He had been lucky. Not every man can spend his lifetime doing exactly what he wants to do. As a boy, two things entranced him: photography, which was still young but full of promise; and "the age of sail," which was still magnificent but full of doom. Sailing vessels would last just long enough to enable him to devote his life to photographing their eternal but fleeting grace, the men who sailed them, and the seas they roved. And to get paid for doing it. He was born on Cape Breton Island, at St. Peter's, southern gateway to Bras d'Or Lake. It's a shimmering, inland sea, full of islands, wooded points and silent inlets. In summer, the yachting in Bras d'Or is still as good as you'll find anywhere and, around the turn of the century, that's where young Wally learned to sail. At 11, he knew the little sailboat he wanted but feared his father wouldn't let him have her. He saved money he earned from odd jobs, bought her on the sly and mastered her during secret solo voyages in nearby coves. One day his father, a general merchant, had an appointment down the coast but no transportation. It was a chance for Wally to come clean. He announced he had a boat, knew how to sail her, and would gladly take his dad wherever he wanted to go. Fine, said Mr. MacAskill, and off they went. After that, Wally sailed openly and honourably. Photography soon hooked him as surely as sailing had and, in hindsight, his life seems to have been charted. It's uncertain how he got his own camera at the age of 12 but, according to one story, his instant zeal for photography so impressed an American tourist at St. Peter's that the man sold him a good one for next to nothing. MacAskill fans will not be surprised to hear that, even when he was still in short pants, his favourite photographic targets were fishing vessels, fishermen at their nets, waves abusing rock, and a white lighthouse on a far point. He was nothing if not consistent. On the day after he died, more than half a century after he'd snapped his first photograph, the Halifax Chronicle- Herald described his oldest passions: He knew, as few others, the Atlantic in all its moods. He portrayed the strength of the waters as they broke on the rocks of lonely coves, their stillness in the great harbours; he knew, too, the men of the sea and the vessels they manned, the last of the square-riggers, the humblest of fishing craft, the deep-water men and the schoonermen and the dorymen. MacAskill made framed photographs of sea and sail so familiar it's easy to forget he was a pioneer, that photographers once earned their living only in the portrait and news businesses. Indeed, it was to study portrait photography that, at 16, he went to the Wade School of Photography in New York. One of his photos quickly won a contest and appeared in a New York newspaper. It was a portrait -sure, a portrait of the sea. He returned to St. Peter's; set up a studio with two brothers; moved to Glace Bay, Cape Breton, and ran a photography business there; and then, just before World War I, settled in Halifax as a commercial and sometimes newspaper photographer. But on his vacations he took the kind of pictures he wanted and, pretty soon, his pleasure became his business. By the Roaring Twenties, he was already in his prime. (So, of course, was the Bluenose.) He was deadly serious about his work, and this was at no time more apparent than during a cruise from Halifax to his beloved Cape Breton aboard the yacht Restless. Phyllis R. Blakely wrote: On this cruise, his fellow yachtsmen learned that he did not obtain his photographs by merely clicking a shutter. MacAskill would get up at five, row ashore, climb halfway up a mountain carrying his heavy press camera, and wait patiently for the sun to reach a certain spot. Often he returned to the Restless without taking a photo. MacAskill was a ruthless critic, and destroyed 99 out of 100 of his negatives. He considered it lucky when he obtained three pictures on this cruise which were fine enough to print and sell, and later to appear in living rooms across Canada and the United States. In search of photos, he sailed aboard schooners to the fishing banks, to the Newfoundland seal hunt, down to New England ports. But he had no interest in travel for its own sake. Like an inshore fisherman, he found what he wanted mostly in familiar waters -off Halifax, up in Cape Breton, in the glory that was Lunenburg. Along the coast of Nova Scotia, infinite combinations of sea, sail, rock and weather offered enough scenes to occupy him for 10 lifetimes. His monument is his work. In his last years, no respectable Halifax office failed to hang at least one MacAskill. Brewer Victor DeB. Oland, the late lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia and sturdy champion of Bluenose schooner traditions, once said that if you were a businessman, "you had your desk here, your typewriter and secretary here, your adding machine here, and, up there, you had your MacAskill." MacAskills still hang on tens of thousands of living-room walls, not only in Atlantic Canada, not only in New England, but also in the dry heart of the continent and, indeed, here and there throughout the world. For homesick expatriates of the northeastern seaboard of North America, they still "keep the salt in the blood." Despite technical breakthroughs that have revolutionized photography in recent years, despite the availability of gorgeous, full-colour, flawlessly executed seascapes by MacAskill's successors, Halifax shops still do a brisk trade in his work. Some of his old -and merely black-and-white -photos appear so fuzzy you can scarcely tell what's going on, so out-of-focus a modern photographer might wonder how MacAskil1 ever earned his fabulous reputation. And yet, they exude romance. It's not just that he recorded the last fling of the age of sail and held it for us against what photography-essayist Susan Sontag has called "time's relentless melt." The patina of age does give his work a sad charm, but there's something else: these photos somehow smell of the sea, sound of the sea, breathe of the sea. Exactly how he caught this effect so much better than other photographers is something that perhaps even he could never quite explain. It had something to do with his forever going out to meet the sea, but that's not the whole answer. The mystery proves again that, sometimes anyway, one picture really is worth more than ten thousand words. Even if, amazingly, the man who shot it hasn't been around for 30 years.

Wallace page 4

Home Page | Angus | History | Links | Tartans | Message Forum