Portraits from acclaimed Saskatchewan photographer Thelma Pepper reveal untold stories

Thelma Pepper started with a question.

When the photographer lined up a photo in a remote field off Highway 41, in a private room in Sherbrooke Community Centre, or across a kitchen table, it was a conversation.

"She had this uncanny ability to ask just the right question in just the right way," her son Gordon Pepper said.

Pepper began her career at 60 and died last December at 100.

In that period, she told the stories of rural women, the elderly and newcomers with the respect, dignity and resilience they deserved.

A year after her passing, Pepper's artwork is as woven into Saskatchewan's fabric as the lives she captured on black and white film.

She found that love for lives captured in photos as a girl, swirling solution over negatives in her father's darkroom actually a bathroom in Kingston, Nova Scotia, according to Amy Jo Ehman's biographyThelma: A Life in Pictures.

The joy Lester Stevens, an avid amateur photographer, took in developing the stills was infectious enough to emerge decades later in his daughter.

Pepper was studying biology at Acadia University when war broke out in 1939.

Pepper's father made fast friends with a crowd of airmen stationed nearby with an interest in photography, leading him to build an expanded darkroom in the basement.

Photography alate-in-life obsession

Her father bought something special from the men preparing for the Second World War: a 35-millimetre prewar German-made Weltini, her first camera.

After graduation, a former professor offered Pepper a position as a research assistant and a science Masters student at McGill.

Montreal had its peaks and pitfalls. It was where she met her husband, Jim Pepper, who was studying at the university.

It was also where a thief stole her camera out of a dresser drawer, robbing her of a creative outlet soon after she moved in, Ehman writes.

During that time, the couple married and Jim took a job in Guelph. Pepper gave birth to their first-born, Bobby, in 1946.

The family moved again when Jim received a job offer from the University of Saskatchewan. After they moved, Pepper had an offer to lecture at the university about her former scientific research, but she turned it down. Three more children Phyllis, Ron and Gordon followed.

Gordon remembers his mother as a dedicated parent who nurtured her children's interests in the world. There was even a darkroom in the house, but he doesn't remember her revealing her artistic talents.

"I would not have guessed that she would have really done what she did," he said.

In 1979, her youngest left home and Pepper found herself lacking purpose as her children began to pursue independent lives.

"I spent my whole life not really doing anything for myself, didn't I? And now that life was over at the stage when my children left home," Pepper says in Ehman's book.

"I felt I had nothing of my own. I knew I had to find something that made me feel good about myself."

During that period, her mother died and Pepper inherited hundreds of photographic negatives from her father and grandfather's collections that would fuel hours spent in the darkroom.

She also honed her skills at the Saskatoon Camera Club with members almost half her age, focusing on nature photography.

Meanwhile, she presented her prints of her father and grandfather's photos as an exhibition in Nova Scotia.

While she was visiting, she met with one of the airmen from her early years, who had a high-end $2,000 camera, just like her dad's old one. She had just inherited her mother's savings and decided to use that financial independence to buy the camera.

"She said, 'This is my money. I'm going to spend this money and buy this camera,' " Gordon recalled.

She had already done nature photography, but buying that camera was "a turning point" allowing her to become an artist, he said.

She "found a groove," becoming a volunteer reader at a local seniors' home, and snapped portraits of the people she befriended there.

Her craft grew more sophisticated and she released her first exhibit, Decades of Voices: Saskatchewan Pioneer Women, in 1990.

It represented a collection of eight years of work interviewing women, all of whom were over the age of 85, in Saskatchewan.

Pepper's body of work isn't complete without the touching interviews that accompanied her portraits, adding another layer to her art.

"I wish to honour these 'ordinary women' of Saskatchewan who ... are often regarded as unimportant, separate from our society, their knowledge out of date and their interests irrelevant to what is happening now," Pepper said in a quote featured in a recent exhibit at the Remai Modern.

Decades of Voices impressed Joan Borsa, a now-retired U of S art history professor and curator who began a long friendship with Pepper.

When Pepper embarked on profiling the area along Highway 41 for her next project, Borsa offered her insights from growing up along it.

Pepper tended to develop long relationships with her subjects before taking their portraits. Borsa's mother, who was the first school teacher in Yellow Creek, was one of them.

"She had a way of turning the camera back on her subject, even if she wasn't photographing them, and you felt like you were in the presence of some wise person that was really dynamic and totally engaged," Borsa said.

Borsa wrote an essay about Pepper's 1996 Spaces of Belonging: A Journey Along Highway 41, which profiled small and disappearing towns.

The photos capture the area's residents in place, situated in their geography an old hardware store, a blacksmith shop, a field that once held a garden.

"She's really interested in their relationship to place and something about identity. I think what she gets us to see is the insides of things," Borsa said.

Jim would support his wife by driving her across Saskatchewan to collect her art during this period. In his retirement speech, Jim dedicated himself to supporting his wife after years of her doing the same for him, Gordon said.

"He was the photographer's assistant."

But the onset of Jim's dementia in the '90s soon prevented the couple from travelling like they once did.

Pepper decided to support her husband and stay closer to home, bringing him to day programs. With less mobility, she began taking portraits of newcomers to Canada at the Open Door Society during these years.

She eventually found Jim a room at Sherbrooke Community Centre, which would also set the stage for some of her greatest photos.

"Thelma would always say, 'I'm not just here to take pictures. I don't just take pictures. I have to know the person so that I can show who they really are,' " noted Patricia Roe, who was leader for communications and public relations at the centre.

The centre's philosophy of caring for the human spirit resonated with Pepper as she captured portraits of the residents there.

After Jim died, she continued to build strong relationships with those who shared a home with him.

Roe's said her fondest impression of Pepper was the respect she paid to each subject of her photos, which continue to hang in the centre as art even after their subjects have passed on.

The centre named its in-house caf "Pepper's" after the photographer, commemorating the warmth she carried when meeting with each resident.

She saw it as "a sacred privilege" when she could take one of their photos, Roe said.

The National Film Board createda documentarychronicling her time at the centre which is only part of the recognition she would later receive.

She later earned the Lieutenant-governor's Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2014 and the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 2018.

Borsa said she doesn't see Pepper's death as the end of her legacy. Her insight into the stories of the overlooked carries on.

"Thelma's work is going to have lasting power and significance," she said.

Borsa noted Pepper was exploring notions of respectful elder care long before the pandemic brought the issue into focus.

Young people equally seemed drawn to Pepper's work when she shared it in her art classes, Borsa said.

One young woman chose to interview her grandmother after viewing Pepper's art exactly the kind of "ripple effect that strong engagement with Thelma's work provides," she said.

For Pepper, creativity imbued life with meaning. Her emphasis on collaboration with her subjects allowed her to validate the histories of women and small communities that never got a second glance otherwise.

"She has a way of seeing things anew and playing it back to people in a much more challenging and broader kind of expanded way," Borsa said.

When Pepper died, Gordon said the family received an outpouring of condolences from people whose lives she touched.

She was an excellent artist, but her true genius was relationships, he said.

In her late 80s and 90s, he travelled with her and visited her old locations along Highway 41 to find people overjoyed to see her again.

They sat for coffee and spoke about their lives, long after Pepper's signature camera had been tucked away, the photos had hung in galleries and Pepper had waved her goodbyes.

There was just as much art in the unhurried conversation over a cup of coffee years later.

"It wasn't about the photo, necessarily although obviously it was a huge part. It was getting to know them," Gordon said.

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