www.collectionscanada.caPeter Pitseolak was born in 1902 on the southeast coast of Baffin Island at Cape Dorset. During his lifetime, he lived through the enormous changes his people, the Seekooseelakmiut, experienced over the next half century, during which they moved from a nomadic hunting life to that of a settled community. Now the people of Seekooseelak produce some of the most exciting carvings and prints that come out of the Arctic.Early in his life, Pitseolak became aware that the traditional way of life of the Seekooseelakmiut would soon disappear. He spent much of his life recording the old ways in every means that came his way - drawings, paintings, prints, recordings, and in an invaluable body of photographs which span the period from the early 1940s to his death in 1973. Pitseolak, and his wife Aggeok who worked closely with him, took photographs at home in Cape Dorset and even out on the land where, Aggeok recalls, "he would put the camera on top of the igloo until the film was all used up (in order not to subject it to temperature changes).... Only after he finished the film would he take the camera inside and take out the film.... We would develop on top of the sleeping platform with the three battery flashlight." **Quoted by Dorothy Eber in Peter Pitseolak (1902-1973): Inuit Historian of Seekooseelak, Montreal, McCord Museum, 1980.---------------Pitseolak, Peter Pitseolak, Peter, photographer, artist, writer (b on Nottingham I, NWT Nov 1902; d at Cape Dorset, NWT 30 Sept 1973). A camp leader, he recognized early that traditional INUIT life was disappearing and strove to record its passing, writing diaries, notes and manuscripts, drawing Inuit customs and legends, and photographing the life around him. He took his first photograph in the 1930s for a white man who was afraid to approach a polar bear; and in the early 1940s, while living in Cape Dorset working for fur traders, he acquired a camera from a Catholic missionary. With help from his wife Aggeok, he developed his first pictures in a hunting igloo, using as a safelight a 3-battery flashlight covered with red cloth.He photographed over a 20-year period, and after his death more than 1500 negatives, images increasingly valued as an insider's record of the final moments of Inuit camp life, were purchased from his widow for the National Museums of Canada. A fine artist, he is credited too with Cape Dorset's earliest contemporary works on paper: watercolour drawings executed in 1939 for John N.S. Buchan, later 2nd Baron Tweedsmuir, at the time a fur trader with the Hudson's Bay Co. Shortly before his death, Pitseolak put down in Inuit syllabics the story of his early life (published in 1975 as People from Our Side, with oral biography by D. Eber) and an account of near disaster among the ice floes (published in 1977 as Peter Pitseolak's Escape from Death, D. Eber, ed).-----Pitseolak, Peter Photographer, artist (born in November, 1902, at Nottingham Island, N.W.T.; died on September 30, 1973, at Cape Dorset, N.W.T.). Pitseolak was a camp leader who realized that the traditional INUIT way of life was fast disappearing. He wanted his grandchildren to know "what went on while I was alive." He began writing notes, collecting stories and songs, and making drawings and painting before the last of the Inuit left the camps to live in settlements near the towns.Pitseolak was fascinated with photography, and had been ever since he was a boy. In the early 1940s, he got his first camera from a missionary, and he and his wife Aggeok began to experiment with developing film. They used makeshift equipment in their hunting igloo, and finally had success. In the course of the next 20 years, Pitseolak took hundreds of photographs of his family and friends. He often used these photographs as a basis for his paintings and drawings, and he also made drawings for the printmaking program at the West Baffin Eskimo Co-Operative.Pitseolak was not well known outside his community until after his death. He had written down the story of his early life in Inuit syllabics, and the book was published in 1975 as People From Our Side. It was illustrated with some of his photographs, and a short time later the National Museums of Canada bought 1500 of his negatives from his widow. Today these photographs are in the collection of the Notman Archives in Montreal. They are the only known collection of photographs of traditional Inuit life on Baffin Island.----------Inuit photographer, artist, and historian Peter Pitseolak is an important figure in Canadian history. Born in 1902, he is best known for recording aspects of traditional life within the small community of Cape Dorset on the Southwest coast of Baffin Island, Nunavut. Pitseolak was an ambitious and strong-minded camp leader. In 1942, he was given his first camera and began experimenting with photography. Until his death in 1973, Pitseolak (assisted by his wife Aggeok) spent much of his time photographing and recording various aspects of traditional Inuit life, including hunting techniques, style of clothing, and re-enactments of Inuit myths, as well as taking portraits of his family and friends. Pitseolak's legacy has inspired many generations of Inuit, and Cape Dorset remains an important center for Inuit sculpture and printmaking today.

Collections

• National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
• Red Deer and District Museum and Archives, Red Deer
• Sarick Collection, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
• Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg