Thaddeus Holownia was born in Bury Saint Edmunds, England, in 1949 and emigrated to Canada five years later. He was a faculty member at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick starting in 1977 and Head of the Department of Fine Arts from 2000 until his retirement from teaching in 2018. Holownia has dedicated most of his career to large-format view-cameras, working with various formats from 8 x 10” to 12×20” in black and white and colour. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including The Nature of Nature, The Photographs of Thaddeus Holownia 1976–2016, at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; The Terra Nova Suite, a twenty-five year survey of his work in Newfoundland & Labrador at the Provincial Gallery (The Rooms) in St. John’s Newfoundland; 24 Tree Studies for Henry David Thoreau at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York. His 1998 mid-career retrospective exhibition, Extended Vision: Photographs by Thaddeus Holownia 1978–1997, organized by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, traveled across Canada and to the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City. His photographs have been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the Monet’s Legacy: Series, Order and Obsession at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany, and Car Culture at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York. Markland Tree with poems by Harry Thurston was published by Anchorage Press in 2022.  https://holownia.com

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John K. Grande: I have followed your photography for some 35 years now Thaddeus.  Whether the subject is nature, architecture or portraiture, you have a remarkable persistence in drawing our attention to specific landscapes and places over time. Your 24 Tree Studies for Henry David Thoreau were exhibited at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery early in the 2000s carries with it an awareness of conservation and sustainability as if a form of still life in the landscape…. and this later manifested in the Walden Pond Revisited series….

Thaddeus Holownia:  I enlarged the Walden Pond vertical trees to a human scale, something I have rarely done. For the Walden Trees I wanted those to have an immediate confrontational element hence the scale. The photographs are from 7 x 17 inch negatives so they possess an extraordinary amount of detail allowing them to work on two levels. Distant and up close, I am interested in the physical structure of the place… (structures of landscape and human built).

Walden Tree IX, Concord MA, 2002

JKG: I like the way you refer to it – the structure of the place. There’s an anomaly right there. You have nature there and yet it is the Walden site that has been encroached upon by human civilization. Many of your photos have this double entendre where nature is in situ and then changes as a result of many layers of intervention with and in nature.

TH: That is a kind of flirtation I have always had. Falling into and falling out-off just not wanting to deal with it and dealing with pure nature. But I occasionally stick my foot in it. The Anatomy of a Pipeline series was probably one that I kind of saw something that everyone shunned and grimaced about it happening. I tried to go and find some elegance in the process of the construction.

JKG: The manipulation of images, as witnessed by Andreas Gursky and other photographers’ phenomenal multi-image assemblage works, challenges old-fashioned notions of “straight photography” as a purveyor of visual “truth”. Your photography is as much process as document, and remains attached to the physics of this world, the evidence of life, and it’s a bio-regional motif quite often. You use panoramic large format view cameras that include a 7 x 17 in. format Folmer & Schwing Banquet Camera from the 1920s and more recently a camera made by Ron Wisner of the Wisner Camera Company in Marion, Massachusetts.  Your close to being a photo-anthropologist hunting down clues to the intertwining of the natural and cultural, and constantly changing landmarks – both natural and cultural – in the Maritimes. Abandoned buildings and structures, beatifically reclaimed by nature, are a way of presenting the nature culture paradigm where a disappearing elegance combines with nature’s beauty. Nowhere is the material as rich as Canada’s east coast….

TH: In 1977, as a young artist I relocated to New Brunswick from Toronto. I found the life in a rural environment much more inspirational.

JKG: And the Tantramar Marshes near your home records a meeting place of land and sea.

TH: I think of the subtlety of that space and the fact that the marshes in their permanent state, exist only because of the human intervention of building the dykes to hold back the Fundy tides, thus creating this essentially human-made landscape. Then the subtle changes of the impermanence of someone coming and working the land, growing hay and building barns to house the square bales of the time… and how the tides can come and eliminate it, or alter it, or make it disappear. Now under threat of rising sea levels due to global warming the challenges of maintaining the dykes may be insurmountable. It may all return to being a salt marsh.

Northern Harrier (from the series Ova Aves), 2011

JKG: The photos in your book and show Ova Aves juxtaposed with Harry Thurston’s poetry expose design endemic to nature and capture a camouflage character common to many natural species, and forms… I believe Gay Hansen, your life companion, recently deceased, helped grow your interest in 0rnithology and the natural world.

TH: Yes. Gay Hansen was a lecturer and lab instructor in the Biology department at Mount Allison University for 39 years. She spent a lot of time with students of all academic abilities, inspiring them to find their voice in the study of the natural world. She made things real for people, evident in her bird collection housed in the newly dedicated Gay Hansen Ornithology Laboratory. She was, over our 41 years together my mentor, teacher, collaborator and guide to so much of the natural world which has been a consistent thread in my photography. I always admired the bird egg collection in her lab and wanted to do something about time and space… Each bird egg has a unique marking, much like a finger-print. These photographs were then given to my friend, poet and collaborator Harry Thurston who wrote wonderful responses based on the species of each bird.

JKG: A response to environment and geo-specifics?

TH: Exactly. The book format allows me to create a structure to integrate something beyond making a catalogue of my work. There is something timeless and energetic about a true literary and visual art collaboration.

Cape St. Mary’s, Newfoundland, 1989

JKG: Icarus; A Falling of Birds refers to Icarus, the son of Daedalus who in seeking to escape flies too close the sun, and the wax that bonds his wings melts, hence he drowns. As a fable of humans’ over-reach of their limits, it suits your project, for these birds fell due to the effects of human-created gases.

TH: I see Icarus as a companion piece to the Ova Ave project. It brought together the same collaborators. My partner Gay Hansen was tasked with the unpleasant task of sorting through garbage bags filled with dead birds. The result of an overwhelming and tragic bird kill due to the folly of big business. A Liquid Natural Gas plant in Saint John, New Brunswick was burning off gases during low cloud cover and during fall migration. The flame drew thousands of migrating songbirds mostly warblers to their death. Some were killed instantly, others suffered in various ways. The whole event was a traumatic event for all those biologists and others that had to collect the dead and dying birds and identify them. The whole thing was in the courts for a couple of years. Once the company was found guilty and paid their fines the birds were no longer held as evidence and Harry Thurston and I were able to gain access and bring our creative sensibilities to them. Not a pleasant experience handling so many corpses.

Blueberry Burn, Machais, Maine.

JKG: An American highway for instance will blast the hell out of a rockscape along a highway and install netting over it – nothing natural remains. A presumption is: “You might win against nature for a while, but nature wins in the end.”. There is a distancing from the immediacy of landscape elements that is truly environmental.  Your photography is less about the object or even the subject, more like being a persistent witness to change and capturing its gradual processes.

TH: Architecture in a landscape context interests me greatly.  I have been working on a project since 1978 titled Stations: Irving Architectural Landscapes. It takes on the gas station as an important element in the rural landscape of the Maritimes.

Gambo River, Newfoundland, 1998

JKG: Yours is an ever-changing view of what is or can be vernacular. Your photography is a constant reminder of the difference between sense and perception, what Henry David Thoreau clearly stated when he said, “The question is not what you look at but what you see”. And so there is this spiritual or deeper reading implicit in your photographs. What is real is not necessarily what appears as real. The Irving gas stations are a case in point. Irving had a long-standing monopoly in New Brunswick on gas and natural resources. Your documents capture how truly pervasive the Irving’s handle on the east coast was.

TH: I guess it is an honoring of something that happens, and it is not necessarily noticed. I am working from a Maritime standpoint. Over a 30 -year period I captured photographs dealing with visual elements of the marketing of gas and services. It just seems to me that politically and economically the Irving’s created something that was unique to architecture and to communities in the Atlantic region. That completely changed due to the economics of selling gas, so you lost the model of the rural service bay gas station and you went to the model of the convenience store/restaurant within the confines of the gas station. Over the extended period of time that I have been photographing this… most of the architecture changed and, in many cases, no longer exists.

Irving Station, New Ross, Nova Scotia, 1989

JKG: You are conscious that there is an organization in the chaos of the photo. I sense your approach is more environmental than focussed on the object whether landscape or architecture. Looking at one of John Constable’s sketchbooks and seeing one of his drawings of a fir tree on Hampstead Heath, the poet William Blake exclaimed, “Why, this is not a drawing, but inspiration.”  Artists, in each and every way, embody a spirit of transformation through their art work, and trees embody a process of transformation. Your process as a photographer contribute to our envisioning ourselves as part of a living ecosystem. Nature’s theatre is subtle and spectacular in remarkable ways.

TH: With my photography I think mostly in terms of the place and the content. The camera deals with a landscape orientation – horizontal – so place is very important. The second thing is the fact that a large format camera can take the detail of that situation and heighten it for you in the print. So even when you are there, you don’t necessarily engage in all the structures and elements the same way as when you are looking at a photograph on a wall with everything else absent. I think your heightened awareness in response to an image is engaged with a photograph that has an exquisite amount of information in it.

JKG: Can you tell me something of your photo works that exist in series?

TH: I was in an exhibition in Hamburg, Germany called Monet’s Legacy: Series, Order and Obsession that started from the thesis that many artists work with the strategy of the Series. It started with Claude Monet’s Haystack paintings and Waterloo Bridge series and moved through to the present… including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Alexei von Jawlensky Walter De Maria, Vanessa Beecroft, Carl Andre, Josef Albers, Piet Mondrian, photography included Bernd and Hilda Bêcher, Cindy Sherman, Gerhard Richter, Roni Horn, Ed Ruscha and a few others. I exhibited three series in that show: Rockland Bridge (1981-2000), sixteen photographs taken from the same camera position of the same bridge ruins. The title references a bridge however the subject is just the remaining pilings and their demise through the series over a twenty-year period. The tide is moving in and out, and one senses the power of the Bay of Fundy… the ice, seasons and so on; Jolicure Pond (1996-2000), nine photographs taken of a pond in a landscape, again a man-made artificial structure. This work deals with the changing light and the pond as a mirror into the emotional element one might derive from observing a single land form over a period of time. Headlighting (1974-1978), the final of the three consists of portraits of people with their cars that collectively represent industry juxtaposed with humanity.

Rockland Bridge, Upper Dorchester New Brunswick, 1981

Shelter, Jolicure New Brunswick, 1993

JKG: Books are an exhibition that lasts in a way. Arborealis documented a wild section of Gros Morne National Park, on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula. In this case the photography became a point of departure for Peter Sanger’s poems drawn from his experience of living and working in the region. In a way you document not just this remarkable bio-region, but the way landscapes are places linked to a collective cultural imagination.

TH: I did a lot of this work in the Trout River Gulch, while on an artist residency at Gros Morne National Park. I was interested in this place that exists in very changing and sometimes harsh weather conditions. Nature adapts to those conditions remarkably. The trees I documented have lived hundreds of years and are only a few feet tall. This is a really hostile environment. Nature survives but morphs into really interesting forms.

Trout River Gulch, Newfoundland 2002

The other part of the series is looking at the people who live there through the architecture of the place. It is coupled with the writings of Peter Sanger, who collaborated on an earlier book project Ironworks inspired by a collection of blacksmith made objects.

Trout River Gulch, Newfoundland 2002 (from the series Tree Calligraphy)

JKG: You capture an east coast very much changed from its past glory. Here we have a region in a state of change. The landscape or the buildings, vernacular artefacts, are all presented with a serenity, even an inevitability. The land and the people, the buildings, are a theatre replete with human-built structures superimposed on them. Do you see the landscape as a medium, we are part of, an ever-changing place we participate in? Culture and nature are, it seems in perpetual exchange in your photos.  What are your thoughts on this?

TH: I feel … to use your phrase “We are part of an ever-changing place we participate in.”

In the Maritimes, a place I have made home and where I have made the majority of my work, we have not experienced the boom and bust and the inflated costs of housing until very recently. Consequently, change arrives slowly.  Mine is a considered observation over time – sometimes over decades of observing the change and our relationship with the natural and the human built. I am drawn to the mundane to find poetry.

JKG: Many thanks for sharing some insight into some of the many projects and subjects from your life and ongoing photography Thaddeus.

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https://holownia.com/

http://www.johnkgrande.com/

All images copyright and courtesy of Thaddeus Holownia.

Art, Creativity, Ecology, Environment, Sculpture