If you find yourself in the Exchange District in downtown Winnipeg, longing for a view of the light outside of the city, the 210 Gallery on Princess Street is the place to visit for the month of April.
Three rural photographers will have their works displayed there throughout much of the month as part of the Flash Photographic Festival in an exhibit called Where the Light Fell. In it, each of the photographers' unique views on three distinct parts of Manitoba are showcased side by side, with different subjects being placed in distinct lights.
For Noelle Drimmie, the light in Flin Flon is a tricky thing to work with. “One of the neat things about being in Manitoba’s north is that we have very short winter days and very long summer days,” she says, speaking inside the gallery just ahead of its opening reception.
What the locale lacks in lighting predictability is made up for in the rugged beauty of the landscapes. “I do a lot of, I would say, my golden hour photography in the fall where we do have a bit of balance on the times all there. The light can hit the rocks, the light can go through the trees, there’s so much water... so it’s just a real pleasure to be able to do that kind of work in such a remote space.”
Light emanating through natural objects is something that also captures the eye and lens of Brandon’s Caley Brown. In addition to the swamps and fields that make up the Westman region, Brown enhances the light through post-productions methods that add a little extra shimmer to images of the aurora borealis and winter sun dogs.
“I do like to bring out the colours and spike up the vibrancy and saturation,” Brown explains. “People will say, ‘Did it really look like that?’, and it does, but when you capture it with a camera, and you look at the screen, it often doesn’t represent what you actually saw. So, my post-processing is a little bit more than some photographers might do, but that’s how I like it.”
“There’s no thought process, which is partly what I love about it,” she continues. “I’m just there and I’ll see something, and I just stop in my tracks.”
While Manitou photographer Susan Crawford-Young's subjects have a more man-made quality to them, the nature of the light that shines on the Pembina Hills shines through just as brightly as the light in Brandon and Flin Flon. Images of old farm equipment are the dominant feature in her work, and the light illuminates a history that she’s proud to portray.
“It’s what’s grown our food for centuries,” Crawford-Young says of why she comes back to these subjects. “I just go out and capture what I run into, basically, because you’ll find sort of a farmyard graveyard, abandoned equipment on a lot of farms, including ours. And I just go out and walk around it and capture images.”
Audiences can see the captured images of rural light in Where the Light Fell until April 24 at the 210 Gallery, which is open Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. More information can be found at the Flash Photographic Festival website.