Lives and Landscapes

Presents a photographic journal of the people, landscape, and day-to-day life of the Strait of Belle Isle. This book shows that the fundamental structure of outport life based on fishing and hunting remains stable.

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In the late 1940s Elmer Harp, a young Ph.D candidate at Harvard, began the first of five summers of exploration along the coast of the Strait of Belle Isle. Interested in studying early human activity in the area, he came to be equally fascinated with life in outport communities. During the summers of 1949-50 and 1961-63, he explored the coast, travelling from one isolated outport village to the next, initially by open boat and later on rudimentary roads, vividly capturing everyday life in his journals and through his extensive Kodachrome slides. In her introduction, Priscilla Renouf places Harp's story of rural northen Newfoundland in historical and anthropological context. She notes that there are economic and cultural continuities from prehistoric times to the present and shows that the fundamental structure of outport life based on fishing and hunting remains stable to this very day.