Carole Harmon

“I write as I photograph—from islands of memory and awareness. When I photograph I absorb the scene, act instinctively as light transforms, people move, wind gusts and stills. In both early and recent photographs I have used multiple exposures to combine ideas, time, or experiences. I try to do this as witness not commentator, overlapping concerns and different realities. I work with a cascade of images given to me by family, other creatures, landscapes, world.”

An Age of Adventure

I grew up in Banff, in the Canadian Rockies. Both my father, Don Harmon, and grandfather, Byron Harmon were landscape photographers.  My grandfather’s photographs captivated me when I was a girl. Large black-and-white images of dogs and horses, people climbing mountains, packtrains fording roaring rivers, people gathered around campfires were displayed in the Harmons building, on Banff Avenue, where my Dad worked, printing his father’s black-and white negatives. They portrayed an age of adventure when the Canadian Rockies were revealing their wonders to the world, largely through the lens of my grandfathers camera.

In my teens I accompanied my father on his own photographic trips. He’d wake me at 2AM to drive to a beautiful lake for sunrise. He’d set up his camera and tripod in the pre-dawn light and then wait for the sun. We also back-packed together; he carried his bulky and heavy camera gear and I carried the food and sleeping bags. We never brought a tent; instead camped under the stars in our sleeping bags, with tarps in case of rain.

Friends Opened My Eyes

In my twenties I stopped resisting joining the family photographic business and took a two year course in Visual Communications, in photography, at the Banff Centre for the Arts. I had lived in Paris and chose Man Ray to study for a class project on historical photographers. My friend, Ed Cavell, chose my grandfather. I was astounded that Ed considered him as important as Alfred Stieglitz, or Dorothea Lang. Then, at the opening of our final exhibition, my friend, the writer and poet Jon Whyte, said to me, why don’t you do something with your grandfather’s photographs?

Preserving the Past

I misinterpreted Jon’s intent. He meant me to reflect on the past in my own work, as he was doing in his writing about his aunt and uncle, artists Catherine and Peter Whyte. Instead I took a close look at what was left of my grandfather legacy, a wooden filing cabinet of rotting paper envelopes crammed with black-and-white negatives. I decided to save them.

From Archives to Website

I am most proud of finding a home for this important collection of images which document the early twentieth century in the Canadian Rockies. They are housed in the Archives of the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, which does a fabulous job of preserving Canadian Rockies history and making it available to the public in a more accessible way than most institutions can manage. You can read more of my work with Byron Harmon’s negatives in Tintypes to Digital, in the About section of this website.

I printed an exhibition, In Mountain Light, The Photography of Byron Harmon 1906-1934, edited a book, Great Days in the Rockies, The Photography of Byron Harmon 1906-1934, attended the opening at the Whyte Museum, and then moved on with my own life, which has included co-founding a regional publishing company, Altitude Publishing Ltd., then running retail businesses in Banff. Nature Works, Wild Elements, and Harmon Gallery were variations on the mountain photography gallery + gift-shop which my grandparents first introduced in Banff in 1909.

I have been married twice and have two children. It has been a delight to introduce Stephen Hutchings, Gary Sill, and my kids, Sebastian Hutchings and Julia Hutchings, to the wonders of the Canadian Rockies wilderness.

HARMON STUDIOS

In 2012 I retired my photography to the web. I continued to offer Byron Harmon images for sale, online, but never managed to convey the scope of three generations of photographers photographing the same landscape over a century, that I had been able to explore with a physical gallery. Harmon Studios attempts to do just that. With this website I continue to scan and retouch all images but I now have orders printed by Tricera Print in Vancouver. This has freed me from production and shipping, giving me time to write the Mountain Tales Blog, and pursue my personal art projects and writing.