Lorraine Field: Back home from the Middle East

Photographer Lorraine Field takes a self-portrait at her exhibit at the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery. (Credit: Peter Saltsman)

Lorraine Field is fondling a copper coffee pot in the Saint Mary's University Art Gallery. She's explaining to a man in a cowboy hat how to make proper Turkish coffee - or at least, how she was taught to make it.

The pot is a souvenir from Istanbul, where she's been living and working for the past five years. She gives it to the man, who is Robin Metcalfe, director of the gallery.

"I've got a whole cupboard of these things at home," she says.

Then she looks around quickly, as if surprised that she's surrounded by her own panoramic photographs. That's endearing, considering that Field is a prominent Nova Scotia artist whose work has appeared around the globe alongside the likes of Edward Burtynsky, one of Canada's most renowned photographers. Her latest exhibition, Vanishing Point, wrapped up at the gallery in mid-October.

Five years in the Middle East changed Field. Living in a foreign country where she didn't speak the language was challenging for the mother of three. "I was in my mid-fifties and all of a sudden you're not an autonomous adult."

That was hard for Field, who started taking photographs in her first year at NSCAD University when she was 40.

But she got to know other artists in Istanbul and those people taught her how to navigate both her new home and her craft.

"She meets people," says Robert Bean, Field's photography professor at NSCAD and now a close friend. "All these people have stories. And in a way they all become part of Lorraine's story."

People such as the owner of the photo lab in Istanbul where Field did her work, or the Bedouins in the Syrian desert with whom she just celebrated her 59th birthday this summer.

They're all part of her Middle Eastern story. Field became conscious of the region's turbulent political situation from that perspective.

"People are aware of the pain of their neighbours," she says. "It's much more theirs."

Her photographs show that place in desert landscapes. In some of them, she's a blurry figure running though the frame. In others it's just a flat expanse of sand.

She fell in love with the Middle East the first time she saw the Syrian desert. The topography reminds her of her childhood home near Calgary. But she thinks that's only part of the attraction.

"This is the desert of the prophets. This is the land where monotheism began," she says. "And although I'm not religious as such, that land holds a certain magic or mysticism to it."

In her photographs, she makes that mysticism real. Her exhibition was one of the most well-attended at the Saint Mary's gallery in recent years. Metcalfe says that might be because of the university's large international population.

"I like to say we have more people from China than from Ontario," he says. "And lots of people from the Middle East."

Having lived these stories, Field is happy to be back in Halifax. It's home, she says. But she's still meeting people in her new role as professor of photography at NSCAD, and continuing to tell the stories of her time away.

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