Tête-à-la-Baleine? Why? What are you looking for? That’s the question all the inhabitants of Tête-à-la-Baleine I’ve met have asked me.
Let’s set the scene.
I often look at the map of Quebec. I can see the towns and villages, especially those dotted along the coast. The Lower North Shore intrigues me. A faraway land. The North. The cold. Isolation. What are these people doing here? What keeps them there? What’s life like for them? What are they building their “living together” on? What kind of environment do they live in? No road. A boat, but only once a week, and not in winter. No shops. No services or just the essentials, exclusively on request. A bank branch, a grocery store, supplied by plane once a week when the weather permits, a post office in a house, also served by plane, a rudimentary dispensary, no doctor, no pharmacy, no electrician, no plumber, no garage, a school on the verge of closure. No restaurant, no store, no boutique. “Nothing”. 100 inhabitants. A subpolar climate. Cold, very cold. The village is slowly dying. Like neighboring Aylmer Sound, it could disappear. Many houses are empty and off-limits. There’s also a church, no priest, with a cross flickering dangerously on the steeple. Quite a symbol. The only link with the “neighbors” is by helicopter…or snowmobile to visit the nearest villages in winter, rarely by boat in summer. Route 138? They are waiting for it… patiently… for 50 years. Winter and July…really.
It’s a sad description, but that’s not what you see when you’re there.
In photographing people, I tried to capture their spirit in an unusual environment and translate it to a warm, poetic level, even when surrounded by cold. The hostile environment doesn’t bother them that much. For example, the offshore islands, part of their historical heritage, are accessible in summer and winter: all you need is a boat or a snowmobile, and the pack ice does the rest. They’re freedom-loving, and proud of the homes they’ve built with their own hands. They own their land in the broadest sense of the word, and even though the population was declining and jobs were scarce, they once refused the government’s proposal for a national park, in the name of their freedom over their territory. Today, they seem to be of a different opinion, ready to make what some call concessions for the village’s survival, and would probably like to relaunch the project…What resilience!
Getting in touch was easy, but that doesn’t mean immediate.
A great American photographer, Alec Soth, is renowned for finding relational chemistry with strangers and enjoys photographing loners and dreamers. He is interested in remote places where people seek to escape civilization.
In a certain sense, I share this relational experience with him, even though the inhabitants of Tête-à-la-Baleine don’t seek to escape the world around them. They form a society with the rest of Quebec. They enjoy the same level of comfort as other Quebecers. That’s what they say, and to some extent it’s true. They’re neither loners nor dreamers, but they also want to be left “quiet” and not have their territory invaded. And, at first glance, a photographer could be seen as invasive.
Photographing them was no easy task… Once the principle had been accepted, I only had a few minutes when I entered the houses to establish a bond with the people, to get an idea of certain aspects of their personality, to find out what was important in their lives so that I could deduce a suitable location for the shoot, which would incorporate all these elements. In other words, the context of all the portraits means something, the interiors tell a story. Landscape photographs enrich this context. The cold is omnipresent outdoors, and blue permeates the images.
By entering people’s private lives and taking their portraits, I realized how proud they were. Some people seem to say: “Did you expect that here?”
Soth paints a world of disillusionment for those he photographs, much as Robert Franck did before him in the great tradition of American road trips.
I wanted to stay in one place, tiny but immense. The world I’ve met is in no way disillusioned or nostalgic for a past that has disappeared – on the contrary. And it shows. The inhabitants are opposed to the eventual closure of the village and have already saved the school by helping several Ukrainian refugee families and their children to settle there. Quite a story. They even asked me to help them by taking up the tradition of school photos, which I was happy to do.
Tête-à-la-Baleine is also the only French-speaking village on the Lower North Shore. Geographical isolation is compounded by linguistic isolation. They all have in mind the closure of Aylmer Sound, a small village a stone’s throw away, where the inhabitants had to raze their homes and erase part of their lives before leaving. That’s why the series of images begins with a “painting” of Aylmer Sound.
I don’t feel I’m the sole author of the portraits. Each showed me a facet of their inner selves in a dialogue between glances. It’s commonplace to say so, but we’re dealing here with people who are very jealous of their freedom. Their image is part of it, and they probably show what they want to show. Sometimes it’s a game of hide-and-seek between us. In the same vein, many of the people I was lucky enough to make friends with, refused to have their photo “taken”.
We find little of their stories, concerns, lifestyles, and beliefs in basements and storerooms. Some objects, sometimes considered insignificant, are the last witnesses to a bygone era. But certain traditions endure, and their photos inspire us to imagine and dream.
Tête-à-la-Baleine? Why? What are you looking for? Perhaps the answer lies in my images.
