Out on the ice, no two huts are the same
Gary Michael-Dault

 Special to the Globe and Mail, originally published Jan 5, 2008.

Although he spends much of his time, of necessity, tending a well-established career as an architectural photographer (he is greatly in demand for his spectacular shots of commercial interiors), Richard Johnson devotes some of his time, as well, to the production of photo-essays for his own enjoyment.

In these personal bodies of work, Johnson demonstrates the same visual rigour as he does in his commercial undertakings. He tends to produce typologies of simple objects, culled from pop or vernacular traditions (chip wagons, say, or garbage bins from the Wasaga Beach area), objects which, though they clearly belong to one category of experience, are, when examined individually (as Johnson is at pains to show), charmingly and instructively different in feeling and, ultimately, in meaning.

His Ice Huts series - now on display at his own Richard Johnson Gallery in Toronto - is a case in point. Photographed last January in the course of several visits to Lake Simcoe, first to the frozen plane that is Cook's Bay in midwinter, and then to the more northerly Georgina Island, the ice huts - varied and resourceful shards of elemental architecture - make up what Johnson's friend and fellow photographer Marcus Schubert calls (in a lyrical essay accompanying the exhibition) "a catalogue of structures that reveal the evolution of a form."

The huts, Johnson points out, are "sled-based," each still resting on the sled on which it was dragged out by snowmobile onto the ice. The hut reproduced here - Johnson has called it Rec Room because of its exterior panelling - has a drift of slushy snow across the footings that serves as a sort of ad hoc foundation, helping anchor the structure against the frigid winds blowing across the lake.

What interests Johnson about the huts is their variety. Although they all adhere pretty much to the basic, archetypal house shape, there are absorbing, often eccentric differences disrupting and animating the conventionality of their construction. One photographed hut, for example, has a mansard roof. Another hut is painted bright blue and has the Maple Leafs' logo emblazoned on one wall. One has been tipped over onto its side (you have to crawl in through a window which is now on the hut's roof). There's one that is painted black and bears a huge painting on one side of a green wolf howling against a fat, lurid, yellow moon. Each hut photo, Johnson says, "is a portrait of the hut's owner - without the owner."

Johnson has photographed his huts frontally ("The three-quarter view was much too real," he says), and positioned them pretty much at the centre of his square (75- by 75-cm) photos. The horizon - the far shore or a stand of distant trees - runs through them like a skewer holding them in place. The effect of this pleasingly stringent arrangement is both to offer the huts as moments of minimalist clarity and, as a result, to allow every one an openness to inspection that amplifies each of their minor but telling differences.

It's rare, I think, to find photographs that are both this rigorously designed and, at the same time, this rich with information. With Ice Huts, Johnson is performing both as artist and anthropologist. I asked him about the degree to which he manipulated the photographs digitally. Very little, he says. "I did de-saturate the urine," he admits. De-saturate? "There was a lot of yellow snow around the huts," he explains. "This is a man's world, after all."