National Geographic photographer Matthieu Paley travels to Canada’s Eastern provinces to discover a wealth of experiences, tastes, and the warmest of welcomes.
Video by National Geographic CreativeWorks
ByHeather Greenwood Davis
Published January 22, 2024
Last fall, on a crisp September morning long before the sun had found its way to the horizon, National Geographic Photographer Matthieu Paley joined a lobster boat crew in New Brunswick on the longest coastline in the world. His goal: A better understanding of how the rugged landscapes of Canada’s eastern provinces have molded the people who live there and how they, in return have helped shape it.
While photographing the team of three out hauling traps, he realized that his preconceived ideas of their work and the people who do it had been shattered.
“They start at 4 a.m. and they don’t stop,” Paley recalls of the team of lobster fishers. “There’s about an hour until they reach the area where they have set the traps and then it’s bam, bam, bam!”
This was the first extended trip to Canada for Paley, a seasoned traveler who has visited more than 90 countries, speaks eight languages and has spent lengthy periods of time with strangers in disparate landscapes. He was invited to Canada and given an open brief to capture the country’s unique spirit through a series of visits to the provinces that inch towards Canada’s eastern coast. Once there, he says, he found people who wear their passion and purpose on their sleeves in a way that is both surprising and disarming.
Case in point: When he asked lobster boat captain Junot Leblanc about his job, the strong man with a grizzly beard and steely focus, spoke not of its rigorous demands, but of his passion, commitment, and family. “He was almost poetic as he spoke about his connection to the ocean,” says Paley, “and how it must be in your heart.” This sort of quickly intimate connection was a common thread throughout Paley’s travels in the region. In New Brunswick, he says, he learned that you have to be prepared to forget about time, be willing to partake in meaningful conversations and to listen closely to what others are trying to say. When that happens, he says, you’ll find strangers open their doors, share their lives, lead you through their fields, introduce you to their people and teach you “their” language.
This is a place, says Paley, where stories get told, Indigenous pride is shared and environmental dreams are uncovered. And that string of connection between people and place, history and time followed him throughout his experience in the east.
At the Metepenagiag Heritage Park in New Brunswick, Stephen “Eggeun” Paul, who is Mi’kmaq, shared his commitment to re-establishing long-threaded roots to his culture, through his company First Nations Tourism. Together, Paley and Paul cast lines for salmon on the Miramichi River and scoured the coastal forests for fiddleheads (a green, fern vegetable), wild mint, and wild rose berries.
“Spending two days with Stephen, I was just drinking his words because he had this way of speaking that makes everybody keep quiet, and that was beautiful,” says Paley. “I could feel the connection so far away. It was an incredibly touching highlight of my trip.” Topics of conversation ranged from the lands before them to Paul’s efforts to reclaim his language, to the residential school systems that had ravaged his culture. And Paley found through their interactions, renewed ways of seeing, tasting and understanding his surroundings.
“I have been really touched in my life, working in Australia and Tasmania and the United States of America, by the plight of Aboriginal [and Indigenous] Peoples,” says Paley, “but I’ve never really met, that often, people who had actually lived through the kind of situation taught in school. This was very moving because the way Stephen delivered that information was very honest and matter of fact, and very quiet without anger.”
For Paley, the experience was enlightening. “This is what stays most in the end for me. Landscapes can be amazing, but this kind of human interaction can be so beautiful.”
Throughout his travels, Paley found people whose passion for the environment fed their work days.
“On several occasions, I met younger people who had left the city to come closer to their connection to nature,” notes Paley, “And that was very touching.” Near San-Siméon, Quebec he spoke with Antoine Forest-Côté and his partner Roxane Lazzaroni, a young couple who offer sea kayaking and dogsledding trips through their company Bosco Charlevoix.
They shared the passion at the heart of their business to introduce travelers to the beauty of the outdoors in the region. Paley says he was impressed by the respect they had for their 29 dogs, which are key to the trips they offer—treating them like family not “ATMs.” He was also struck by their decision to build an off-grid home away from the city, both to support their dream of connecting people with the animals and to live a more sustainable life.
He found a similar commitment in Ned Tobin, part of a multi-generational family of homesteaders outside Pictou, Nova Scotia, who are transforming a farm, abused by years of monoculture, into a bio-diverse environment using sustainable farming methods that celebrate heirloom seeds, wildflowers, and native grasses instead. The Red Spruce Farm boasts a five-acre apple orchard and has plans for a cidery in 2025, but, at its heart, Tobin said the farm is about working with the land instead of against it, creating a healthier environment and focusing on a “triple bottom line,” where profit shares space with both environmental and community impact.
“That’s why we’re doing this,” says Tobin. “Self-resilience, self-reliance and sustainability are definitely key words that we’re trying to keep in mind.” And in Montreal, one of the greenest cities in the world, Paley found that even inner-city residents are benefiting from regeneration thanks to people, like Émilie Bégin, a chef at the Culinary Lab (Labo culinaire), who enthusiastically infuse gourmet menus with the seasonal bounty available from the almost 60 urban farms in the surrounding area. In each case passion—not profit—drives their commitment to sharing what they have with visitors.
Early in his trip, Paley thought he knew what his search for “openness” would reveal. Surely, in a country as large as Canada, it needed to refer to vast landscapes. Standing on a cliff of the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, he’d seen this epic sense of open space for himself. But in the end, it was the impact of the land on the people, and the people on the land that impressed him most and led him to let go of any preconceived ideas with which he had arrived. And he’s fine with that.
“One of my favorite expressions is ‘don’t hold your own beliefs too tightly’,” says Paley. “Let them loose a little bit. Let them be ready to be affected by other people’s vision, their understanding of who you are and your understanding of who they are.”
And that, he says, is what he hopes readers take from his photographic interpretation of “openness” as it refers to the people of this region. “You will find people that are living a simpler life—whose minds have been cracked open and shaped by the environment–and by default, they end up having open hearts.”
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