sentence of Eaton’s conclusion is a call to our imaginations: “The burden is on
us all to bring to life alternatives that can break the cycle of boom and bust
and that are more environmentally and socially just.” At this point I called my
partner Harvey into my office to look at the photographs in Fault Lines, the ones of Swift Current
in particular. We’d stopped in Swift Current in the summer of 2014 and I waited
in the car in a busy parking lot looking at the doors of the very mall Zink had
photographed that same summer. My experience in that parking lot, a place buzzing
with the young and the old, the seemingly affluent and the seemingly poor, a
range of hipsters and hippies, suits and cowboy hats and campers and truckers
with travel mugs sweating like me, ring-billed gulls circling above, contrasts
sharply with the lone figure of an elderly man walking away from the mall as captured
by Zink. That summer I marveled at how much Swift Current had grown and changed,
how vibrant it seemed, and remember the feeling of joy and relief when Harvey
finally appeared in the crowd with our camping supplies, a loaf of French bread,
a chunk of Gouda, and a big bag of ice.
In Hold Still:
A Memoir with Photographs, photographer Sally Mann writes, “All perception
is selection, and all photographs – no matter how objectively journalistic the photographer’s
intent – exclude aspects of the moment’s complexity. Photographs economize the
truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time’s continuum.”
In Fault Lines, thought-provoking
images, engaging writing, and the careful
curation and placement of image and detail are further enhanced by a beautiful and
clever design. The first page of the chapter titled “The Past, Present, and Future
of Oil in Saskatchewan” ends mid-sentence: “An exploration boom ensued, and by
the early 1950s the industry had expanded into” and this is where you turn the
page to find the image of a grinning girl in a cowboy hat, her two front teeth just
beginning to grow in. We’re expected to notice this expanse and expansion, I suspect, this gap and growth, and I suspect that we’re
expected to feel clever, make the expected imaginative leaps, and buy into the overall design.
