Everybody loves a photograph of a smiling baby. Everybody loves a photograph of a kitten playing with a ball of wool. Everybody loves a photograph of a sunset streaking its colours across the sky. Sentimentality has its place, I guess. I don’t know. I wonder if, when I was a child, my parents took me to a special doctor who inoculated me against romantic notions and maudlin feelings. I know what sentimentality is. I can identify it and I can even suggest it in my own work. But it makes me uneasy. Even in the most innocuous work, I can feel the shit oozing into the diaper, the wolf’s eyes peering through the garden greenery, the storm clouds gathering just beyond the horizon.
Is this pessimism? Or realism? Is this cynicism? Or honesty?
Below are two photographs shot from roughly the same location on Lake Couchiching. The first is framed to look pretty—fall colours, reflections in the water, sky with hints of mauve, Canada geese flying through the frame. The second, shot with a wide lens to draw more into the frame, includes all the garbage at my feet.
The curious thing about the first photograph is that it overlooks the location where Minnie Ford’s body floated to the surface in 1966. Three years earlier, her 16 year old son had whacked her in the head with a baseball bat, encased the body in a crate filled with plaster, carted the crate to Lake Couchiching, and dumped the crate into the lake. [See my post on the Camp Bison Prison Farm for more details.] To my way of thinking, sentimentality is a matter of framing, both in space and in time. Draw the frame tightly enough around the subject and you exclude the garbage at your feet. Open the shutter for a split second and you let in just enough light to expose a beautiful image, but not enough to capture its ugly history.
