Much of Don Emerson's photography work is symbolic and invites the viewer come to their own conclusions.
Using film cameras and a traditional darkroom, Emerson selected photos from over the decades for In Tandem, on display at the Old School House Arts Centre in Qualicum Beach. Emerson and his wife Norma combined their talents of photography and painting for a dual exhibition.
Most of the photos depict Emerson's native Northern Ireland, with and contain a good deal of religious imagery.
“I’m really reluctant to call it religious symbolism but it’s more of a spiritual quest that I have been on in recent years," he said. “A lot of people don’t quite get, like what is this? But there’s a lot of symbolism."
Emerson does not take many landscape shots and instead prefers to capture details.
One photo from In Tandem shows a double exposure of 1,000-year-old carved foundation stones of a ruined Cistercian monastery.
“I like that one, it’s my favourite," Emerson said.
Another photo that stands combines four photos superimposed into one print. Most prominent is the 200-foot tall Scrabo Tower, built in the 1850s close to the town of Newtownards. Titled 'Celtic Roots', the print has the tower grow up out of a seemingly massive tree trunk.
Emerson snapped a photo of the tree stump in a park 16 kilometres away from the tower. He also added gnarled tree branches as a background to give it an overall spooky feel.
'Giant's Ring, Ireland' shows a huge rock dolmen, a mesolithic burial chamber sometimes called a druid's altar. Its title comes from the fact that it sits in the middle of a burial ring. Just over the horizon is Belfast, Emerson said.
"A lot of these images have got personal memories for me," he said. "The day I took this picture I was with my mum and my daughter and it was raining very, very heavily and we sheltered — you can sort of crawl in there. It was a perfect shelter."
Almost all the photographs are in black in white, with the exception of 'Release', which shows the demolition of St. Michael's Indian Residential School in Alert Bay. The school was closed in the 1970s and demolished in 2015.
Emerson, working as a school photographer at the time, was in the area on his way to Port McNeill and noticed the wrecking equipment was set up.
As he took the photo, a raven happened to fly past the partially demolished building, and created a striking image.
"This is a real bird that’s not positioned there on Photoshop," Emerson said. "It flew and I snapped it. I didn’t even see the bird coming."
The photo includes a spray painted figure of a boy wearing clerical robes and wearing an upside down crucifix.
Emerson spotted the figure on the building, around the back of the building. He decided to add it into an empty doorway.
“I thought, I can integrate that somehow," he said. “Whoever spray painted that up onto the wall, there was obviously a reason why he did it that way."
Emerson was interested in photography as hobby as a teenager, but he became more serious while he spent a decade working on offshore oil rigs as a geologist. When things were slow, he would take photos of the rigs — roughnecks covered in mud and oil and steam rising off the rigs.
Back on land, people at the oil company asked him what he did when things were slow, and when they found out he took photos, they were curious to see the results. Emerson printed off his small snapshots, but decided it was time to improve his photography skills so he could print larger, higher-quality shots.
When the oil and gas exploration industry crashed in the mid-1980s, he enrolled in a photography program at what was then the Western Pacific Academy of Photography in Victoria.
He made a living as a school photographer for 30 years, but always kept progressing in his symbolic photo work on the side and has been resident in his darkroom at TOSH since 1988.
Emerson recommends to focus on what you like to photograph and really zone in on whatever subject matter that you are drawn to.
And look to the masters, even those from before the birth of photography, such as the painter Rembrandt.
“Rembrandt was doing something right, and he did not have strobes or anything like that," Emerson said. “See how they deal with light because that’s what photography is."
