What began as fieldwork for a master’s degree decades ago turned into an exhibit featuring fantasy-like photographs for a Cochrane artist.
In the 1980s, Maureen Hills was working towards a master’s degree in biogeography and studying the impact dammed rivers have on cottonwood trees in the badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park.
“They are only found along the rivers and they require very specific conditions to regenerate, one of which is flooding,” she said. “When we start damming all the rivers, we are controlling the floods and we don’t get the big flood events they require to regenerate. They are not coming back in large numbers. This might be the last large stands of cottonwoods that we’re seeing right now.”
After taking a photography class at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, Hills returned to the small group of trees in 2010 to view them from an artist’s perspective.
“I spent four summers shooting them in Dinosaur Park,” she said. “They’re a beautiful tree. They tend to get big, gnarly and twisty branches. Just the shape of them is quite fun to photograph.”
Her black-and-white photos were on exhibit at Mount Royal University in 2011, the historic Lougheed House in Calgary in 2013 and in Canmore earlier this year.
More than 20 of the images are on display at the Sheep River Library’s art gallery in Turner Valley until the end of June.
“People have been very complimentary towards them because it is different,” she said.
Hills took the pictures using infrared film, a medium introduced to her by colleague George Webber. Webber is a Calgary documentary photographer who’s photographs of the Turner Valley Gas Plant were displayed in the Sheep River Library gallery in 2014 and his exhibition Simply Put: Vernacular Alberta featuring fading and dilapidated motels, drive-ins, gas stations, general stores and car washes at the Okotoks Art Gallery earlier this year.
“I was given some film to try from George in the darkroom in 2010,” she said. “It was something that was a fit for me. It’s quite finicky to shoot and it’s not something a lot of people pursue. You have to load it and unload it in complete darkness, otherwise you get light leaks.”
Hills said she also has to use special filters and the exposures are really long.
“You have to drag out a tripod and to compose it you have to take the filter off,” she said. “It’s not just shooting and running.”
The results that come out of Hills’ darkroom are what she calls fantasy-like.
“It tends to make the skies look black so you get nice black skies with fluffy white clouds,” she said. “It’s quite a dramatic fantasy world that it creates. It makes it look like a fantasy-type, magical world and that’s why I do it.”
Hills said many of the images were shot using a wide-angle lens.
“It’s pretty tight quarters in there,” she said. “I tried to capture the badlands in the background and the barrenness of the environment that they’re in. It’s such a dramatic change from the river to the badland topography.”
The Cochrane photographer specializes in foothills landscapes and wildlife.
“I play with just about everything,” she said. “In the winter time I do a lot of bird photography on digital. We live west of Cochrane on an acreage and we are pretty secluded here with lots of birds and wildlife.”
In the near future, Hills plans to set her focus back on trees.
“I’ve been working on other projects, but I’m planning on going back to trees this summer and looking at some of the other beautiful trees we have in Alberta,” she said. “The limber pine is an interesting tree.”
