Patrice Helmar

 

Polaris is an ongoing series that I began working on in 2015. These photographs explore the dramatic potential and complexity of returning home: characters, archetypes, and dreamlike landscapes of 50 miles on a road to nowhere. As a child in a working-class family growing up on a twenty-six-foot hand troller, my parents taught me where the north star was in the night sky. This constellation alluded to in literature, myth, and song has guided seafaring people for time immemorial. These photographs were made in my hometown of Juneau, Alaska. One of the few capital cities in the United States without a road to the outside world.

The history of photography is rife with work made by the upper classes. These visitors often have little connection to people and places they image. In my work, I'm not attempting to document or sensationalize working class, and queer life. I'm authoring what I would like to exist about my communities in contemporary culture.

Alaska has a way of making me realize how small and fragile everything is. In the evening, I make photographs in the downtown area where I was a bartender for much of my twenties. During the day I drive out the one road, exploring neighborhoods and landscapes. I bring my dog, Dolly Girl to the beach, and we walk between towering mountains that jut out of the ocean.

I love Alaska, but I don't feel the Jack London, Call of the Wild that others do who have intentionally made their home here. I love it in a complicated intergenerational trauma way. In a Jim Carroll, "People Who Died" way. In an Iris Dement, "Our Town" way. In a Hazel Dickens, "Hills of Home" way. In a Pogues, "Dirty Old Town" way.

The majority of these photographs are made with a view camera from the 1950s. Bulky and awkward, the Graflex is unapologetically photographic. It holds up to my lack of dainty-ness, and at times, difficult environs. These photographs become an event, each shot an improvised dance with the people and places where I grew up.