The Current - How a camera opened Eldred Allen’s eyes to Labrador’s beauty

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Picking up a camera taught Eldred Allen to look at his home in Labrador differently, from its dramatic coastlines to the shimmering northern lights. The self-taught Inuk photographer shares some portraits of his home, with a warning that its beauty is under threat from climate change.

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The landscape in that part of this country is a wonder. But for Eldred Allen, the place where he grew up is more than that. Eldred Allen is an Inuk photographer from Rigolet and he wants to show the people, the lifestyle and the wildlife scenes of his community to the rest of Canada, one photo at a time. His solo exhibit, Scenes from Labrador is on now at the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto and Elder Alan is with me in studio. Good morning. Good morning.

It's a real pleasure to meet you. Describe the place that you live in. I'm from a remote community in Northern Labrador. We're one of five communities in Nunachivut, which is Inuit self-governed region in Northern Labrador. And my community is called Rigolet, and it's a very small community of 300 people. We're completely isolated in that we don't have road access, so it's only ferry and airplane to arrive in the summertime. But it's a beautiful place. We live, our community is right on the water. Very intimate community, of course. Everybody knows each other and we have amazing wildlife and scenery and people and culture and all beautiful things that are

right on my doorstep that allow me to capture them in photography. What do you love about the place? I mean, you've given us a lot there, but why is that the place that you can't bear to leave? It's where I grew up. I've lived there all my life and it's just the slow pace and the connection with nature I think is most enjoyable. We lived, myself and my wife lived for a year in Ottawa and it was just so completely different. It's such a fast hustle. You work all day, get home and cook your supper and by the time all that's done you're ready for bed to get up and do it again the next day. And you know, we'd spend our Saturdays just walking downtown Ottawa and we'd sit on a

curb eating an ice cream and we'd look at each other and say, we could be sitting on the shoreline next to the water having a fire and enjoying beautiful scenery. And it's just something, you know, that once it's in your blood, having grown up there, you just can't leave it. It's so beautiful. The lifestyle, the disconnectedness from technology and nature and just being so close to nature all the time, it's something that once you experience and once you love it, it's just something that you can't leave. The work that you're doing now is photographing the community and kind of sharing it with the rest of the world in many ways. Tell me how this started. You're a self-taught photographer.

Yes, it all started in 2016. I had a personal interest in drones at the time, and I just seen one online and thought, you know, I was at a point in my life where I could afford one. So I ordered myself a drone and I was working at the time doing GIS work, so computer mapping. And I only had my drone for maybe three days and because we live in such a remote part of the world, a lot of my GIS work, I would be looking for aerial imagery and data of this remote projects going on in Labrador, but we couldn't, you know, it wasn't available. Google Earth had terrible coverage of Northern Labrador. So I had the idea that I could use the drone, start a business and offer that as a service to clients. That's smart.

To be able to offer them high resolution imagery and data of project sites in remote locations. So I started a company, Bird's Eye, Inc. in 2016 offering those services and it was in 2018 when I was working for a client. They asked if I could supplement my drone pictures with handheld pictures from the ground of their project. And I had no experience in photography, just using automatic settings on my drone was sufficient for commercial client work. But when I ordered my first camera in 2018, I wanted, I'm the type of person when I want to be proficient at whatever I'm doing and using.

So I took a deep dive into photography while I was waiting for my camera to arrive via the mail, which usually takes a couple of weeks. So I taught myself how to use the camera, how to expose images correctly, and once I got the camera, prior to using it in any client work, I would take it with me everywhere because I wanted to practice with it. And I quickly found that photography was something that I was really interested and passionate about, and in 2018 kind of sparked my photography career, I guess you could say. Completely self-taught, you know, we live in such a remote place that I learned everything that I learned about photography from YouTube and the Internet.

So that answers a couple of questions. One is, YouTube is what you were looking at before the camera arrived. Yes. This is the first camera that you don't? Yes, other than just a point-and-shoot camera, right? That everybody can purchase at a Walmart or something, you just turn on and use it. But this was what I deemed quote unquote, a professional camera because you could take the lenses off, change the lenses. And when I got it, my camera come, I had been studying how to expose images correctly.

And right from the get go, from the first image I took, I used manual settings only on the camera because I wanted to understand what changing certain settings like your shutter speed or your F-stop would do to the image. So right from the beginning is almost like learning how to drive a standard.

I started there and so, you know, I've become proficient enough now that I can just switch between, you know, fully manual or change some automatic settings on my own. What did you love about it? When you started playing around with this and then got out to take images of your community, what did you love about it? When you started playing around with this and then got out to take images of your community, what did you love about it?

I always give the example of wherever you live in your day-to-day life, you kind of operate with blinders on because you become so accustomed to your daily routine that you go through activities in your daily life that you just don't pay attention to. You see it every day. You see it every day. It's like for yourself here in downtown Toronto, you might walk four city blocks, and then you look up and you're at

where you wanted to get to, but you don't remember at all those city blocks you passed. And that's what I found was like for myself. I lived in a beautiful place, and we have amazing activities and scenery, but because it was something I seen, just it was, you know, my daily scene of what I always look at, I never really fully appreciated it.

So I had those blinders on to the beauty that was all around me. But when I got started in photography and got my first camera, you become directed, right? You look through the viewfinder and through the lens of your camera and you're looking at certain aspects of the scenery, the wildlife or the landscape that's around you and you're trying to compose images and take something out of it and present it in a beautiful way. Give me an example of that, something that you walked past, something that you saw but you never saw until you pointed the camera at it. Even very simple things, like, you know, as coming from an Inuit culture, we hunt and

fish and gather as part of our daily life. So in the wintertime, we'd go out and shoot partridges, it was white ptarmigan. And you know, 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. But I've never really seen it other than it's there, I've got to shoot it. But when I started photography, I would go, I would find the partridge and 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 and just going through its normal activities and I'd never ever seen that before because I

never stopped to watch it. Because you were looking at it in a different way. In a different way. And so now when I go out with my camera and I go out and find the partridge, oftentimes I'll just watch it, take photographs and video of it and just appreciate it and what it's doing and then just leave it and let it go on its way. And that's something I would never ever have seen or witnessed without photography because it, it gets you to slow it down and just look at something

specific that you probably just glazed over in your regular life. Can I ask you about, I'm just looking at some of the photos that are on display here and I mean, the interesting thing about this is you are shooting from a couple of different perspectives. Yes. One is at ground level and the other is from these drones up above. Yes.

How does the landscape that you live in change when you can look at it from above? It started and it was made apparent to me quite early when I first got my drone, because we live right on the water and there are always lots of seals that are in the water. And having grown up there and we're always on the water and speed boats and stuff like that, and you only ever see the head of the seal as they poke out to look around and breathe.

And so for 40 years, that's all I'd seen a seal, unless it was say on the ice or on the land. But one day I had my drone out and there was what we call a scull of seals, so you know a flock of birds but a large group of seals. They were all swimming together and I had my drone flying over them and I had never seen that perspective before but looking straight down you can see their entire bodies as they're swimming through the water. You can see the way that their flippers move and you can see the breath coming out and spraying in the water. And it was just so amazing to get that different perspective on something I had seen from the ground perspective all my

life. It just really opened my eyes to the drones offer this new and interesting perspective. And that's one thing that I always try to accomplish with my photographs is take everyday scenes from home and not only have people from away that have never seen them before to be excited about it, but for people from home who probably had never seen it from that vantage point before as well to be just as excited about it as someone from away. So I really enjoy that when people from home also get excited because they're seeing things in a new way they've never seen it before.

Tell me about this photograph I'm looking at called Support. It's a drone photograph. It's a drone photograph and it is, I mean, I guess an ice sheet, but there's a couple of different tracks on this ice sheet, right? Yes, and that's one of the things I enjoy about photography as well is I enjoy abstract photography and quite minimalist photography at times where you don't fully understand what you're looking at. And so you have to kind of study the image and get in close and dissect it and kind of

feel with it as well. But there's a story behind what I'm looking at. Definitely. Near my community, just to the north, there's a body of water called double mirror. And of course, we depend on ice in the wintertime and snow to travel, it becomes our ice highway, so to speak. And in the fall, that has to freeze up for people to travel across that ice to access cabins and hunting grounds and go out fishing. And it's usually about the same time of the year, late December, early January, when that freezes up in recent years.

And it's always the same family members who are the first ones to go over and test it to see if it's safe to cross or not. So they, you know, once they safely cross they come back and everybody's all excited because now you can cross over safely. But in this image, if you notice on the top of the image, there's a single track. Yeah. And that's a single snowmobile track. So this was the gentleman from the community who had driven out onto this ice during a time when it should be frozen up and safe, but he got out so far in his snowmobile and he fell through and he lost his snowmobile and it sunk in probably a hundred feet of water. But when he jumped off, luckily he never broke through. And in the bottom of the image, if you look in it

closely, it's all footprints. That's what there's all these tracks that go out there. Yep. So my father and another gentleman were on the shoreline watching him as he was out testing the ice and when he broke through, he jumped off and was walking back to shore. And my father and the other gentleman walked out to meet him.

So you can notice some of the footprints are going in one direction, but then they all turn around and come back. So I call it support because, you know, when things happen in small communities, everybody's always there for each other. And the gentleman that were on the shore walked out onto the oash to meet him,

to walk back with him and give him support because he had lost his snowmobile. And so really it's an abstract image, but it's really a depiction of climate change and the effect it's having on our region. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy.

Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. One of the other, and maybe this is connected to another incredibly beautiful photograph of yours is, um, broken road, which looks, I mean,

again, it's, it's the breakup of ice. Yes. And it's another image speaking to climate change. When I started photography, of course, I mean again, it's the breakup of ice. Yes, and it's another image speaking to climate change. When I started photography, of course, I'm still, I consider myself a new photographer. I only started in 2018. And when you start, you're always interested in kind of the single images, things that excite you.

But as you become more proficient, you start looking at themes and looking at projects and stuff like that. And of course, climate change is having such a dramatic impact on our region I'm always looking at certain aspects of the environment that are becoming affected or ways that to capture an image and compose it in a way that kind of speaks to climate change and as I mentioned ice I say is our highways right we travel on it to go to other communities

or hunt and fish. And I call this one broken road because ice becomes our road. But in this image on the right hand side of the picture, it's all broken up in the small ice van. These little fragments of ice. And it's all fragmented. And that's what's happening. It's becoming unpredictable.

Our ice is not forming the same way that it used to. And I call it broken road because it looks like a highway of ice, but it's all broken up and it's of course the effect of climate change. As somebody who, I mean, as you said, you live off the land, you grow up in that land. When you see that land changing, when you see the climate changing, what does that do to you?

It's pretty terrible because of course, you know, I'm only 46 years old and even in the last 10 or 15 years, the changes are happening so rapid and so quickly that, you know, I've got two kids, a seven year old and a nine year old. And I want them to be able to enjoy the lifestyle, the traditional lifestyle of getting out and harvesting from the land and going out and enjoying the land that I'm used to and generations before me are used to. You worry about that, but they won't be able to do that.

But I'm worried about that because they're not gonna be able to do it. This year at home is the worst year that I've ever seen or people can remember on how late the ice is and freezing up because we've had such, our temperatures are well about 20 degrees above normal for this time of the year. It's only within the last week that we've had good freezing temperatures. So it's really worrying because the lifestyle that we live is going to be completely changed because the climate change is having such a drastic and quick impact on everything around us. Let me ask you about one other photo. This is a photo called Tickle. Yes.

And there is a cabin. It's in the dark. There's some lights on, but the cabin is in what you're really paying attention to. It's the Northern Lights that are in the background. There's astonishing display of the aurora. Tell me a little bit about the story that surrounds that photograph. It's a photograph that just depicts, and what I'm trying to capture in my photography is everyday life of what we enjoy and presenting it in a beautiful way. And so everyone at home always travels on the weekends to their remote cabins around the community to get away and disconnect and hunt and fish and spend time with their family. And we often get amazing aurora borealis, northern lights. And

everyone always says, you know, from where I learned all my photography on YouTube is save your money and travel to these all these locations and take amazing pictures. But fortunate for me, I just have to go out on my doorstep and it's all, you know, we live in such an amazing landscape that, you know, I was there with my family at that remote cabin and, you know, go out in the nighttime and look up at the sky and you can see the Royal Borealis happening. So it's just a matter of picking up my camera, walking 20 feet and being able to capture scenes like this. This is the thing that people travel, again, all over the world just to go and see, but for

you, I mean, the ordinary becomes the extraordinary. Yes, exactly. And so 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 the bunk bed. There he is. Yeah. And so, you know, my family is just in the cabin.

My kids are there asleep. My wife is in the cabin reading and I'm just outside at night with my camera and taking pictures and, you know, we've got this beautiful Anuk Shook right in front of the cabin that you can see in the image as well, and there's, you know, so many amazing scenes that it's right on my doorstep and it's great to be able to capture it. You were part of this Pulitzer Center project called How Inuit Want to Protect Their Arctic Home. Tell me a little bit about that. Yes, that was a collaboration with a journalist from the region as well,

Ozzie Michelin. He now lives in Montreal, but he was born and raised in Northwest River, which is a community near Rigolette, and he's a colleague and a friend. And he approached me and said that he was working with the Pulitzer Center and the Guardian, and they were wanting to tell a story about how climate change is affecting our region and our lifestyle. And he had a story, of course, that he wanted to depict through his words in the article he was writing, but he needed a photographer to be able to capture it, to express the words that he was... because of course they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so if you can kind of tell it in a nice image and composition, you can really get your story

across to your audience. So I think it was quite amazing that, you know, he came into my community and told that story there, but I'm from the area as well, so I've got that inside access. So we're out on a small 16 foot speedboat in the ocean hunting seals and so kind of you know if you're not from the area it's kind of graphic content and you might not be as comfortable capturing and how to safely you know move in a boat and get around and take images and stuff so to be a photographer from a small place like that involved in telling a story like this,

I think the access that I have in being there, being a childhood friend of the person that I was photographing, it just gives you that intimacy and you're able to express and see that through the photographs. I mean, part of this is also about... This is your first solo exhibition, the one that we're talking about. Yes. West of Newfoundland and Labrador. That's correct.

What does it mean to you to be able to show your community to the rest of the country? It's pretty special. I'm very, very thankful for Steven Bolger Gallery here in Toronto. They represent my artwork and they sell my artwork as well. And to have such an esteemed and established gallery such as Steven's here, showing my artwork and the clients that he has and the network that he has to be able to bring that to an audience further outside of Newfoundland and Labrador is really, really special and quite surreal as well. Pete This has been a responsibility that comes with that as well though. You're also, you're representing your community as well.

Steve Yeah, and it's great because I've got so much support from my community. As I mentioned, I'm trying to capture photographs in ways that even my community members enjoy them. So I'm not trying to do anything and make it fantastical or trying to do fancy things with Photoshop. It's realistic, it's documentarian, it's, you know, showing everyday life and everyday activities. So for, you So for the Stephen Bolzer Gallery to want to display that and show it on a wider stage outside of Newfoundland and Labrador and my small community of Wrigley is very, very special. My exhibition, Scenes from Labrador, is currently on display now at the gallery and it's on until February 22nd. What do you think those of us from away get wrong about your community? We might have impressions of what life

is like there. You have a little smile on your face as you're about to answer. Go ahead. I think, you know, it's small, it's remote, it's often difficult. There's lack of access to a lot of things that people I think from urban areas take for granted, you know, such easy access to food, easy access to shopping. And through the photographs, you see the beautiful things. But we have so many mosquitoes and blackflies that I'm often tormented half to death while I'm out on the land trying to capture these pictures

because they're hounding me and biting me all over and stuff. But no, I think through the type of photography that I do which is you know documenting where I'm from Everything that you see there in those images is real if you come there you can see those things for yourself as well But yeah, we're very remote. You know we've got it You got to fly in on a small 18 seater twin otter airplane and stuff So it's not easy to get to. It's very expensive to get to.

So yes, everything there is beautiful, but there's quite a few challenges and stuff there as well. If there's one place that you love in your community to take a photo of, what would it be? Oh, I think it's a little bit of the entire region. But oftentimes in the image that you referenced earlier, Tickle, which is our summer cabin, it's a very, very small island. You can walk around the entire perimeter of the island in less than 10 minutes.

But with that Inukshuk out front, often with the Aurora Borealis that you get in the summertime, there's whales probably 10 feet from the shore because the water is so deep and there's wildlife and another image there in the exhibition with that same inuksuk. You can see the Milky Way behind it, it's called stargazing. It's just such a beautiful place. There's minimal flies on there as well. For me as a photographer, because it's so small and there's no trees or anything on it,

that it's great. You don't have to go far. And there's just so, so many different opportunities to get different photographs on such a small location. It's one of my favorites. People are gonna see this and your community is gonna be overrun. But those of us from away who wanna come

and see what you've seen, these are beautiful pieces of work. Thank you. And it's just, the story that you have is fascinating about telling, learning how to do this and telling the story, but also what we will learn about your community, I think is really powerful as well.

Thank you for coming in and telling us about it. Yes, thank you for the opportunity. Eldred Allen is a photographer from Nunez-Vetziet in Northern Labrador. His solo exhibit is called Scenes from Labrador. It's on right now at the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto through the 22nd of February.