NORTHERN LIGHT

A new book chronicles the Canadian Arctic expeditions of photographer Richard Harrington, who documented the Inuit's disappearing way of life

- Caitlin Walsh Miller

ON AN ASSIGNMENT for the Hudson's Bay Company in 1946, the photojournalist Richard Harrington travelled to a Chipewyan settlement near the northern Manitoba border. The German-born Canadian photographer, who died in 2005, self-financed five more expeditions to the Canadian Arctic between 1948 and 1953. Sled dogs hauled him to the shores of Hudson Bay and through much of present-day Nunavut, covering some 5,600 kilometres. He took countless black-and-white photos of snow structures and austere landscapes, hunters and smiling families, all in an effort to document the everyday lives of Inuit communities.

More than 100 of Harrington's images appear in a new book, Richard Harrington: Arctic Photography 1948-53, which features a biography by gallery owner Stephen Bulger and a foreword by artist and curator Gerald McMaster, a Plains Cree citizen of the Siksika Nation. McMaster describes how Harrington's photos of Indigenous people are less romanticized than those by other white photographers, who sometimes staged their subjects in headdresses or traditional attire. Harrington showed the inside of igloos, papered with magazine clippings; an Inuit man with a gun next to a seal he'd just shot; and a friendly game of tug-of-war. Still, Harrington was always an outsider: his Inuit hosts called him adderiorli, or "the man with the box."

He is best remembered for his photos of the Padlei community in Kivalliq, a large region in southern Nunavut. In 1950, it was hit with a famine when the caribou, an essential source of food and raw materials, shifted their migration patterns. Many Inuit in the area died from starvation. By the end of the decade, the Canadian government ordered some survivors out of their camps and into outposts in the High Arctic. (Although the government claimed the relocation would be better for hunting, many Inuit believe Canada used their forced migration to establish claim to High Arctic land.)