18 Photographs by P.G. Downes: The Man Who Talks About Dreams

In the late 1930’s, a young American school teacher ventured over several summers into the far north of the western Canadian provinces. He travelled by canoe, either alone or in the company of Cree or Chipewyan (Dené) traders, through vast stretches of Treaty 8 territory: from the boreal forests to the Barren Lands, Great Bear to Great Slave Lake and beyond.

P.G. Downes travelled hard and light, but his ‘wanderings’, as he called them, would not have stood out against the feats of portage or trapping or woodsmanship of any resident northerner. What Downes carried with him was a unique openness and curiosity for the lands and people he encountered in the subarctic north, the timelessness of which was “soon to be erased by war’s upheavals and the encroachments of bureaucracy, commerce, and technology”.

Downes made photographs, a selection of which are reproduced [here/within these pages]. He also kept journals, which are captivating not only for their sensitivity, but for how his observations define two different thresholds: that between a white man without a mercantile agenda and the characters he meets and bonds with year after year; and that between the North of no time, “the North of a thousand or ten thousand years”, and the march of progress, with bush planes opening up previously unmapped regions, mining settlements expanding, and the threat of fascism spreading across the world.

In an unpublished, type-written note in his archives, Downes quotes Ailivik, an Inuit acquaintance:

The white man, said Ailivik, is often very good. However, he has the mind of a child. Why? Do you not see? He gets angry. Among us, only children get angry. A man who loses his temper is a dangerous thing among us. He is mad. He should be destroyed. Therefore, the white man must have the mind of a child.

On September 2, 1939, returning to a trading post near Pelican Lake with a party of Cree canoemen, news arrived that Germany had invaded Poland. “It is too incredible and insane”, writes Downes; “Better to be back in the Barrens among civilized people – [Chipewyans] and Huskies”.

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I introduce these images for the sake of drawing a line across histories, and thinking through what it means to tell or retell a story. I have different anchors, both cultural and geographic, to P.G. Downes, as he likewise had different anchors to the subjects of his images and writings. To look and feel through these images, across eras, becomes both an act of empathy and of critique, a chance to reassess the intrinsic power of the outsider’s point of view.

Who has the right to tell your story? Should it be someone who looks like you? Someone who shares your experience? The broad answer is yes, or it should be yes. Too often, stories of the Other have been interpreted at will by those with the power to define the terms of interaction. At the same time, the importance of looking at the world from an unfamiliar point of view, from the point of view of a stranger, should not be undervalued. As a practice, this way of looking has passed beyond the horizon of the mediated social landscape many of us live within. Image-driven networks encourage us to stand for one thing, to land firmly on one side of an argument or the other, to forgo our porosity, our openness, or our care.

“In the twenty-first century, the continuing loss of a world in common and the crisis of relationality help explain the resurgence of fascisms and fundamentalisms across the world”, writes Irmgard Emmelhainz in her update of Hannah Arendt’s Lebenswelt concept – the world of common human experience and interpretation. “For each user/citizen/consumer”, she continues, “the digital neoliberal capitalist order offers an individualized, tailor-made reality. This process occurs and repeats to the point that our ‘normal’ now consists of living in a world in which we all have the right to retreat to our own private worlds of meaning, tailored by the algorithms of digital interfaces that constantly adapt to each user’s individual needs”.

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P.G. Downes was a high school teacher, and apparently a good one. Like all good teachers, he had an “absence of egotism” in the classroom, and one feels this in the tenor of his photographs and writings from the North. He would return late to school at the end of the summer “with a full beard and Eskimo jackets”, and had a reputation for keeping his students “spellbound” with his breadth of knowledge and dramatic flair.

(I’m thinking here, too, of teachers on the south side of the world, in the far-flung post-colonial outposts where my education began. Mine were named Faye Chung, Miguel Browne, Llewellyn “Short Pants” Mac Intosh – unorthodox educators engaged in the aftermath of independence struggles, re-interpreting the given syllabi, re-centering the narratives of history so that we didn’t feel so far-flung after all.)

Do the eyes of a teacher and the eyes of an artist require the same candour? Nikos Papastergiadis reminds us that “the artist does not simply dwell in place but collaborates with place. The collaboration is more than hospitality; it is a small gesture in a specific place that bridges different lives”.

Downes’ main gesture in those northern wanderings was simple but vital: he humbled himself in relation to his companions and surroundings, offering an early example of how one white man might begin, within themselves, a process that is now required on a paradigm-shifting scale.