Minus 30: How a photographer found her muse on the cold Saskatchewan prairie

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Photographer Angela Boehm loved, for practical and creative reasons, bitter Saskatchewan winter days.

While warmth-seekers huddled inside with sweaters and hot drinks, she’d drive frosty rural roads, looking for photos. She’d tape hand-warmers to the bottom of her camera body and tuck batteries inside her coat, trying to keep them functioning.

Her efforts were part of a project, stretching over a couple of winters, that is now a photo book titled Minus 30. Her rules for shooting were simple: She’d go out only when it was minus-30 Celsius or colder. If it was storming? All the better.

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Boehm’s frozen, ungloved finger would click a metal button to capture the image in front of her. While scouting around, she’d sometimes think of people she lost while growing up in this environment — her mother and two brothers, in particular.

“I think this project has kind of shifted my thoughts,” says Boehm, originally from Rosthern and now living in Calgary. “I grew up right in the thick of that winter. It forms your identity, in a way. You don’t realize until you get older how much of your identity is wrapped up in that kind of a winter.

“I had all these realizations once I started photographing it, which was that everybody talks about this environment as being harsh and brutal, but I started to see it as being very delicate and fragile. Snow breaks when you walk on it. Ice is fragile water. And really, is there anything as fragile as a snowflake?”

Boehm says the passing of family members made the Rosthern area a place where she first learned about the fragility of life itself. While looking for a tangible project to pass along to her kids, she settled on cold images right out of her upbringing.

“I think the project is really about not so much the loss, but the fading memories of them in that place,” she says. “When I went back, it’s almost like you could hear the echoes, but they’re not there, and the snow is just blowing in the footsteps.

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“This particular environment has been so dear to me,” she adds, “and has made up such a huge part of my life and my memories here, and maybe I’m losing a bit of it, too. And that’s when it occurred to me, this is what I want to leave my kids.”

So she trudged through fields and down back roads, looking for a shot, going by feel and instinct. Most of her project photos were taken in Saskatchewan, the majority of those in the Rosthern area.

She remembers pitching the project to a European book-publishing executive, and mentioning her rule about shooting in minus-30 weather.

“I kept talking,” Boehm recalls, “and this guy stopped me and says, ‘Wait a minute. Wait. Wait. Minus-30?!’

“To us here … you’re going to get that. To them, they can’t even fathom what that would feel like. There was a lot of discussion on what does it feel like, and how can you do that?”

Inhospitable prairie winters leave much to complain about — numbed body parts, icy roads, sluggish and dead machinery.

But Boehm found beauty and neat little truths set in the bleak environments she shot.

“A thing I really, really came to appreciate — that is becoming more and more rare — is there’s so few places left in the world where you can be completely by yourself and it’s actually silent,” she says.

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“I’m a former climber, so even in the mountains, you can ascend the mountain and you’re still going to hear a train. There’s always something. But in this environment, in that climate, there’s nothing. It’s you and the animals, and that’s it.”

Shooting Saskatchewan winters at their coldest isn’t without peril. Boehm was storm-stayed one night at a small-town hotel after a white-knuckle drive, and once fell into a cattle guard, hurting her knee.

“It’s probably not the safest environment to go out in, but somebody always knew where I was and I had everything in my vehicle, should I have gotten stuck for any period of time,” she says. “And honestly, I found some amazing things to wear. There was days where it was incredibly cold and windy and I would have to undo my jacket. The technology in outerwear is really quite incredible.

“But the most challenging part, interestingly enough, as a photographer, you still cannot press the shutter with anything but your finger. It doesn’t work with gloves. It doesn’t feel the same, and you can’t get it right. So I did have trouble keeping my hand warm. I’d have to take two or three photos at a time and then put my hands back in my pocket.

“And batteries — I had to keep batteries inside my coat, so they didn’t drain the charge. And I couldn’t bring my camera into the vehicle to warm up because it would fog up. So there was a few technical challenges with all of it.”

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After the work, the travel, the shutter clicking in frozen landscapes, she had a big body of images.

Boehm’s pictures were showcased at the recent Photo Paris, one of the world’s largest gatherings of photographic art, and she’s made them into a photo book — or, as she puts it, “a book of visual poetry” complete with words and images, sequenced intentionally.

Boehm is not a life-long photographer. She’s been at it for six years. She graduated from business school at the University of Saskatchewan, lived in the province until she was 28, then moved to Calgary. She was a director at CP Rail before retiring and moving into philanthropy, including serving as a trustee on the Alberta Cancer Foundation, chairing it for three years, and working with the group to get a new cancer centre built in Calgary.

“And once the shovel hit the ground,” she says, “my kids were in Grade 11 and 12, and I went, ‘Oh, my goodness, I have so little time left with them.’ And so I decided to pick up a camera and photograph every last moment I have with them.”

She then decided she wanted to do this new passion well, which led to getting a mentor, and then attending the International Centre for Photography in New York.

“And that’s really what got me started,” she says.

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Boehm has since won awards, and her work has been displayed both domestically and internationally. Her book about the prairie winter has been published by Hartmann Books, based in Stuttgart, Germany. It can be purchased on her website — angelaboehm.ca — and will be available at Saskatoon’s McNally Robinson starting in December, as well as at hartmann-books.com

“I kind of fell into it by accident,” Boehm says. “Being a photographer in this part of the world, you grumble from time to time that you get to photograph so few months of the year. And it just happened to be one of those days where I’m out at the end of my lane in a car, it’s minus-30 out, probably a bit worse. I’m waiting for a gap in the highway to turn, and I’m grumbling again — another cold day, can’t get a photograph.

“But then it just hit me between the eyes. I looked at it and went, my God, this is beautiful, and it’s been in front of me this whole time, absolutely right in front of me. So I started to photograph it. And then, as it typically does, all my projects take me back home to Saskatchewan.”

Once home, she sought poetry from the crisp and crackly cold that would rise in clouds above her head with every breath. She says she’s learned and noticed much while shooting, including how winter storms mimic life with their “immeasurable beauty, but careful edge” — hard edges out on the horizon, softened by snowy fields.

“To me, it’s like standing there at a certain stage of life and your memories are softening,” she says. “The horizon is clouded, so to me, the whole winter storm is really a metaphor for life. That’s really what the poem is about.”

kemitchell@postmedia.com

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