Saskatchewan Book: Photographs by George Webber

An evocative collection of contemporary photography that shines a light on the charm and disintegration of small towns in Saskatchewan.

Captured over 30 years, the 200 images in this finely wrought exhibition document prairie landscapes and rural structures like no other in recent memory. With skill, sensitivity, and a renowned eye for detail, documentary photographer George Webber once again transports the viewer with his lens across time, geography, and history.

Bright colours, sun-baked facades, endless horizons, and straight edges are all beautifully haunted by the shadow of time’s inevitable decay and nature’s slow embrace of abandoned human settlements. The varying shades of prairie-blue skies can hum with optimistic vibrancy, while fists of cloud can march toward an unknowable front.

Saskatchewan Book shows us that small prairie towns remain beacons of affection and bastions of memory, all the while succumbing to the enigmatic fate that eventually enfolds all living things.

George Webber is a renowned documentary photographer whose previous collections with Rocky Mountain Books include Prairie Gothic, Last Call, Badlands, and Alberta Book. He is the recipient of numerous National Magazine Awards (Canada), two Awards of Excellence from the Society for News Design (USA), and an International Documentary Photography Award (Korea). His images have been featured in American Photo, Canadian Geographic, Lenswork Quarterly, Photolife, The New York Times and Swerve magazine. In 1999 he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in recognition of his contributions to the visual arts in Canada. George Webber lives in Calgary, Alberta.

An Officer of the Order of Canada, Lorna Crozier has been acknowledged for her contributions to Canadian literature, her teaching and her mentoring with five honourary doctorates, most recently from McGill and Simon Fraser Universities. Her books have received numerous national awards, including the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry. The Globe and Mail declared The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things one of its Top 100 Books of the Year, and Amazon chose her memoir as one of the 100 books you should read in your lifetime. A Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, she has performed for Queen Elizabeth II and has read her poetry, which has been translated into several languages, on every continent except Antarctica. In 2018, Lorna Crozier received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives on Vancouver Island.