VERA SALTZMAN (Fort Qu’Appelle SK, Canada)
Biography:
Vera Saltzman is a Canadian photographer who primarily explores themes of identity, place and memory. She is a graduate of the Portfolio Development Program at the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa (SPAO). Currently based in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, she is represented by Slate Fine Art Gallery in Regina.
Artist Statement:
O Human Child
Canadian author W.O. Mitchell’s seminal book Who Has Seen the Wind depicts life as a child in rural Saskatchewan in the 1930s. Through stories of everyday events of a young boy trying to make sense of life, death and God, Mitchell addresses the theme of being human, articulating a universal theme in an authentic Canadian Prairie voice.
Seventy years after its publication, “O Human Child” takes a contemporary look at children growing up in rural Saskatchewan, and considers how the tensions and complexities of childhood today both contrast and mirror those of Mitchell’s time.
*Title borrowed from W.B. Yeats poem The Stolen Child.
Practice Statement: How does photographing on film (or using your material photographic process of predilection) inform your artistic practice?
Shooting with film is like falling in love: a heavenly experience one moment but in another instant it can lead to great heartbreak. But you continue the journey because you believe in it and how it makes you feel in the end. Some days it is all roses, but others more thorny. I think that sums up my relationship with film. In such a tactile process there is something intangible about the experience that leaves me coming back for more.
