For many photographers, the open road calls out to them like a siren song, filled with enticing new vistas and travel across great distances. The camera acts as a passport to places beyond the horizon. Yet for Canadian photographer Steve Evans, the camera led him to discover the wider world on his own doorstep. Through the portal of his neighbors’ homes, he entered not only another space but also another time. The portraits that make up Life in the Ottawa Valley, images made across decades, capture a slice of the world few know outside its borders.
Seated squarely in the middle of the frame, an old man cradles his cat. Thin, vertical slats cover the walls, two calendars, and a stove that seems to be from another century sits on a hodgepodge of linoleum and wooden board. One can’t make out the dates on the calendars but it’s doubtful that they belong to the year the image was made. Herbert, the portrait’s subject, might be looking at us from 1954 or 1984 or even now.
Moving through Evans’ images one finds similar scenes of homesteaders, farmers, hunters, siblings, and married couples. Most often they are older, framed formally, at times bringing to mind the work of August Sander or Walker Evans. In fact, it was the imagery of these icons, as well as Dorothea Lange and Diana Arbus, that first sparked the photographer’s love for his medium.
His interest and connection to his surroundings, the quiet Ottawa Valley, led him to embark on a documentary project that has spanned more than 30 years. “My parents grew up in the Depression here in the Ottawa Valley, and a lot of the photographs I was looking at resembled what that was like,” Evans reflects. “I decided that I wanted to take a couple of years off and travel around the valley, and see what I could find.”
Photography is vast in its scope but often the images and stories that most grab our attention are of extremes—violence and war, glamor and youth. Evans, however, has trained his camera and conversations most often on the elderly, a group that is easily dismissed from media portrayal.“Many of the people I met had never been photographed before. That was one thing that jumped out at me,” he says. In our time of immediate image-sharing and overload, this anomaly was striking.
“The other thing was giving them a voice. I like the thought of, at that age, having someone record your life. They would talk about growing up in the Ottawa Valley, about farming or working in a general store, about getting older. Some of them had kids, some of them didn’t. Some were married, some weren’t. I enjoyed speaking with them,” Evans explains.
“It was similar to talking to grandparents. My grandparents passed before I was old enough to sit down and talk to them about their life. I always wish I had taken time to sit down with them. I always thought, what was it like? I started to live vicariously through all these other people. But I also found it interesting to photograph in the places they lived. Some homes were stunningly neat. Some people had kept animals in their house like deer and groundhogs. I shook my head a bit afterward. You know, like, wow.”
Look closely at the portraits and you’ll be delighted by the details and the strangeness of some of the settings. His affinity for Arbus is clear, the slightly odd or surprising in his images is treated with care and genuine interest. There is a formality to the poses that feels of another time, with the people he portrays often placed dead center of the frame and looking into the lens. Yet each portrait is imbued with the subject’s unique character, moving between shy or awkward, rockabilly cool or calmly appraising.
Finding people to photograph was like the game telephone, where one photograph’s subject would suggest an acquaintance or someone at a general store would mention an address. “I’d knock on the door and introduce myself. People generally let me in, which is probably not so common nowadays,” he explains. “It was heartwarming; they’d say, ‘Sure, come on in.’ We’d spend a few minutes getting to know each other, and then I’d pull out my recorder. We would go from there, and then they would say, ‘Oh, you should go visit so and so down the road.’ I’d go and it would become like a game of dominoes.”
As Evans photographed, he found people who were glad to speak, to open up and invite him into their worlds. “A lot of people in this age group, older people in the Ottawa Valley, seemed starved for communication, hungry for someone to talk to. I’d ask them questions. And then I’d say, ‘mind if I take a photograph?’ And they would say ‘No, no, I don’t mind you know, but you wouldn’t want to take a picture of me.’ And the whole time when I was talking to them, I’d be looking around trying to figure out where I’d like to photograph them.”
Evans’ childhood time in his grandfather’s barber shop primed his observant eyes and ears. “I remember going in to get my haircut as a kid. I’d have to wait till all the farmers had their haircuts before I would be able to sit in the barber’s chair. So I’d sit and listen and watch what was going on all the time.” This early immersion in the art of observation is apparent in Evans’ portraits.
His compositions move between striking bare white walls that frame a tall, slim man on a chair to wood-paneled walls adorned with scattered framed images—a family portrait, the Pope, a print of an idealized house with a winding road—above a woman and her accordion. In another, a man poses with his small dog in his arms, an open smile on his face and the floral lining of an open cabinet door just above his shoulder. A woman stands slightly off center, a door to her right, and an empty pair of boots to her left.
In sticking close to the familiar, Evans has created a record of a specific slice of migration. “One of the things that kept me going was the demographic variety; the people I photographed were Irish, Scottish, German, French, and Polish,” he says. “They all had their areas they grew up in, and if you’re looking at the Irish area, it was very much like Ireland, if you looked at the Polish area, it was very much like Poland. And so when they came here, they truly brought their culture from where they came from with them. The holidays, the music, the dances that they’ve held onto are apparent in many ways.”
Many of the people that Evans first began photographing are long gone now but in the Ottawa Valley, a certain spirit remains. For Evans, these records of the people of the area are dear. “The importance of the past is something that has stuck with me. It helps me think through the question of where I came from. What did my family do? Why did they come here with all the troubles that they went through? It wasn’t always a bed of roses, it wasn’t always a beautiful story, sometimes there was a lot of sadness looking back through family history.” In Evans’ portraits, one sees not only how we carve out lives both quietly personal and close to tradition but also how embedding oneself in home can be a lifelong journey of discovery.