Becka Viau's "Young Farmers"

Becka Viau, "Kyle Jewell, Cornwall, P.E.I." (2009)

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Becka Viau’s great Young Farmers project, a series of fourteen large, color portraits, each a frontal encounter with a young person in a farm setting. Also included is an audio piece combining the voices of her subjects talking about farming and their hopes for the future. The project was carried out in late 2008, early 2009, and first exhibited at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, April – May, 2009, and then in August, 2009, at Charlottetown’s Old Home Week Exhibition. It’s currently on view at beckaviau.com. 

Young Farmers is notable for the natural look of its portraits. Often when subjects face the camera they’ll alter their self-presentation. But Viau’s young farmers seem to gaze at the lens matter-of-factly, straightforwardly, unselfconsciously. They appear not so much to be posing as just being themselves. 

How did Viau accomplish such a natural look? The key seems to be the interview she conducted with each subject before she photographed him/her. She told me, “I interviewed them first. So they had a basic idea of what I had in mind. But there really wasn't any collaboration; we just rolled with it. I would pick a good spot or location on the farm and they would then stand as they normally do, just in that space. I wanted them to be unposed.”

Another key to Viau’s approach was her use of whatever light happened to be available at the scene. She didn’t use a flash or any other form of photographic lighting. In a sense, the light she used was “natural”; it’s what was there in the sheds, barns, and pens – whether it’s window light (“Carson Smith,” “Sarah Greenan,” “Soleil Hutchinson”), florescent tubes (“Kyle Jewell”), naked light bulb (“Mark Bernard,” “Nelson Smith”), a heat lamp reflecting off a feeder (“Mathias Drake”), or outdoor winter sun (“Ryan Weeks”) – where she took the pictures. No one would describe the light in these photos as radiant, dazzling, or golden. But it is distinctive. 

Look at “Kyle Jewell,” for example. The lighting is florescent. The light source is visible – florescent rods on the ceiling. The light is white. You can see it spread out on the ceiling around the rods. The light irradiates the whitewashed shed. It illuminates the cattle – predominantly white, with contrasting black patches. The dominant colors are white, off-white, and the cream-yellow of the sawdust-strewn floor.  

A third key to Viau’s naturalism is her use of the actual rooms and spaces in which her subjects live and work. Again, she appears to have used whatever conditions she found present when she arrived with her camera. She didn’t alter the scene. One of her subjects, Soleil Hutchinson, told me that she asked Viau whether she wanted her to move her vacuum cleaner so it wouldn’t be in the picture. Viau said no, don’t change a thing. And so the vacuum cleaner remains where it will forever exist, in the corner behind the chair, amidst the many other quotidian details that compose this arresting photograph: laptop, coffee mug, wine bottle candle holders, greeting cards on the windowsill, light-flooded window, raspberry-colored curtain, and – most significantly – the “New Farmers Gathering” poster.

Looking and looking at these superb Young Farmers portraits, I always feel I’ve only begun to look.