Western Canada: Valerie Zink | LENSCRATCH

I’ve known Valerie Zink’s since I was working on my book Out West (2014) and was looking for photographers who had photographed rural Saskatchewan. In the Canadian province three times the size of the United Kingdom I only found three. This is a common theme of good documentary photography in Western Canada – its hard to come by. Raised in rural Alberta, like a bunch of us who ‘moved on’ temporarily, she adopted the camera as a mechanism for understanding the prairies. She was part of the Imaginations special edition – North by West – that I co-edited as she collaborated on a piece called Placing Nostalgia: Affect and Photography in the New Saskatchewan with Vera Saltzman (images) and Jon Petrychyn (words).