The Pink Houseboat

Photography on cotton rag paper.

30.50x24x1"

Limited edition 2 of 10.

Houseboat Bay in Old Town Yellowknife is one of those places that quietly astonishes you. The people who live there made their homes on the water in large part to avoid paying property taxes — a practical solution that somehow became a community, and then a way of life. They are creative people and resilient at the same time, shaped by distance, cold, and the particular freedom that comes from living slightly outside the conventional rules.

And then there is the Pink Houseboat. Someone decided, at some point, to paint their home pink. Not blush, not dusty rose — pink. In a place where winter temperatures drop to -30 and the landscape goes white for months at a time, someone chose pink. There is something quietly rebellious about that — a refusal to be subdued by the cold or the landscape or anyone's expectations of what a home in the north should look like. I admired it enormously.

I never met the person who lived there. I didn't need to. The houseboat said everything.

Part of my Life in the Knife series, Houseboat Bay, Old Town Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.