CBC Radio, Ottawa Morning, Feb 3, 2012 |
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Festival X, Ottawa, October 2010 |
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Media Coverage: Louis Helbig
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CBC Radio Ottawa Morning (February 3, 2012)
The Oilsands as Art: Alberta's oilsands have been described as dirty, booming and big. But Ottawa-based aerial photographer Louis Helbig's latest exhibit, Beautiful Destruction shows them from a different viewpoint: through the lense of a camera one thousand feet up.
Ottawa Morning guest host Amanda Pfeffer interviews Louis Helbig about the new "Beautiful Destruction Alberta Tar Sands" exhibition running Feb 2 - April 12, 2012 at the Corridor and Chambers' Galleries in Almonte, ON.
The Millstone, February 2, 2012
Artist Louis Helbig - Beautiful Destruction - Aerial photography on display at Mississippi Mills February 2 - April 12, 2012
Louis Helbig describes himself as an accidental artist. Raised in Williams Lake B.C., and with an M.Sc in Economic History from the London School of Economics, he was working for the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa when he was offered a promotion ... more, including exhibition schedule and images
Citytv, Thursday, January 5, 2012
Breakfast Television Edmonton with Ryan Jespersen
Beautiful Destruction
The oilsands are a subject for tireless debate and discussion. But as debates are getting increasingly polarized, are civil, balanced discussions slipping away?
CTV TV, Sunday, November 20, 2011
Regional Contact with Joel Haslam
Aerial Art - Louis Helbig
When it comes to photography, Louis Helbig prefers a birds-eye view. He takes pictures through the window of his 1946 Luscombe, a two-seater airplane which he flies above Canada's vast landscape. The award-winning photographer produces large format images of a variety of subject matter relating to history, nature, recreation and the environment. His limited edition prints are available to purchase. Louis continues to host public speaking engagements and exhibitions across the country.
See the 12 minutes documentary on CTV's website
HGTV TV, Tuesday, November 23, 2011
Sarah's House with Sarah Richardson and Tommy Smythe
Season 4 Episode 12 Rec Room
Beach Volleyball Tournament and Camaros Less N40 and N42 were featured in Sarah's House HGTV's reality home renovation show. The framed prints were provided courtesy of Canvas Gallery in Toronto.
See the episode (to zip to the clip featuring Louis Helbig's work click on 15:00 minutes)
Ottawa Outdoors Magazine, Fall 2011
The Sunken Villages Story
In parntership with Canadian Wildlife Federation come see Louis Helbig exhibiting "Canada's Altantis: Sunken Villages in the St Lawrence River in Ottawa at Francecos (857 Bank) Sept 30 - Nov 1, 2011.
The Sunken Villages Story July 1, 1958 is remembered as Inundation Day in the Cornwall, Ontario area. At 08:00 a controlled explosion tore open a coffer dam and four days later an area that had once been home to over 6,500 people in 7 villages and 3 hamlets - some dating back to the 1700s - disappeared under the waves of Lake St. Lawrence, part of the newly created St Lawrence Seaway.
A feat of unprecedented industrial accomplishment, the St Lawrence Seaway, was the largest industrial project of its time. It eliminated the massive Long Sault Rapids to generate hydro-power and open the Great Lakes to ocean-going vessels. Completed in only four years it was a source of great national pride. It was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth and Vice-President Nixon in 1959.
Some buildings were moved, some graves exhumed and the monument commemorating the 1813 battle of Crysler's Farm, by which Montreal was saved from American invaders, moved to higher ground. Bridges, old locks and canals were left to be buried; all else was leveled, razed to the foundations, cut to the stumps, burned and bulldozed. Except for a few bits that breach the surface, all disappeared under the murky water of the St Lawrence River. Until today.
The zebra mussel made this art exhibition possible. In the past few years the water has become crystal clear and the Sunken Villages have reemerged, visible once again. Ottawa Outdoors Magazine
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National Post, Friday May 27, 2011
full page article in AVENUE Section
A River Runs Over It, Photographer takes to the skies to uncover St. Lawrence's 'lost' villages.
By Angela Hickman
An airplane may not seem like the most obvious place from which to photograph underwater foundations, but for photographer Louis Helbig, being 1,000 feet above his subjects is the perfect vantage point.
Helbig started flying 12 years ago, and shoots his photos out the window of his 1946 Luscombe, a little two-seater. When he first encountered a group of sunken villages along the St. Lawrence River, Helbig was heading back from Cornwall, Ont., where he had planned to photograph a First Nations’ barricade — a shoot he says didn’t work from the air. Empty-handed, Helbig was taking his time as he flew back home to Ottawa, when suddenly something caught his eye.
“In my peripheral vision, on the side, I saw a house,” he says. “And I thought ‘What’s a house doing here, in the water?’ And then I had to do a double take.”
That house led Helbig to discover entire villages that were levelled, burned, razed to the foundations and flooded to make way for the St. Lawrence Seaway, a major industrial project that opened in 1959. Fifty year later, the previously murky water was completely clear thanks to the work of zebra mussels, making the “lost” communities the perfect candidates for Helbig’s aerial photography, now on display as part of Toronto’s CONTACT Photography Festival.
Because the buildings were removed in preparation for the Seaway flooding, Helbig’s photos have a surreal, two-dimensional quality to them, and due to the varying levels of colour, it can feel like you’re looking at an up-close etching of a shipwreck rather than at an aerial view of an old dairy barn’s foundation.
“I think that’s the power of doing this kind of work from the air … you can really muck around with perspective,” Helbig says. “So many of the cues that we might otherwise have, such as a horizon or other things that would tend to tell us how big something is, are removed, and that adds to the disorientation that occurs.”
In the year following his first sighting of the villages, Helbig flew to the area eight times to photograph the foundations, church yards, roads and locks that lay crystal-clear below the water of St. Lawrence. The flooding covered seven villages and three hamlets, displacing about 6,500 people, and the enormity of that history almost overwhelmed Helbig.
“When I left that museum [Lost Villages Historical Society] I felt that I couldn’t do justice to all that was there,” says Helbig, who is a trained historian. “I sort of had a brainwave in the next hour or so when I realized, you know what, I don’t need to try to put it all together; what I need to do is put something up that draws forth the stories from people, whatever those might be.”
Beautiful Destruction, Helbig’s previous large-scale aerial photography exhibit about the Alberta tar sands, did just that; people were intrigued by the photos and excited to talk about them. Helbig hopes the same thing will happen with his new Sunken Villages exhibit, and would like to present the photos again, alongside stories and memories from people connected to the lost communities.
The Seaway project, says Helbig, “was the biggest industrial project of its time … and nowadays what’s going on in Alberta is the biggest industrial project, possibly in the world.”
But, Helbig adds, there’s more to his photos than industry and a changing landscape; there are cultural and personal implications as well. “It reaches into something else.”
Sunken Villages is on display at Toronto’s Canvas Gallery until May 28, when Helbig will host a talk about the exhibition starting at 2 p.m. For more information, visit sunkenvillages.ca.
Read the original.
CBC TV News Ottawa Late Night, April 7, 2011
News Anchor Adrian Harewood
"For our Night Cap we visited an art exhibition in the city tonight. These stunning aerial photos were taken by local photographer Louis Helbig. If you want to get a closer look at his pictures they will be on display at the Shanghai Restaurant on Somerest Street in Chinatown until May 7th."
To see the news clip of the exhibition click here and go to the end of the newscast.
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Ottawa Magazine: The 2011 Interiors Edition (February, 2011)
Feature: The Way I See It, by Paul Gessell, Photos by Tony Fouhse
Award-winning photographer Tony Fouhse takes portraits of the five other local photographic artists whose work inspires us.
THE AERIALIST LOUIS HELBIG BORN: TORONTO, 1964
BACKGROUND: As a child in Williams Lake, B.C., Helbig developed many passions – including photography, with an old Voigtlander bellows camera, and flying, alongside his pilot father in a 1946 wood and fabric Aeronca Chief. As an adult, Helbig felt stifled at the Department of Foreign Affairs. He fled the bureaucracy in 2006 and pursued a career in fine-art aerial photography.
GREATEST HITS: Even the New York Times took notice of Helbig’s Beautiful Destruction series about the Alberta oil sands. The abstract-looking aerial views were exhibited at Ottawa City Hall last year.
INSIPRATIONS: Helbig’s ability to create beauty is often compared to that of Canadian superstar photographer Ed Burtynsky. But Helbig says he was most inspired by another Canadian legend, Freeman Patterson, old copies of Magnum photography books, and the author John Updike (“He painted pictures with words.”)
HIS WORKS: Helbig largely sells to individuals. This year his line up of exhibitions includes a show at Exposure Gallery in Ottawa (which runs until March 15), at Canvas Gallery in Toronto (in May) and, at a time yet to be fixed, COEXIST Gallery in Tokyo and Muszeum Historii Fotografii in Krakow, Poland. Current projects include aerial views of villages flooded in 1958 by the St. Lawrence Seaway project and, some day, Arctic scenes. See the website www.louishelbig.com.
Note: other featured photographers included: Justin Wonnacott, Jennifer Dickson, Geneviève Thauvette, and Darren Holmes.
Link to Ottawa Magazine's Sarah Brown's Letter from the Editor.
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Ottawa Citizen (January 27, 2011) View from Above: Bush-pilot artist transforms landscapes into gorgeous abstractions, by Peter Simpson.
Who knows what adventure lurks in the hearts of mild civil servants? Louis Helbig had a career in the federal public service, and with NGOs or other policy groups, but beneath the ordinary life of Ottawa was a taste for nature, for the outdoors. Helbig expressed it in vigorous ways; he was a member of Canada's national cross-country ski team, and he was a bush pilot. And now, five years after leaving the public service, he is reaching great heights — literally — as a photographer of our landscape.
Helbig, a B.C. native with a degree from the London School of Economics, pilots his own vintage aircraft around Central Ontario and Quebec. He shoots photographs from 1,000-or-so feet up, and the results are intriguing, and often beautiful.
"Removing context provokes wonder, thought and reflection," it says on the artist's statement posted to the wall of Exposure Gallery in Wellington West, where Helbig's new exhibition, Aerial Abstractions, now hangs.
That bit about removing the context is key, for it leads you to see the land, and the things upon it, in ways that are different, and unusual. "It's the mystery, or questions that I want people to ask," Helbig says. "What is it? How did you do that?"
We're standing before a sequence of photos of ice breaking up in the Ottawa River, between Gatineau and Orléans. It looks like a long sequence of ice slowly breaking up, as if Helbig flew over time and time again, but in fact it's essentially the same scene shot in quick sequence as Helbig's plane made one pass. He explains, and still it takes me a moment to comprehend that what I'm seeing is not the movement of ice, but movement of the camera.
Helbig's photos are not riddles; they are literal representations of the landscape, but in them he finds patterns, both natural and man-made, that toy with the eye of the viewer. Even when it's obvious what the image is, they prompt other images in the mind. Wave Pool and Cots is immediately obvious as precisely that, a giant wave pool and dozens of carefully arranged sun cots, all empty of people. Yet the tight horizontal crop of the photo makes me think of a Japanese fan, pulled tightly together and ready to be flicked open in a moment of drama or seduction. A pile of tailings (or something) at the Stelco Steel Mill looks exactly like a sand dollar, a curious mollusk that can be found on the beaches of Atlantic Canada.
Another photo, Shawville Thaw, shows a ragged band of snow across two fields. From 10 feet away, it looks like Helbig has torn a swath from the photo, exposing the white paper beneath. Only when closer do I recognize it as snow. Helbig laughs, delighted. "I would never have seen that," he says, and tells me that another gent, the day before, had seen it as a slap of white paint.
He takes great pleasure in the interpretation of viewers, what they bring to it, because he doesn't see what they see. We look at Snow Geese in Field One, which shows hundreds of mostly white geese in a green field of sod. I note that enough geese face in one direction to create a vague sense of lines of white from bottom right to top left, while their shadows create intersecting lines of black, from upper right to lower left. I have to remind myself that these patterns occurred naturally.
These shots are all taken where the seasons meet and change. Helbig goes up in his plane (a 1946 Luscombe) and looks for those places where the converging seasons create scenes that are transitory, "foreign," as he puts it.
The images do seem foreign, and then they become familiar. Context removed, wonder provoked.
Aerial Abstractions
What: Photographs by Louis Helbig
When & where: Exposure Gallery, above Thyme & Again at 1255 Wellington St. W., to March 15
See some photos and read online article
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Live 88.5 (Nov 8, 2010), Interview on the Live 88.5 Startup in Ottawa, ON.
Interview with Katfish Morgan with and the Live 88.5 Start Up morning show crew's Amal Wahab and David Schellenburg.
Metro (Ottawa), Oct 12, 2010. Metro Minute with Louis Helbig. Tracey Tong.
"Ottawa-based artist and aerial photographer Louis Helbig will discuss his latest work, entitled Beautiful Destruction: Alberta Tar Sands Aerial Photographs at the RA Photo Club at 7:30 p.m. today. Originally photographed in August 2008, images from this project are now being exhibited and published internationally, as well as being sold as limited edition prints. More than 10,000 people saw the exhibit when it ran at the Ottawa City Hall Public Gallery this summer. Helbig will discuss different aspects of Beautiful Destruction, ranging from the creative to the political"
X Festival Ottawa Photography Festival, Oct 1, 2010. IN/OUT: Reading Images at X 2010. Response Essay written by Curator Melissa Rombout. Excerpt paragraph on Louis Helbig's Beautiful Destruction Exhibition at Ottawa City Hall as part of Festival X.
Louis Helbig's 2008 excursion with his partner Kristin Reimer to the Alberta Tar Sands has yielded a series of aerial photographic abstractions that belie the very specific marred terrains they depict. Taken from a vintage 1946 Luscombe monoplane, the resulting images at first glance draw immediate comparison to the mid- to late- 20th century urban abstractions of American photographer Aaron Siskind. Like Siskind, the detailed minutiae of a specific place (here) ostensibly objectively given by photographic evidence rendered by the machine lens are contested and eventually superseded in our sensory beholding to the aesthetic concerns of form and colour, composition and balance (nowhere). Residual Bitumen, for example, appears as a lyrical curving surface: it is only through the title, which includes the global positioning system coordinates, that we understand that the subject of the photograph is the trace of viscous crude oil left behind by the petroleum industry. As a cultural object, the dialectic of beauty/ugly, the beauty of the image itself versus the ugliness of its polluted composition, slams into another conflation of binaries extremely familiar in the history of photographies, namely, the uneasy shapeshifting of images between their function as social or scientific evidence and their assigned role as aesthetic objects. Helbig activates all these uncomfortable dualities and leaves them unresolved; and we, the beholders, are likewise unable to "fix" these images into a stable and unified interpretation.
Full essay here. FestivalX.ca
Ottawa Citizen (Sept 22, 2010) Full Exposure: 10 Picks from the X Photo Festival, by Peter Simpson.
"Beautiful Destruction: Louis Helbig's aerial photographs of the Alberta Tar Sands, right, will bring to mind the work of Edward Burtynsky, though Helbig seems less focused on industrial degradation and more interested in naturally occurring (so to speak) and esthetically appealing patterns. His photo of oil run off held by floating booms in muddy water looks like the wings of giant birds, swooping gracefully."
The McGill Daily (Sept. 16, 2010) Bitumen Beautiful, Aerial Photographs show another side of the Alberta Tar Sands, Seble Gameda
Crumbling earth, oil, and toxic water encapsulated within the faulty restraints of a tailings pond, unfathomable magnitudes of bitumen, rich hues of poison, piles of sulfur, heavy metals gushing out of a metal pipe. All this portrayed as beauty? Combining both his talents as photographer and pilot, Louis Helbig has created "Beautiful Destruction"a photo exhibit featuring aerial photographs of Alberta's Tar Sands, currently showing in Ottawa. Helbig's exhibit offers emotionally conflicting images that oscillate between the beauty of the visual and the atrocity of the large-scale industrial project. This, he explains, is the result of his effort to delve into more serious subject matter. "While it's nice to take pretty pictures I wanted to do something that was more politically compelling, more topical."
Helbig's photos deliberately blend the lines between reality and artistry. In his photos, the residual bitumen is confused with a painter's brushstroke, and an alluvial fan laden with oil is mistaken for the shimmering roots of an ancient tree. The swirling shades of copper mix with the blue tinge of oily waters, reflecting a late summer's sunset. The viewer is dizzied into a fantasy world of dreamy hues and glistening colours; photographs become nearly impossible to identify from their true form. "It seems to engage people. They get drawn into the art as well as the aesthetic and then it opens a place to think about, to reflect and to identify with the imagery, however they might do that," said Helbig.
But the massive scale of this environmentally devastating endeavour shakes us from this dream world. The sheer extent of the industrial project becomes undeniable. A Greyhound bus is dwarfed by the immensity of a tailings pond, the Tonka trucks tearing up the boreal forest appear minute, a lone sailor is unidentifiable in a sea of oil, and a sound cannon (used as noise pollution to deter migratory birds) is dwarfed against the immense backdrop of bitumen slick.
"What I find most compelling is what the whole project says about Canada, and Canadian institutions. It's a bit of a deja-vu in terms of natural resource exploitation," noted Helbig, citing the depletion of cod fisheries in Newfoundland as an example. Helbig's photographs also resonate with the number of social issues inherent with the project, including the housing conditions of the numerous migrant workers and the artificial landscapes that are created around these areas.
Helbig's exhibit colourfully aestheticizes the tar sands project, while still vividly portraying the environmental destruction the tar sands project has caused. A photo of a misty evening near Fort McMurray captures the serene beauty that is the boreal forest, evoking an honest and sincere depiction of the land. This is contrasted with the horrific scenes of open-pit mining that take place once the so-called "over-burden" is removed. In this way, Helbig plays with the senses to truly engage the viewer. "The purpose of the exhibit is to have people reflect and think and that is way more powerful," said Helbig. "That reflection, that philosophical space or imaginative space or emotional space, that speaks to us as individuals, as a community, our human spirit, and that's really powerful."
Ethical Consumer (UK) (September/October, 2010) Louis Helbig's Destruction from above (two page photo essay).
Louis Helbig’s striking images offer a new perspective on the environmental disaster that is the Canadian tar sands.
These incredible images were captured by self-taught Canadian aerial photographic artist Louis Helbig, during a journey across Canada in an antique aircraft with his partner in 2008.
Teetering between documentary and abstract, Helbig’s photographs of the Canadian tar sands reveal something more about this environmental scandal than words ever could. Helbig’s imagery is often complex and contradictory. He has been both commended and criticized for how he depicts his subjects, finding beauty in the mundane as well as the controversial.
Helbig considers the visual images to speak truth to power in Northern Alberta. The tar sands and their development seem suspended in a web of misinformation, half-truths, spin and outright deceit as different parties with various points of view and vested interests attempt to manipulate public opinion. Our problem might, in the end, not be that the tar sands are good, bad or ugly, but that they are allowed tooccur essentially without real examination or substantive debate.
Voir (Gatineau et Ottawa), Aug 19, 2010. Katy Le Van.
L'exposition de Louis Helbig, à la Galerie d'art de l'hôtel de ville d'Ottawa, est étrange. À l'entrée, la photographie intitulée Highway 63 Bitman Slick montre, au dire du panneau explicatif placé quelques mètres plus loin, un voile de bitume résiduel s'élevant au-dessus d'un autobus. L'épreuve surprend d'abord par l'actualité de sa thématique, soit les sables bitumineux, mais aussi par sa perspective presque surréelle, et qui place le témoin devant des détails qui lui sont étrangers.
L'autre épreuve qui l'accueille: Alluvial Fan, une grosse masse dorée, brillante, texturée à souhait, et qu'il jurerait pouvoir toucher. Aussi attirante que de l'or.
Le parcours se poursuit. Residual Bitume laisse perplexe (le goudron arbore-t-il vraiment cette franche couleur bleue?), tandis que des prises de vue aériennes de paysages industriels font voir l'immensité prodigieuse de l'entreprise pétrolière albertaine. Le tout reste à la surface du sujet, la photographie jouant le rôle d'un écran protecteur qui, tout en documentant, épargne de la réalité tangible de ces lieux: l'odeur âpre du goudron, la pesanteur de l'air, les nuages de poussière...
La pièce la plus saisissante, au détour d'un mur: Tonka Trucks, dont l'éclairage matinal révèle cinq camions à benne affairés au prélèvement du bitume minier. Vus de loin, minuscules comme des babioles d'enfants, c'est à travers eux que le spectateur comprend, thématique et titre de l'exposition en tête (Beauté et destruction), que le jeu est certainement dangereux.
L'artiste étant pilote d'avion professionnel, il propose au visiteur des points de vue privilégiés, et introduit un sujet dont personne, malheureusement, n'a encore fini d'entendre parler.
À voir si vous aimez / Guy Lavigueur, Bertrand Carrière www.voir.ca
Ottawa Express (August 5th, 2010) Louis Helbig's Beautiful Destruction Tar sands in the hourglass, by Adam Volk.
Aerial artist Louis Helbig finds beauty and destruction in the Alberta tar sands
Stretching out across a pockmarked wasteland of broken earth, a toxic pond glistens with shimmering blue colour, the swirling chemical patterns resembling the abstract flourishes of a painter's brush. It's one of the many images captured by Louis Helbig, an Ottawa-based photographer and pilot who took to the skies in 2008 to document the controversial and environmentally destructive tar sands projects of Northern Alberta. The results of Helbig's aerial photography are on display now at the Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery in Beautiful Destruction, a series of shocking, beautiful and surprisingly affecting images.
As for what drew the B.C.-raised artist to the unusual subject matter, Helbig says it was really about finding something that was inspiring both artistically and culturally. "I'd taken a lot of pictures of 'pretty things' and I had a desire to photograph something of a little more consequence," he says. "The tar sands seemed to be an unbelievably huge project but had very little coverage of it. Certainly there was no coverage in proportion to its size or in terms of its real-time cultural significance for our country."
And while one would expect the aerial photographs to feature dark, industrial images of blackened earth and smouldering refineries, they are in fact strangely colourful works, from the dusky orange and red hues of a spewing effluent pipe to the lush brown and earthly pastels of a toxic bitumen slick. For Helbig, however, the images capture only a fraction of the scope and power of the tar sands themselves when seen up close.
"Flying over these things was a very strange experience," he says. "It's overwhelming in its massive scale, but also overwhelming in its minutiae, with all of these different elements at play, and looking down you get this sense of inertia and movement and momentum. As an artist, I just tried to respond to the imagery as it came at me without really knowing what it was."
Given the recent BP oil spill, Helbig's work is a fitting and timely artistic reminder that raises questions about society's relationship with the environment. In this sense, Beautiful Destruction is an exhibit that dares its viewers to find meaning in images that are shocking in both their beauty and the destructive forces they so eloquently capture."
Centretown News (Ottawa) (August 5th, 2010) Beautiful destruction disturbs and enchants. Ryan Lux,
Imagine a world of swirling technicolour among unearthly vistas of an unfathomable scale, without any obvious signs of flora or fauna. While it seems like a description of a fantastic land like those of Tolkien or Star Trek, photographer Louis Helbig exposes these landscapes as those of the Canadian hinterland in Northern Alberta. His exhibition, which is now showing at the City Hall Art Gallery, consists of a series of disorienting and almost whimsical aerial photographs of the Alberta tar sands.
Helbig had never been to the tar sands when he decided to embark on this project in 2008. He says that he had seen very few images of the tar sands and deliberately kept it that way until he flew over them in the summer of 2008. "I avoided looking at images of the tar sands. I didn’t want preconceived notions of them so that I would be able to see them unfiltered,” says Helbig.
When he took off on his first flight and soared above them he says what he saw was a gargantuan and surreal place. "When you separate the issue that surrounds the tar sands they’re unbelievably beautiful, the colours that came at me were absolutely mind-boggling,” says Helbig. The first thing that came to his mind was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For Helbig flying over this bizarre, exotic landscape was very disorienting and he says that the natural thing to do is reach for some cultural touchstones to make sense of his disorientation.
To pay tribute to the surprising beauty that he found in the destruction of Northern Alberta’s once pristine Boreal forest, Helbig titled his exhibition Beautiful Destruction.
One of his motivations behind the project was the lack of substantive dialogue about the impact the tar sands is having on Canada’s environment, economy, and culture. "In Canada the debate is limited to caricatures of us vs. them, Calgary vs. Toronto, industry vs. the environment,” Helbig says. “With this exhibition I wanted to create a this space where people can reflect, relate to it, and debate it in order to get away from the stupidity.” What he finds worrisome is that the major tar sands debates are happening outside of Canada, in Europe and the U.S. and that these debates are beginning to define Canada’s international reputation.
The tar sands, says Helbig, should not be such a divisive issue because they affect all Canadians. He says what all Canadians should find disturbing is the non-critical stance of the government towards their exploitation. "Why are the industry’s message and the government’s message the same? There’s no oversight and industry gets too much run over things. When our public officials are in the pockets of industry all Canadians should be concerned,” Helbig says.
Aesthetically, Helbig’s choice of aerial photography to document the tar sands landscapes defies the imagination. “It’s a really unique way to see things. These perspectives of familiar things make you go wow!” He says the scenes disturbing beauty come from the jarring combination of colours, forms, lines, the play of oil, water and light.
That combined with the massive scale of the images provides observers with a truly surreal experience. To truly grasp the immensity of the landscapes Helbig includes miniscule points of reference that might be a dock, pumping station, boat or truck.
Beautiful Destruction will be on display at the City Hall Art Gallery until September 26. It was selected to be exhibited at the gallery by a jury of artists from the community.
Hill Times (August 2, 2010) Ottawa artist opens tar sands exhibit, By BEA VONGDOUANGCHANH
Alberta's tar sands are an "environmental disaster," but the bigger problem is Canadians' lack of interest in finding an appropriate balance between environmental stewardship and economic gain, says local Ottawa artist Louis Helbig. "The two main parties are avoiding the issue like the plague, the provincial Alberta government is acting as a shill for industry and in the environmental community it only became fashionable a.."
Business Insider (US) (July 12, 2010) Big Beautiful Photos Of Canada's Lucrative And Destructive Oil Sands, Isabelle Schafer
Canada has an oil source under its lands that is the second largest after Saudi Arabia. Its 'oil sands' in the northwest of the country, made of a mixture of sand, water and oil slick, is becoming the biggest source of crude oil imports into the U.S. in 2010, as a new report of the research group IHS shows. The first attempts to make use of this natural phenomenon were made in the 1960s, however the massive expansion of extraction facilities kicked off after 2003, with oil prices rising. But production is a risky business -- a tremendous amount of water and natural gas is used for the extraction process, and nearby boreal forests have been destroyed for open pit mining.
A Canadian artist, Louis Helbig, took aerial pictures of the area, fascinated by the power of industry. With his permission we're running a selection. More can be seen at www.beautifuldestruction.ca.
New York Times. (May 19, 2010) FREAK Shots: The Oil Sands, Freakonomics, the Hidden Side of Everything.by Stephen Dubner
"Photographer Louis Helbig has been photographing Canada's oil sands mining (featured in a Freakonomics contest last week) for several years, with fascinating results."
Toronto Futuréale (July, 2009), Contacting the Public. Louis Helbig's Beautiful Destruction. by Rochelle Grabenheimer
“Calming but confrontational, gorgeous but scary. An eye-opening look at the Canadian landscape reminiscent of Ed Burtynsky or Andreas Gursky.” - Betty, Toronto. Visitor of Beautiful Destruction Exhibit
The darkroom I entered on West Queen West was not quite like a photographer’s red light heaven nor was it like a typical West Queen West space. Yes, photographs hung for viewers to process and yes, the room was Tim Burton-esque but this room was a little different. Well-lit, crisp and unfamiliar photographs decorated the unpolished walls. Rustic and whimsical furniture cobwebbed the corners but in serene Pottery Barn neutrals. This room wasn’t faithfully dark, it was eye-open-ing and calm. It was Komo Design, home to Ottawa photographer Louis Helbig’s Beautiful Destruction exhibit of the Alberta Tar Sands’ ruin and awe. With many aerial photos displaying neutral scenes of unnerving tar ponds and mammoth construction sites, work fit in well with its surroundings.
As part of the CONTACTphotography festival, Beautiful Destruction called attention to the environmental and political arena the Tar Sands are mining in. pond bird deaths of 1600, government and business spin, Greenpeace activism and generous jobs for Canadians make the issue wholly controversial. interviewed the humble Louis Helbig to ask him about the adventures he encountered while cre-ating his work and what viewers can appreciate behind his National Geographic-like photos. by Rochelle Grabenheimer
Q: What is the beauty behind the Tar Sands?
LH: It’s a place that defies the imagination. When my partner Kristin and I flew there we were kind of dumbfounded by what we saw. For some people it reminds them of Apocalypse Now, 19th century poetry about the industrial revolution or Lord of the Rings. If you can push aside what you’re seeing, be uncritical, it’s an incredibly beautiful place.
Q: How much of yourself have you put into this project?
LH: Um, way more than I ever thought. It has become the focus of my life; it has become my most important project. I was drawn to it because it is such a big issue and I thought I had a knack for aerial/industrial photography. The Tar Sands are a big thing, it’s the biggest thing in Canada. It’s the biggest construction project in the world, it’s changing our country. Before I went there I tried to avoid reading about it, seeing other pictures, tried to avoid preconceptions. Just wanted to absorb it, photograph it for what it is visually, with an open mind. After I’d taken the photographs I tried to fill in the gaps; address my ignorance of what I pho-tographed. So that’s also been a part of the process, to sit and research, read, look things up on the internet, talk to people and figure out what I was looking at. Just what is that thing I’m looking at, is that a tar pond, an upgrader, an open pit mine? What does it mean?
Another thing people find puzzling is that I’m not really absolutely against what’s going on up there. I’m from a small town out in B.C. and my father had a logging truck, if I was dead set against what’s going on up there I would be a hypocrite, I think. What bothers me profoundly about what’s going on up there is that we aren’t talking about it. What we do have is spin about the Tar Sands development that is manufactured by communication types on the industry and government side as well as from the envi-ronmental movement. Tied in with that, a little bit, the Canadian media is lazy here, they don’t really go in there and report on the story. They tend to get a quote from one side like Greenpeace and then Syncrude or Suncor. Of course they say two things that are diametrically opposed and get two easy sides of the story but the context, the substance of the story is missing. We’re not taking [this issue] on ourselves like a responsible democracy and that bothers me. We should have a discussion.
Q: Was flying your own antique plane to Fort McMurray [to take pictures of the Tar Sands] the original plan?
LH: Not really. The original plan was to drive out West for a wedding and rent a plane in Alberta but my partner Kristin kind of said, “But we have a plane, don’t we? We can fly out, can’t we?” It sounds exotic but the plane isn’t worth very much, in money anyway. The plane is an antique and it has a range of four or five hundred kilometres, depending. If we have a tail-wind we can get from Ottawa to Toronto in one go but if we don’t, we have to land somewhere and get gas. Once we decided to do this we had an incredible adventure. When we landed at small airports that sometimes weren’t close to town so we had to hitch-hike; [we] met lots of great people. Flying an antique plane into Fort McMurray was a little tricky because my airplane lacks a transponder. It’s a very basic plane from the 1940‘s, there’s a lot of traffic and a transponder is needed. We needed to get special permission to land there.
Q: Tell us why you produce aerial photographs?
LH: That’s one of the things I do, aerials, but I don’t think you can really capture the sense of the place, both in its magnitude and its detail on the ground, even if you’re allowed to access it [from] the ground. Apparently, the Tar Sand operators make you sign waivers if you go on site…if you take a photo on the site you’re not allowed to use them except for private use. Maybe there’s a certain level of censorship that goes on. From the air there are no restrictions.
Q: How do businesses and organizations react to your work? How do environmentalists?
LH: There’s been a positive reaction from a lot of environmental organizations. I’ve also had one of the companies call me about buying photos for an annual report, or something. But the most gratifying responses are from people I do not know, have no relationship to me who come, look at the work and respond to it. You can tell they are responding to it, you can feel their response, the honesty. It’s almost like just by looking at the pictures and…appreciat-ing the beauty of it, that people’s imagina-tions are open to what they see and then in turn, it opens them up to asking questions, filling in the blanks for themselves of what they’re seeing. People just look at it and go, “Wow, this is beautiful. How can it be so beautiful, when it’s so ugly?” It’s especially powerful with those who might not even think about these things most of the time. I try as much as possible to not be too pre-scriptive about what I say and I also try to talk about the positive sides of it, the jobs, the living people are making. There’s a great tension in the photos, in the issue.
Q: One of your concerns was that the Tar Sands was discussed by too few members of the general public. What message might you have for why people should engage in this dis-cussion and in your work?
LH: I think we have a duty as citizens to be concerned about the world around us, to be concerned about the welfare of oth-ers, the environment and public accountability. If we don’t do that, others will do it for us. I think what we have in Alberta to some great extent is two levels of govern-ment, federal and provincial that are not protecting the public good or maybe, better put, have very narrowly defined the public good. There hasn’t been any real discussion. It was a bigger issue in the American elec-tion than in our last federal election. Are we really a superpower if we don’t talk about it, take responsibility, are not transparent, are not accountable, pussy footing around the National Energy Policy and other ancient arguments from 30 years ago instead of talking about what we’re really doing now? Right now it’s the US that is defining the Tar Sands for us, banning imports of dirty oil in California, sending shock waves through the Canadian political establishment. Are we Canadians ever going to grow up?
To see and hear more about Beautiful Destruction, visit www.beautifuldestruction.ca or www.louishelbig.com
