Pinchard's Island
Photography · Archive · Memory Maps
Pinchard’s Island is a treeless outport off Newfoundland’s northeast coast, reachable only when the Atlantic Ocean permits. My grandmother was born and raised there. It was emptied when Canada’s post-1949 resettlement programs paid outport families to leave for “growth” communities. In the early 1950s its houses were lifted from their foundations, floated as house boats, and towed by boats across the ocean to nearby communities. Other than a few gravestones, nothing of the original settlement remains.
Cabin answers that distance by placing a fragment of homeland inside the city, then opening a live connection back to the island.
Years later, against policies that discouraged return, my family began going back. We built an off-grid cabin and spent summers walking the island again, in a place history had marked as having “no great future.”
The photographs come from those returns: family frames mixed with my own. In some views the cabin and figures are barely noticeable against the shoreline; in others the interior looms, and the windows frame and contain the land and sea. Memory maps, drawn by former residents, chart the island from recollection: harbour, hill, and house lots as they still sit in the mind, without claiming likeness or scale. Between those distances I am both from the place and outside it, trying to represent a place that no longer exists.
