An evocative collection of contemporary photography that shines a light on the charm and disintegration of small towns in Saskatchewan.

Captured over 30 years, the 200 images in this finely wrought exhibition document prairie landscapes and rural structures like no other in recent memory. With skill, sensitivity, and a renowned eye for detail, documentary photographer George Webber once again transports the viewer with his lens across time, geography, and history.

Bright colours, sun-baked facades, endless horizons, and straight edges are all beautifully haunted by the shadow of time’s inevitable decay and nature’s slow embrace of abandoned human settlements. The varying shades of prairie-blue skies can hum with optimistic vibrancy, while fists of cloud can march toward an unknowable front.

Saskatchewan Book shows us that small prairie towns remain beacons of affection and bastions of memory, all the while succumbing to the enigmatic fate that eventually enfolds all living things.

George Webber is a renowned documentary photographer whose previous collections with Rocky Mountain Books include an illustrated edition of Robert Kroetsch's classic novel Badlands, Prairie Gothic (with Aritha van Herk), Last Call (with Karen Connelly), Alberta Book (with Fred Stenson), and Saskatchewan Book (with Lorna Crozier). He is the recipient of numerous National Magazine Awards (Canada), two Awards of Excellence from the Society for News Design (USA), and an International Documentary Photography Award (Korea). His images have been featured in American Photo, Canadian Geographic, Lenswork Quarterly, Photolife, The New York Times, and Swerve magazine. In 1999 he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in recognition of his contributions to the visual arts in Canada. George lives in Calgary, Alberta.

George Webber's profile page

Lorna Crozier, one of Canada's most celebrated poets, has read from her work on every continent. She has received numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award, for her fifteen books of poetry, which include The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems; Whetstone; Apocrypha of Light; What the Living Won't Let Go; A Saving Grace; Everything Arrives at the Light; Inventing the Hawk; Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence; and The Garden Going On Without Us. She has also edited several anthologies, among them Desire in Seven Voices and, with Patrick Lane, Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast. She lives in Saanich, BC.

Lorna Crozier's profile page

"What’s amazing about these photographs is how much narrative and emotion are contained in the sparsest, most stripped-down of the found remnants of men and women who are not on site. The pictures do the work of poems and one of the briefest of poems at that, the haiku." -Lorna Crozier, author of The Book of Marvels and Small Beneath the Sky