A satellite ping three years ago from a boat docked in Chemainus led a documentary photographer from Europe to Vancouver Island in his global search for ‘authenticity.’
“As a photographer, I’m not so much interested in the beautiful picture but the story behind it, or trying to tell the story that you cannot see,” said Michiel De Cleen, sitting in a cabin overlooking Ladysmith Harbour.
“Of course the ship is no longer there and it’s a theme with every Authenticity I find, that every time I go there it’s already long gone - but that’s the thing with ‘authenticity’,” he explained.
De Cleen is taking a fresh approach to documentary photography, which typically dives deep into only a single subject.
Instead, the University of Ghent School of Arts student is trying to demonstrate how images can also be shown in the same way an encyclopedia uses cross-referencing.
“You take one subject and you let it make it’s own cross-references all the time,” he said.
He has three starting points for his study that are tied to the idea of authenticity: watercraft carrying that name - a metaphor for authenticity as a maneuverable vessel in photography, forests as the representation of the authentic landscape, and nuclear pacemakers, which ties into putting technology into our body and the symbiosis it creates.
“We always think that forests are the purist landscape, the most authentic landscape,” he said, delving deeper into one of his three subjects. “When you look around you see that a lot of these forests are part of an industry, which isn’t a bad thing, but it kind of conflicts with this idea of authentic landscape.”
When he’s researching a new place De Cleen tries to find “other subjects that are closely related to this idea that authenticity is something you can maneuver.”
“I’m mostly here for the ship and the forests - I haven’t found any nuclear pacemakers in town,” he said jokingly.
In the case of the boat from Chemainus, De Cleen became interested in the Boeing reef and Western Forest Products, which donated five logs - four Douglas fir and one western red cedar - to help restore a historic ship known as the Juan Bautista that was damaged by the 2011 tsunami off the coast of Japan.
The Japanese-built ship first sailed the Pacific in 1613 and the logs being used to restore it was harvested from 232,000 hectares of land referred to as TFL 44 and shipped out of Port Alberni.
“As a landscape photographer you try and get as close as possible to the actual subject,” he said. “It’s impossible to find the exact location but just looking for it and trying to document the search for a place is already interesting enough for me.”
So while he’s become comfortable knowing that many of his searches for ‘authenticity’ come up empty-handed that’s also part of what he’s documenting.
“The idea of trying to photograph something that is no longer there is an interesting challenge,” he said. “It’s not important that it’s here or not. The fact that is was is important enough to come here.”
Asked about what he’s learned while on Vancouver Island, De Cleen said even after coming across the debate over raw log exports in his research he was surprised at political tensions when he came face-to-face with the issue in Port Alberni.
“I knew it was happening but I didn’t think I’d get so close to something so hard for the town,” he said.
How all the images will be presented is a question De Cleen is continuously asking himself, but it will mostly like be an exhibition and book.
He’s now off to Belgium and he recently found another Authenticity in Florida that will likely take him there in the near future.
However, De Cleen’s time on the Island has more like time off.
“Traveling around this country, I’m at work but it feels like a holiday,” he said.