Root Cellars
by Catherine Osborne

Richard Johnson first came across Newfoundland’s root cellars in 2012 and returned to photograph them in 2018, pulling off to the side of the road whenever he spotted one of their shaggy heads covered in wild grasses emerging from folded sedimentary rock. To him, they were indigenous oddities; efficiently built and curiously anthropomorphic. They fell in line, too, with his life-long fascination with small structures built out of necessity and usually by hand.

If you compare this collection to his other serialized projects – from the Wasaga Beach garbage cages to the Ontario chip wagons and, of course, his decade-long study of ice fishing huts – each reveals a quintessential Canadianness that’s taken shape on its own particular terms before evolving into an essential aspect of local life. For Wasaga Beach, it was bins built at the side of the road to keep wildlife out of the garbage. With the ice huts, it was the architecture needed to turn fishing in sub-zero conditions into a popular winter activity.

With root cellars, it is the necessity for food security on an isolated island. In fact, to understand the history of root cellars you need to know about potatoes – the ultimate symbol of sustenance and survival. Potatoes aren’t native to Canada. They arrived as foreigners at some point in the 1700s, and managed to take root on Newfoundland’s rugged Precambrian terrain. They’re an extremely hardy vegetable. Even without much soil or water, one lateral stem and its mother tuber can yield as many as 20 baby potatoes in a single season. The only criteria for keeping them firm for months at a time is to provide a dank, dark space that’s a few degrees above freezing. Hence, root cellars became a thing in Newfoundland for over a century – the ideal way to ensure a healthy diet during a long, Canadian winter.

They are no longer used to the same degree. When refrigeration arrived in the 1960s, cellars became the poor man’s appliance, but no one bothered to take them down. Instead, they simply became part of the furniture, so to speak. Locals barely notice them anymore, while non-natives look at them as though they might house a family of hobbits.

This is Richard’s favourite kind of reveal – to find an understated anthropological occurrence, then document it through repetition. Over the course of three weeks, he photographed 115 cellars located between Twillingate and Elliston, capturing them in the spring, when the tall grasses are still compressed from the weight of winter’s snow. At that time of year, when there’s barely any growth, tones are reduced to a minimal range of silver, grey, black and white. It’s also when the cellars are most visible.

Locally, there’s been a renewed interest in preserving the cellars. At Memorial University in St. John’s, folk experts and historians have started to amass a database of a few hundred, recording their measurements, construction methods and GPS coordinates. They have also been identified as intangible historic cultural assets, and Elliston has claimed itself Root Cellar Capital of the World, with 135 located within its community. Seven distinct typologies have also been categorized, ranging from those dug into hillsides using spades and picks, and the more common mound-shaped variety that are tall enough to stand in and accessible through a wooden door or top hatch.

The resurgence is a mix of nostalgia, tourism opportunities and an uptick in 100-mile diet lifestyles. For decades, though, cellars have mostly languished in abandonment. Locked in time, they have stood as lone survivors of homesteads that have long since moved on. They’ve outlasted houses, wharfs and the people who built them due to their construction, arguably the most basic architectural scheme imaginable – a process of piling up nearby rocks, then covering the walls in thick layers of peatland bog. In more modern times, concrete was employed. Their simplicity is what’s enabled them to last for over a century, and what makes them such a compelling image of survival.

When Richard locks onto a subject, he gets entirely lost in the mechanics of shooting. It’s usually only when he’s back in his studio, sorting through images, that he notices what else he’s actually recorded. Interestingly, with this series, while focused on framing root cellars, he also captured Newfoundland’s rocky terrain, and when he placed one photograph next to the other, the landscape morphed into jagged alignment. This is one reason why it can be hard to distinguish, in Richard’s work, where the documentarian ends and the artist’s eye begins: two mindsets that are completely and seamlessly baked into the final results.

Catherine Osborne is a writer and editor based in Toronto. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of the architecture and design magazine Azure.