Newsletter #223: September, 2026
© Chris Harris. All rights reserved
This Newsletter is celebrating 20 years of sharing photographs and stories from the Cariboo Chilcotin region of British Columbia.
Welcome everyone!
The two months since my June Newsletter flew past so fast that I now realize that my August Newsletter is now my September Newsletter! However, as they say; ‘better late than never’, so here we go!
Contents:
- My new photographic project ~ part I
- Wildfires: past, present, and the future
1. My new photographic project ~ part I
Discovering soda lakes
Without knowing it at the time, the idea for my most recent photographic art project germinated back in 2010 when I began photographing a book titled Flyover: An Aviation Legacy. It was to be the first publication of its kind: stories of adventuresome pilots and an aerial perspective of British Columbia, previously unknown except to those pilots, who showed it to me.
During the first hour of my first fight, I discovered a series of odd shaped and extremely colourful lakes tucked away in forested grasslands on the Cariboo Plateau. They were within one hundred kms of where I live. Although intriguing, these small semi dried-up alkaline lakes seemed poisoned and contaminated.
Little did I realize that photographing these alkaline lakes, known as Soda Lakes, would lead to an undiscovered beauty and a narrative of planetary importance.
Defined by shape and colour
By flying ever more slowly and closer to the ground, shapes and colours became amplified.
Eventually I learned to lower my camera angle to eliminate the horizon. By doing this, I began to abstract the landscape by removing context.
Veering toward abstraction
As my relationship with the soda lake environment deepened, I narrowed my field of vision still further. In doing this, I discovered an inner reality of the landscape, far more interesting and fascinating than the greater one.
A period of artistic growth (2013 – 2023)
During this period, two important things happened in my life. First, in 2016, I completed the last of my Legacy Series book publications with British Columbia’s Cariboo Chilcotin Coast; A Photographer’s Journey.
Second, I began seven years of teaching Creative Vision residency workshops with my friend Dennis Ducklow. It was a period of reflection and contemplation. Inspired my painters such as Monet, Van Gogh, Braque, and Picasso who dared to express themselves in new ways, I said to myself, ‘photographers can do the same’.
Throughout this period of teaching, I became a serious explorer of photographic expression. I experimented with camera technique and visual perspective and soon began to discover unique and unfamiliar styles of photographic interpretation.
Self Portrait; an intersection
Jane O’Malley’s art table
Aungier Street, Dublin
These three images were made to evoke my feeling of a place rather than depict the reality of a place; the ‘feel’ moreso than the ‘real’.
Besides experimenting with technique, I began to visually explore my subjects in far greater depth. By greater depth I mean (a) investigating my subject to see beyond what I was looking at; gradually moving from the physical world to the imaginary world, and (b) discovering new interpretations that had never been seen or experienced before. By doing this, I could express both my subject and myself in ways I never thought possible and bring viewers into my experience.
There is one other aspect to this artistic growth that I should mention.
I have always been interested in pushing boundaries of expression, but often I lacked the courage to take it to the next level and sustain it. With the encouragement of painting master’s and other art influencers, I began to include my new styles of expression in books, newsletters, talks, and hang them as art prints in my studio gallery. Their inclusion was groundbreaking; my books still sold, newsletter subscribership increased (after an initial decrease), expressive and abstract print sales overtook representational work, and my confidence in expressing myself as a visual artist rose dramatically.
I was reimagining my photography as an art form; I was becoming who I truly am as a photographer.
My photographic art project (2024-2026)
One day, while driving along Meadow Lake Road, I stopped to make this documentary image of Long Lake. With boots on the ground, it was now fourteen years after photographing this very lake from the air in 2010.
A soda lake landscape
Apart from its unusual yellow colour and white trim, this alkaline lake with its brown grass and power lines marking its western shore, seemed very ordinary. Why would I ever return to make another documentary image, I thought to myself? There was a sense of finality to both being here and taking this image; a sort of ‘been here, done this, and recorded my experience’ feeling.
Fortunately, I have another voice that I listen to. It says; “surely, photographic art is more than the replication of appearance; it includes exploration, imagination, and experimentation, and it usually results in a visual language which has more to do with feelings”.
Expressions of the above soda lake landscape
Part II of this article will resume in my December Newsletter. It will speak to how I reimagined photography as an art form and what I discovered when I veered toward highly expressionist and abstract photographic art.
2. Wildfires: past, present, and the future
During the past several weeks, large-scale wildfires have swept through several parts of British Columbia burning tens of thousands of square kilometers of forest. People, and many forms of animal life have lost their lives, and private homes and ranches have been destroyed.
During the evenings as the sun set, the sight and smell of smoke brought back strong emotional memories of the 2017 wildfire that forced Rita and I from our home. It is an eerie and worrisome experience.
The 2017 wildfire as seen and photographed as it approached our home.
Our home was fortunately sparred; this home belonging to a good friend of ours, however, was not.
Private property of every description was burned.
Highway 97 reopens. 70 Mile House
Rita was told a story in recent years, by a Secwepemc elder, that in his grandparents’ time, folks would travel the approximately 150 kms between Lac La Hache and Kamloops by foot and by horse. At that time, apart from sporadic, giant, fire-resistant, Douglas Fir trees, that landscape was entirely open grasslands and was managed by fire.
Today, forest encroachment has filled the entire landscape, and is not managed to prevent the scene above.
When are we going to learn?
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