`Canada's Madonna and child'
PHOTO BY RICHARD HARRINGTON
A Picture and a Thousand Words
John Goddard on `Canada's Madonna and child' - TorStar
Feb. 27, 2005.
Death and love have rarely been
portrayed together so dramatically.
Mother and child are on the brink
of starvation. The previous fall,
the main caribou herds bypassed
their camp and now, toward the end of
February 1950, nothing remains in
the igloo to ingest except scraps
of caribou skin.
Earlier pictures from the same roll
show the mother displaying the
scraps to her three-year-old son
and encouraging him to chew on one.
Then, with nothing else to give,
she floods the boy's senses with
love.
She grips him firmly and close,
presses nose-to-nose as though to
literally breathe life into him,
and showers him with comfort and
affection - through her eyes, her
smell and the familiar rustle of
her clothes.
Richard Harrington, who took the
picture, turned 94 on Thursday;
details of his epic dogsled
journeys through the Canadian Arctic in
the 1940s and '50s are fading from
his memory.
"And I don't like the
cold," he says ruefully over a cup of tea at
his East York bungalow.
But his records tell the story well
enough.
On Jan. 19, 1950, he left
Churchill, Man., by dogsled in 50-below
weather heading north along the
coast of Hudson Bay. At the time, he
was one of the country's foremost
documentary still photographers. He
regularly sponsored his own
assignments to the far corners of the
world and afterward showed up in
New York to sell his work to Life,
Look, Parade and other mass-circulation
magazines.
This time his purpose was to
document the way of life of some 300
people calling themselves the
Padleimiut, living in a region little
visited by outsiders.
After a hard 320-kilometre trip,
Harrington reached the coastal
outpost of Eskimo Point, now the
town of Arviat. From there, he
prepared to head inland. He hired
another guide and dog team and,
within two days of his departure on
Feb. 4, discovered that the
Padleimiut were in trouble.
"The people didn't get many
caribou around here," he wrote in his
diary. "By now, that's
frightening. Dogs are dying everywhere.
Remaining dogs: skin & bones,
shivering, listless... It means (the
Padleimiut) can't move around
anymore (to trap or hunt for food)."
For the next several weeks,
Harrington travelled among scattered
igloo camps doling out what
supplies he could: tea, flour, biscuits,
chocolate bars, kerosene and
matches. He also bore witness to the
starvation.
"In the midst of this misery,
I took photographs," he later wrote in
his 1954 book, The Face of the
Arctic. "These pictures would, I hope,
show the outside world what real
suffering was. They would also show
the strength, endurance, courage
and ingenuity of an almost exhausted
people.
`These pictures would, I hope, show
the outside world what real
suffering was. They would also show
the strength, endurance, courage
and ingenuity of an almost
exhausted people'
"Maybe after seeing them,
white men would stop referring to Eskimos
as `children' and `incompetents.'"
Technically speaking, Harrington
was travelling with two 35-mm Leica
cameras, which he carried in his
fur leggings during the day and
stowed in his sleeping bag with him
at night.
For film, he used fine-grain Kodak
Panatomic-X, which he rolled
himself. Normally, film comes 24 or
36 frames to a roll but, by
buying in bulk and rolling his own,
Harrington got 40 to 42 frames.
It meant changing film less often
in the bitter cold, and it paid off
especially in this case: The mother
and son photo came at frame 37.
"No one will ever realize what
goes into the pictures I bring back,"
the photographer writes in the
introduction to The Face of the
Arctic. Three times on the Padlei
trip, he developed frostbite on his
hands. Sometimes his fingers got so
stiff he could not click the
shutter. Sometimes the metal of the
camera stuck to his eyebrows and
lashes, and he had to rip them
away.
What makes the pictures unique,
however, is not the technical details.
Arctic peoples had faced
late-winter shortages and occasional
starvation for millennia, but
Harrington is the only photographer
ever to have captured such an
event. Not long afterward, such
extremes of isolation and hunger
almost totally disappeared.
The photos are also singular for
Harrington's capacity to bear honest
witness at a time of crisis. Unlike
some writers of the time,
Harrington never blamed the
government for the tragedy.
He did raise the alarm when he
returned to Toronto in early April,
and he did secure both short-term
and longer-term relief for the
Padleimiut. But he also understood
that Arctic life was hard and that
periodic starvation was a fact of
life. "It was a very traumatic time
in my life to see that and be
directly connected with it," he told an
interviewer many years later.
"I felt helpless (to do anything)...
but death was always violent among
the people then. You didn't die of
old age in the Arctic; you died
because you could not go on."
Of all the pictures from that trip,
the mother and son portrait stands out.
Perhaps it is also the most
important photograph of Harrington's
long, distinguished career and even
the most important ever taken in
the Arctic. Lorraine Monk, founder
of the still-photography division
of the National Film Board, calls
the work "Canada's madonna and
child."
Over the years, it has been
reproduced many times. Unfortunately,
editors have often cropped it
tight, zeroing in on the faces and
hands but leaving the impression
that the mother is hoisting the
child to her level.
Far better to leave the photo
full-frame, as Harrington intended. It
shows the mother crouching to the
boy and gripping him not to hold
him in the air but to hold him
close.
Their ultimate fate is unknown.
Some of the Padleimiut certainly died
that winter. Harrington himself met
several old people who appeared
days and even hours from death.
A few years ago, he had an Inuit
friend in Arviat try to find out
what happened to the mother and
son. The researcher established from
other families and Hudson's Bay
Company records that the woman was
called Keenaq and her son
Keepseeyuk. But whether they survived the
winter of 1950, the researcher was
unable to discover.
What is indisputable, however, is
that the mother loved and cared for
her child to the end.
Keith and Marnie Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site
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