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Peter Pitseolak, photographer, artist, writer (born November 1902 on Nottingham Island, NWT; died 30 September 1973 in Cape Dorset, NWT [now Kinngait, NU]). A camp leader, Peter Pitseolak recognized changes to traditional Inuit life and strove to record them. He wrote diaries, notes and manuscripts, drew Inuit ways of life and traditional stories, and photographed life around him.
Photography and Art
Peter Pitseolak took his first photograph in the 1930s for a white man who was afraid to approach a polar bear. In the early 1940s, while living in Cape Dorset (now Kinngait) working for fur traders, he acquired a camera from a Catholic missionary. With help from his wife Aggeok, he developed his first pictures in a hunting igloo, using a 3-battery flashlight covered with red cloth as a safelight.
He photographed over a 20-year period. After his death, more than 1,500 negatives were purchased from his widow for the National Museums of Canada. These images were increasingly valued as an insider's record of Inuit camp life. A fine artist, he is also credited with Cape Dorset's earliest contemporary works on paper (see also Inuit Art; Inuit Printmaking). These artworks were watercolour drawings executed in 1939 for John N.S. Buchan, later 2nd Baron Tweedsmuir. At the time, Buchan was a fur trader with the Hudson's Bay Company. Shortly before his death, Pitseolak put down in Inuit syllabics the story of his early life, later published as a book titled People from Our Side (see also Inuktitut). He also wrote an account of near disaster among the ice floes, published under the title Peter Pitseolak's Escape from Death.
