A THOUSAND WORDS

Sarah McPherson Blends Art and Communication in Her Photography

Photographer and Walleye contributor Sarah McPherson is fascinated by soup—film soup, that is. Film soup is a technique where analog film is soaked in liquid, creating a distressed look and altering the colours. Currently, McPherson is using the approach as part of her studies for her Master’s degree in English at Lakehead University.

“I’ve been going back to my own reserve and talking with people about the water insecurity there…there are dioxins in the water on Frog Creek in Couchiching [First Nation]. And those discussions have led me to just talking about my dad and talking about his family and his generation and how things have changed over time, and exploring people’s relationship with community and land and their food and all that sort of thing. People are so much more disconnected now,” she says. “I’m photographing the people on the land and the water, and then soaking [the film] in the contaminated water.” The chemicals in the water creates a royal blue wash over the images, she says, similar to the colour a kid would use for drawing water. In contrast, another film soup made up of wildflowers and mushrooms yielded green cloudiness on photos. One of her film soup images won first place in a 2021 cover art contest for Room magazine. Her work has also been shown at Definitely Superior Art Gallery and at Goods & Co. Market’s Co.Lab Gallery & Arts Centre, where she is resident curator.

McPherson’s parents gave her a camera in her early teens, and she really got into the art in 2014, when she was 15. “There was a number of years there where you’d be hardpressed to find me without a camera in my hand,” she says. She adds that she has a pretty bad memory: “Once I started taking photos, I realized that I found a way to document things and share memories and relationships with other people.” Her friend Riley Urquhart taught her some technical aspects, and together they founded Nefarious Film Co., a grassroots collective aimed at making the practice of film photography more accessible in Thunder Bay. McPherson is also intrigued by portraiture. “I found a love for trying to capture people as they are and reflect that kind of uniqueness that I could see.” She says what she appreciates most is the ability to capture moments and spaces that would otherwise be somewhat fleeting. “What I found key to my work is thinking of photography as language and art as language. English is so limiting, right? We only have words for so many different things, and that’s the same with every other language. Something like a photograph is going to be a lot more relatable and

a lot more cross-culturally communicative,” she says. “We all have different world views, we all have different perspectives on things. Even just between the Indigenous world view and a Western world view, there’s a lot of things to get misinterpreted. And I think photography goes a long way to kind of bridging those gaps.”