Ned Pratt was born and has spent the majority of his life in Newfoundland. As a result he has developed a unique relationship with the land, sea, and sky of Canada’s easternmost province. No people, no romance, no sentimentality – this isn’t the Newfoundland found in travel brochures; it’s harsh and almost brutally unapologetic in its simplicity. But with the deconstruction of the world around him to the most simple of forms and colours, and with the distinctive point of view of Pratt, you see a familiar, comforting beauty.

Achieved through the veritable tenacity and love of revisiting locations and compositions hours, months, even years apart waiting for that perfect moment where beauty and brutality intersect to create the sublime, One Wave is an absolutely breathtaking encounter with that feeling exactly.

I got the chance to sit down with Ned, in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and ask him a few questions about One Wave and his journey as a photographer:

Jarrid: When did you first pick up a camera? Did you always want to be a photographer? 

Ned: Photography was always in my family, and because of the nature of my parent’s life, photographers would come to the house all the time photographing them. And pretty serious photographers like John Reeves and Geoffrey James and some of these guys and I loved the equipment – I loved the gadgetry of it. My uncle Phillip was an amatuer photographer, my grandfather was always taking photographs and making 8mm movies, and so this stuff was just always around and I always fiddled with the cameras even when told not to, you just can’t resist – you know what it’s like.

J:  I do.

Ned: So yeah, it was always around, and I remember the first picture I ever took that I thought sort of became something else: we were boiling the kettle down by the beach and I had a little nikon camera. Sort of a point and shoot thing and I had slide film in there, Kodachrome – and I just took a picture of this kettle on the rocks and it came back and it was just beautiful. The light on the kettle looked just like one of my mother’s paintings and I realized there I had a problem [laughs], and I thought, “Jeez, maybe I could do this!” but that was probably – I didn’t really think about that, I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

J: How old were you then?

Ned: 16. Something like that.

J: When did you know photography was what you wanted to do?

Ned: At NASCAD [Nova Scotia College of Art of Design]. I had been to Acadia and got a degree in Art History, got into architecture briefly and then went to NASCAD to study graphic design. Photography is a major part of graphic design and I took the course and just loved it. I loved the dark room. I got singled out for making a good negative, it wasn’t a good photograph at all- it was of a bus or something. But for some reason my instructor, Gary Wilson picked this negative out and showed it to the class, and said “This is a really good negative!” and I thought “Alright, someone finally said I’m good at something, I better just do this” and off I went.

J: Is there anything you miss about being a photojournalist?

Ned: No, not a thing. I liked doing it, but I felt like didn’t have the right to do it, somehow or other. Especially certain types of news stories. We were covering the Mount Cashel abuse scandal for the Sunday Express and we were taking, you know, really tough stuff. It was really hard for everybody, and I had to photograph some people who had done some really terrible things. That being said, when the trial was going on: I didn’t know what they’d done, I wasn’t involved in writing the story or doing the research. Yet, I was taking and image that talked about them in a certain light and so I had the power to make this person look mean and horrible, when the truth is I, as an individual didn’t know. And so you have this power when you’re a photographer to make a judgement and I didn’t feel comfortable with that.

It’s alright if you’re photographing a sandwich [laughs], but even then when you’re photographing food– you know, I do a lot of seafood photography and the oceans are a mess. So you’re photographing all these different species and you’re image is the first starting point to sell them. So if the shrimp are coming out of the ocean and you’re photographing shrimp and it’s going on a bag that’s going to sell the shrimp, well you’re part of the problem. Photography is so powerful, you know, with morality there’s a great responsibility photographers have.

J: How did you transition from photojournalism to fine art photography? 

Ned: It’s very slow. Every photograph you take is your own responsibility, and you try to do everything you do as well as you can. You want everything you do to be art at the end of the day, somehow or another– that’s not possible. I guess the intention was to always be an artist, but you can’t just flip a switch and say “I’m an artist” I don’t think and maybe do it sincerely because art is something that grows out of your past and your experiences. You grow into your imagery, or your music, or your sculpture, or your dance. You have to grow into it, and so it was just a long process of mistakes and successes and boiling down what I actually felt about things.

J: How long do you explore and take in an area before you find a composition that strikes you? Is there always a composition waiting or do you let an area go after a while?

Ned: No, you never let an area go because it’s always changing. The light is always changing, the buildings are always changing. It’s a living sort of thing that you go back to it and you see something that you didn’t see before and you can never completely see any place. So when I find something that I find interesting I go back to it over and over and over again so I can see it in different light and different seasons. I put form in my photographs and I can lock down the form and then wait for the world to change around the form.

J: That’s an interesting technique.

Ned: Yeah, you have your structure and then you watch around it for a while.

J: Both of your parents, Chris & Mary Pratt are very well known Canadian artists. What was the best piece of advice they ever gave you for your work as an artist?

Ned: I think they told me to be a doctor. [laughs] I wish they had! They always kept to themselves really about their practice. They gave us good advice on the importance of your dealer and how to respect the profession of being an art dealer. Mom was much more critical of the images.

J: The images you took?

Ned: The images I took or the painting my sister did. My sister is a very successful painter in Newfoundland, Barbie Pratt. But mom was always very critical and pretty tough, but that’s really important. Dad is much quieter about it, but they both could be pretty tough.

J: Was your mother being critical helpful?

Ned: Absolutely. And efficient. [laughs] If she thought something was weak she’d just tell you if she thought it was weak.

J: Sometimes you need that.

Ned: Oh god, yeah.  I mean, you don’t get anywhere by being pandered to. She was really good. I used to criticize her painting too, because I used to work in the same house she did for a while so she’d be painting and she’d ask me to come up and we’d talk about the painting and then I’d show her the polaroids I was working on and things, so we shared too. That was good. It was nicely removed, it wasn’t a father-mother-son thing, it was just professionals talking a lot of the time.

J: How does it feel to have your work in the same gallery you’ve spent so much time at as a kid and where your own mother’s work has been displayed?

Ned: It sounds really hokey but it is an honour. That word is thrown around all the time, “it’s an honour, it’s an honour”, but it’s an honour! I’ve always thought of the building as a beautiful building and I’ve always seen things here that have taken my breath away. So to have my work on these walls and to be taken seriously in this space means a lot. You know, I was out looking at some of the other work that’s up now, these incredibly world famous paintings and I came back here and look at my stuff and I said to myself, “What’s this in here for?”[laughs] Yeah, it’s an honour.

J:Tell me a little bit about how One Wave started. Did you take a particular photo one day and have a clear vision or idea of what this could all be, or was it a more gradual process?

Ned: The photograph ‘Miller Mechanical’, which is just a utility pole in front of the ocean, that was the first image in all of this body of work. I was trying to do landscape work because I was fed up with the work I’d been doing for the department of tourism. I was sick of taking all these beautiful pictures of Newfoundland when I thought the beauty in Newfoundland was totally different. I thought, you know, it was all a bunch of lies. Newfoundland is a beautiful place, but it’s got nothing to do with what I’m doing, this is bullshit. So I was trying to figure out where to get my voice, and I was taking this photograph that was as simple as I could possibly make it– it was just the ocean and the sky and it was a grey day. It was a mundane day and I thought “God damn it, I created “a dad”. I’m doing one of dad’s things, I gotta tear this apart.” So I put a pole in the middle of it, just sort of defaced my first approach. So the pole acted to deface what was inherently something I was getting from my father, which I had to battle and still have to battle every time– and my mother. I’m very conscious of their influence on me. So I defaced what I was drawn to and it was beautiful. And I looked at the polaroid that was on a 4×5 transparency and I thought, “My God, it’s ridiculous but it’s absolutely beautiful. That’s it. I’m going to take this and go from here” and so I went off in all kinds of different directions but always sort of used that image as the point to come back to it as the ultimate in the heart of the approach.

J: What is the most important part of your process?

Ned: The most important part is standing behind the camera and watching, just watching and waiting for everything to align. As I said, you have a still moment, you have the structure and then as the sky and clouds move across, you have shapes. So you’re watching shape enter and leave so you have to wait for the right combination of form. It’s sort of like sport’s photography. You’re watching the grass move, and the water move, and the clouds and that is the most important and enjoyable part of the process. It’s very hypnotic, you sort of get into a bit of a trance because it’s a slow process.

J: When you’re creating images like these, the ones in One Wave, how do you connect with the scene around you? Do you have any rituals?

Ned: Yep, very definite ones. I look for things on the ground as places to start. I see something I want to photograph and I’ll look for something on the ground that’s around where the camera should be and I’ll go there. And quite often that’s where I’ll wind up taking the picture– it sounds like utter bullshit, but it’s true. It’s like there’s a marker there for me to go to, whether it’s an outcrop of rock or an outcrop of berries. When you’re looking for something you’ll find it, let’s face it, but I do that every time. I’m sure it’s absolute crap but it connects you to the whole thing a bit better. It makes it less of a mechanical process. You’re letting yourself think about it as sort of a more spiritual process.

J: Like communicating with the land.

Ned: Yeah. Mind you, it could also be a coffee cup [laughs] but it’s part of the land. Yeah, I do that, it just makes me feel a bit more sincere about what I’m trying to do. Not that I question my sincerity, but you always doubt yourself. I really like that ritual. And the quietness. Generally where I work it’s pretty quiet and all there is is the wind and the odd car. It’s a real luxury to be able to do these kind of photographs. You know, it’s just ridiculous. [laughs]

J: In a 2017 interview for Bonavista Biennale you said “I can’t keep getting more and more minimal because you know what’ll happen, I’ll be doing all my work in the winter time.” What’s the next evolution of your work?

Ned: Well, it’s true. But you can get more minimal in different ways I’ve realized. Minimal doesn’t mean ‘nothing’. It means simplicity, so what I’m trying to do now is bring my work into a more urban environment. I need to start working outside of Newfoundland. I don’t really want to but I need to, for me. And to see how well I can bring my approach outside of Newfoundland and if it will apply. I’m starting to take photographs in St. John’s in a more urban setting, concentrating on form and less about beauty and ocean. Trying to substitute the notion of ocean with other shapes, because the ocean is always a bar of blue. If you look at the photo St. Philip’s Beach, it’s a black piece of plywood but it looks like the ocean, everyone thinks it’s the ocean. I can do that, I realized, anywhere by substituting form where someone expects to see something. I just put something else there and it will still act like that. Once I get my work in an urban situation, and I feel comfortable with there in St. John’s, maybe then I can take that out of the province.

J: What do you want people to think about while they are taking in One Wave?

Ned: I don’t know, [pauses] a feeling? Maybe a different way of looking at things?

J: What, if anything, makes you angry about photography?

Ned: Over manipulation drives me nuts because I don’t think it’s photography. It is image-making, yes, and that image has value, of course it does. But I don’t think of it as photography.

J: As a follow up, how much editing do you do on your images?

Ned: Virtually none. I do everything I can do in a dark room, but that’s it. In the digital world it’s important that you give yourself limits to how much of that world you’re going to access.  Everything you see, everything I see is manipulated in one way or another, and it always has been. There’s nothing new about photography being manipulated but you have to set limits for yourself. Those limits can be wild and be all over the place, but for me to enjoy photography my limits have got to be pretty tight. As tight as the images themselves. I’ll take dust out, I’ll fix perspective because I could do that when I was using a rail camera and a 4×5 field camera. I make the colours as accurate as I can but if there’s junk there I leave the junk in, you know, that’s part of the land.

J: Is there anything you have to have with you when you’re out taking photos besides your camera/gear?

Ned: No, I don’t have, like, rabbit’s feet or anything like that. I love to have my wife with me, and I love to have my dog with me. I don’t mean to draw any comparison there. [laughs]

My wife and I, we have the most fun when we’re working so I think if anything, it would be her.

J: Is there a photo that’s “the one that got away?”

Ned: It happens all the time, it’s heartbreaking. What’s worse, is when you see something and you don’t stop and take it and think, “I’ll come back and get it” and it doesn’t happen. If you miss it you miss it. I go through periods of being lazy and not stopping and I’ve missed some beautiful things. If you see something you stop and if you’re not, you’re not working.

J: If you could tell 12 year old Ned any advice for what lay ahead, what would you say to yourself?

Ned: Become a doctor [laughs]. Hmm… don’t follow. Be creative, you don’t have to be an artist to be creative. Everyone is creative, someone says, “I’m not creative” that’s ridiculous. Be creative with your life, don’t think like other people about your life. Take the thoughts that are yours that are different, as long as they’re not… wrong and push them. Be yourself and don’t be afraid to make tons and tons of mistakes and let people laugh at you and talk more about other people than yourself. And brush your teeth. [laughs]

One Wave continues to be displayed in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick through to December 2019, so be sure to catch it before it’s gone. It’s a wonderful experience!

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