Writer and photographer Stephen Legault knew from an early age he wanted to capture the rawness of life found in the Alberta and Montana foothills.
What make’s Legault’s latest release, Earth and Sky: Photographs and Stories from Montana and Alberta, stand out is the honest emotion displayed through not only the area’s landscapes, but with his meticulous capturing of the fauna, animals, people and place that forms the region’s natural beauty and stories.
Legault delves into each section, breaking the book into five parts, including The Kananaskis, The Northern Range, The Waterton Front, Blackfeet Country and The Rocky Mountain Front. He follows each section through with a collection of 200 black and white and colour photographs; along with personal essays describing his time and adventures in each region.
“From the very early times of my exploration of the foothills of Alberta I knew I wanted to do this project,” said Legault. “I was contemplating how I would pull a project like this together.”
The challenges of writing and photography projects is that sometimes your ambitions don’t necessarily match what a publisher wants to do. Legault had to do quite a few other projects first before being able to find the right time for Earth and Sky.
“Then, four years ago, I was in a conversation with my publisher at Rocky Mountain Books, Don Gorman. I was showing him essays and photos from another project, and then showed him some of the images I’d been working on for Earth and Sky over the years and he really liked them,” said Legault. “At that point, I essentially had a four-year window to round out the portfolio of images, and it took about that amount of time to bring the project to completion.”
The organizational development consultant is the first to say he is quite methodical when it comes to his writing and photography. He begins with an outline on all his book projects, but admits pretty early on he had a sense of the five unique regions he wanted to capture in the book.
“My day job would take me into a lot of the areas during that time. If I was working down in, say, Helena, Montana, I would take a couple of days either before or after to meet people and take pictures,” Legault said. “I put a goal on the number of images I wanted for each region, and I just worked until I had a good representative portfolio for each area – in those four years I took about 45,000 images just for the book, and I whittled that down to 200.”
These days, Legault measures a good day not by how many images he takes, but by how many images he digitally deletes.
When asked for a favourite memory from travelling and shooting, a black and white image of five horses standing on a hillside with the wind absolutely tearing through the landscape of Montana’s Blackfeet Indian Reservation comes to mind.
“That picture was taken in February and the wind was blowing about 70 miles an hour, it would just blow me along the road,” Legault said. “To get the image I had to wrap myself against a fencepost and use it as a monopod in order to shoot that image; my lens cap blew off and disappeared. It was a pretty extraordinary day. It’s really indicative of that landscape in Montana, it’s wide open and windy as all hell and as wild as you can possibly imagine.
“Since I was 12, I’ve been shooting landscape photography, and I’ve always been drawn to that big wild country, but I also love taking pictures of people. When I travel around the world I always end up taking pictures of people more than anything ... people are part of the landscape too and in places like the foothills of Alberta and Montana, the people are few and far between and that rarity makes them special.”
Earth and Sky: Photographs and stories from Montana and Alberta is available at Café Books, and through Rocky Mountain Books’ site www.rmbooks.com retailing for $40.
