Bill Reid and the Haida Canoe

By Sana Sohel

Snugly nestled behind Vancouver buildings and overlooking a beautiful garden is the exquisite and unique Bill Reid Gallery.

Currently, it is home to the lively and stimulating photographs depicting the making of the “elegant traditional Northern-style sea-going canoe” photographed by the renowned and talented photographers Robert Semeniuk and Phil Hersee.

The influence of Bill Reid’s art on Vancouver culture is omnipresent, starting from the Vancouver International Airport (YVR). In-fact, if you flip over your twenty-dollar bill, some of his famous pieces will intently stare back at you.

So one can imagine the excitement Semeniuk and Hersee felt at photographing Reid and fellow carvers’ work on the Haida Canoe project.

The exhibit displays the steps and stages taken to build Lootass (Wave Eater), a 51-foot-long Haida canoe that traveled 950 km along the B.C. coast to Haida Gwaii and Seine River in Paris. The Lootaas was carved from an 800-year-old cedar log – which is a marvel in itself.

“The highlight of the project was to be in the canoe, accepted by the Haida and to photograph Bill standing under the Pont Neuf Bridge in Paris,” says Hersee.

“He treasured that moment of bringing the Haida and the Lootaas to Paris for the exhibition at the Musée de l’Homme with his friend Claude Levi-Strauss.”

According to the website, “Bill Reid and the Haida Canoe conveys the pivotal role of the canoe in Northwest Coast art, cultures and communities.” For Reid, “the canoe was more than a means of transportation; it was art,” and that it “played a generic role in the evolution of Northwest Coast art.”

“The big thing for me, of course, was meeting Bill and hanging out with him. He actually taught me to how to carve, so since then I’ve been making masks,” Semeniuk expresses enthusiastically.

“He gave me a piece of wood and said, ‘Here, carve this,’ and I made a spoon! Then I started making a mask that I worked on for two years. He actually drew the mask for me and I carved it. Since then, I’ve carved about fifteen masks.”

Hired under a contract by a publisher for a book that never materialized, Semeniuk exclaims, “oh, I jumped at the opportunity.”

Hersee, too, knew that he had to go “capture those valuable moments.”

“My feelings were one of being a part of a new family that had a real purpose and a story to tell the world,” says Hersee.

Though their photographs have distinct differences, each image has an intensity that draws the viewer in to experience the zeal of the moments, as if they were happening right then and there.  While Semeniuk captures the building of the canoe from start to finish, Hersee photographs the canoes journey in Paris.

“Good photographs come from putting in time. There is no magic in them. I try to move away from the stereotypical and instead I like to photograph extraordinary pictures of ordinary things,” Semeniuk explains

“My photography style is just real and eclectic. Images that capture the mood of the subject you believe in and the value of being there is what creates good images,” Hersee says.

When asked about why he chose to work on the project, Hersee commented that “they were like a big family and it was just by hard work and wanting to cover the event that I was accepted. I took on the project to have these valuable images to show the world that the art of the Haida was accepted very well in Paris – something that had not happened for over` a 1000 years.”

The exhibition runs until Jan. 8 2012 at the Bill Reid Gallery