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When discussing her book Minus 30 at an event in Athens, photographer Angela Boehm matter-of-factly reported that the project got its title because she only included photographs that were taken in that temperature or colder.
Europeans may have a deeper appreciation for photography and photo books than North Americans, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t taken aback by this Canadian photographer’s modus operandi.
“It was rolling easily off the top of my tongue that I had made a rule for myself that it had to be -30 or colder before I would go out and photograph,” says Boehm, in an interview from her Calgary home. “I just kept talking because we get -30 here, big deal. Someone interrupted me and said ‘Wait … -30? Do you mean Celsius?’ They absolutely could not understand that kind of weather.”
It’s true that Canadians, particularly those from Alberta or Boehm’s home province of Saskatchewan, understand that kind of weather. That doesn’t make Boehm’s insistence on capturing landscapes in the bitter cold any less impressive on this side of the pond.
Throughout the winters of 2020 and 2021, the photographer travelled to rural areas where she grew up near Rosthern, a town in central Saskatchewan between Prince Albert and Saskatoon, and throughout Alberta to get the shots. That included areas south and east of Blackie, east and north of Drumheller and north of Calgary and the highway between Calgary and Saskatoon. The resulting work is haunting and beautiful; photographs of landscapes where the silence and desolation are palpable.
Boehm was driving outside of Calgary on a particularly blustery day in 2020, grumbling to herself that the winter weather in the Prairies limits opportunities for photographers.
“Then I really looked at it,” she says. “I took a really good look at it and went ‘Oh my God, this is absolutely beautiful and it’s been in front of me the whole time.’ It was through the process of photographing it that I started to notice some things. It was, particularly being from Saskatchewan, that winter is such an indelible, enduring part of your life and it makes up so much of who you are. When you’re a kid or younger you kind of grumble about that, too. As you get older, you look at it and think this is really a precious environment that I’ve experienced as such a big part of my life.
‘I started to notice in that vein how everybody talks about the environment as being so harsh and brutal and I started to see it as very delicate and fragile. Animals hibernate in winter and they feel perfectly safe doing it. It’s just this unwritten code in nature that they don’t bother each other. That doesn’t happen in the summer. Snow breaks when you walk on it. Ice is fragile water. ReWhent comes right down to it, is there anything as fragile or as vulnerable as a snowflake? So it was really that frame of mind when I got the trigger. After I got that trigger, I just floated on it and tried to understand what I was really catching onto here as an artist.”
It took her back home to Saskatchewan, which is where she first “learned about the fragility of life” after losing a number of family members when she was young.
“So I’m standing there in this storm and having all these memories come back to me,” she says. “It’s as though I’m looking at this theatre of air and the actors are gone. I can still sort of hear them, metaphorically I can see their footprints being covered by snow. It’s like me standing there in this stage of life, being older, and seeing all those memories fade and soften. The winter storm just seemed like a metaphor for all that.”
A former chair of the Alberta Cancer Foundation who had worked in marketing before retiring, Boehm didn’t take up photography until 2019. At the time, her children were teenagers and she realized she wanted to document as much of them as she could using her newfound passion. That early project was called Don’t Tell My Mom, and another with her aging father was called Echoes. Boehm won the Exposure Festival Emerging Photographer Award in 2023 and has participated in group exhibitions in Paris, London and New York.
Minus 30 was published by Stuttgart, Germany-based Hartmann Books. Boehm stresses that it is not a coffee-table book but a book of visual poetry, which is a “very specific type of art form” that has more traction in Europe than here. Like much of her work, the images in Minus 30 evoke ideas of mortality and memory. Central to many of the images is a tree on the property where Boehm grew up in Saskatchewan.
“I kept being drawn to this one particular tree,” she says. “In the beginning, it was very tiny. It was one little tree off in the distance. It’s an interesting tree because it has managed to survive on the wide-open prairie by itself. My father named it years ago the hundred-year-old tree. But it grew on the property line between two fields. So I started to realize there was a metaphor there, too. This tree is smart, it has figured out how to survive on its own. I started to relate to it because of the losses in my own family, and how it’s been able to stand in all these storms and remain strong and grow. The tree becomes larger throughout the book because to me it was a symbol of resilience in the storm.”
There are technical considerations when photographing in -30 weather, which Boehm says involved some trial and error. Once the camera got cold, it had to stay that way or else the lens would fog up. So even in the coldest temperatures, she would have to keep her car windows open. She would occasionally seek out inclement weather, which once included driving into a snowstorm between Regina and Brandon.
“When I was out there, the other thing that occurred to me was that it was such a wonderful feeling to finally be alone,” Boehm says. “When I say alone, I mean alone. There is nobody out in that weather. There are no cars. There is nothing because the roads were closed and it was just you and the animals. It was really quite lovely to be out in it.”