Richard Harrington was born in 1911 in Hamburg, Germany. He immigrated to Canada in the mid 1920’s, and went on to become one of our most respected photographers. His career led him to over 100 countries, and more than 2400 of his photographic stories were published in numerous magazines and books.
In 1947 Harrington made a trip to Inukjuak in the eastern Arctic, and his desire to see the far north was stirred. Over the next decade, he made five additional trips north and his resulting photographs now form a historical record of a vanishing way of life, as the Inuit people were soon to abandon their nomadic lifestyle to settle into permanent camps.
This exhibition features photographs from several of these trips. Complimenting them, are a number of sculptures from the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s impressive Inuit art collection that reference Harrington’s last trip to the Arctic in 1959. During that trip, he visited the Nunavik settlement of Puvirnituq to document carving techniques, particularly those of Charlie Sivuarapik, whose work had become well-known in the late 1950s. Harrington’s photos of the carver were used in an article for Canadian Geographic Journal in 1960. The sculpture Inuit Hunter with Caribou and Dog shown in several photographs is included in this exhibition.
Presenting photography by a non-Inuit artist and carvings by an Inuit artist together provides a new context for visitors to view these historical records of a time and place that has profoundly changed in the last 50 years.