Reave Dennison - Under 60 Tons

Canadian photographer Reave Dennison’s Under 60 Tons is a photobook about work. Resource extraction is its subject, from logging and mining to the vast, interlocking logistical systems that keep these industries in motion. His photographs possess an unusual familiarity with the coast’s working life, one that could not have been acquired through occasional visits or magazine commissions. Before he became a photographer, Dennison worked on tugboats along the Fraser River and Gulf Islands, hauling lumber, scrap metal, and other cargo through the industrial waterways of the British Columbia coast. This fact explains less about the photographs than it first appears to. His working life and his photography have developed alongside one another: the coast gave him the knowledge necessary to make these pictures, and at the same time the camera enabled him to return to and understand the world in which he worked. Dennison photographs this world as someone who knows it from experience.

A century earlier, such photographs might have fallen under the category of worker photography. Known in Germany as Arbeiterfotografie, the movement encouraged workers to turn their cameras toward the conditions under which they laboured. Emerging from worker camera clubs and communist organizations of interwar Europe, it carried the conviction that workers’ labour contained a story worth telling. Such photographic projects were shaped by a form of political consciousness rooted in workers’ own experience and the belief that those who performed the work were best positioned to record it, or even speak to their exploitation. The movement has wholly faded from view, along with the organizations that sustained it. Dennison inherits neither its institutions nor its politics. What he shares is the conviction that labour is best photographed by someone who has experienced it.

Canadian photographer Reave Dennison’s Under 60 Tons is a photobook about work.

Dennison’s photobook opens in Anyox, the abandoned mining town on British Columbia’s remote northern coast. It is the kind of ghost town that would seem to invite photographers to work within the familiar vocabulary of industrial ruin: weathered buildings, collapsed structures, and vegetation slowly reclaiming the remains of human activity. Dennison resists this convention. His camera settles on the slag heaps, vast deposits of industrial waste produced before the smelter closed nearly a century ago. They rise from the landscape like artificial mountains. For decades the slag was treated as industrial waste, a useless byproduct of the mine. It is now excavated, processed, and shipped south, where it becomes an abrasive for sandblasting and an aggregate for roofing materials.

The material transformation acquires an almost allegorical force within the world Dennison photographs. Under 60 Tons is filled with objects of labour facing obsolescence: small tugboats, older working methods, vessels designed for circumstances that increasingly conflict with contemporary regulations and industrial consolidation. The book revives a world in which things are repeatedly declared obsolete and then discovered to contain another kind of usefulness. That idea had already surfaced in an earlier series, where Dennison photographed piles of logs that had slipped from barges and drifted along the coast until salvagers recovered them. Recovering these ‘sticks’, as they are known, has long been a small coastal industry. In Dennison’s photographs, the past does not disappear. It remains on the shoreline, at the bottom of the ocean, waiting for someone to find a reason to retrieve it.

One of the book’s most haunting photographs appears near the end. It shows the tugboat Sammy J being lifted from the ocean floor at night. The scene has the atmosphere of film noir: a vessel illuminated by strobes of artificial light, cables extending upward into the unseen machinery of the crane, the surrounding water dissolving into darkness. It has the strange appearance of a crime scene, as though a body were being retrieved from the ocean floor. Death is not the boat’s final resting place. The Sammy J is being raised because its hull is still worth saving, surviving beyond the life of the rest of the boat. The image becomes a fitting conclusion to the book: a wrecked and ruined shell being brought back into circulation, salvaged by the discovery of some remaining use.

The stark black-and-white of Under 60 Tons places Dennison within a broader return to a photographic mode that, for a medium supposedly liberated from the old obligations of film and the darkroom, has found a renewed voice. Several contemporary photographers have returned to a black-and-white photography built around a wide tonal range and classic large-format mode. Photographers such as Ian Bates, Adam Ianniello, Kristine Potter, Vanessa Winship, Rahim Fortune, and Susan Lipper exemplify this sensibility, which has also found a particularly strong home in the publications of Trespasser Books. Bryan Schutmaat’s Sons of the Living (2024) and Matthew Genitempo’s Jasper (2019) offer distinctive approaches to photographing the American landscape and experience. Dennison refined this visual language during a workshop with Schutmaat and Genitempo at FotoFilmic on Bowen Island in 2024, an experience which situated Under 60 Tons within a broader resurgence of black-and-white photography while giving its conventions a distinctly British Columbian inflection.

Dennison’s images of mountains, water, and sky cannot really be seen apart from the work that produced them.

The question is why this particular photographic mode has returned now, and why it has done so with such persistence. Part of the answer may lie in black-and-white photography’s austere tonal range, which has long provided documentary photographers with a way of describing work and material life. One thinks of Walker Evans, or later the measured formalism of the New Topographics, whose influence continues to shape contemporary practice. At the same time, its stark divisions between darkness and light seem strangely attuned to a present defined by extremes, especially on the BC coast, where such contrasts appear both in the landscape and in the material conditions that increasingly shape it: resource extraction, atmospheric rivers, drought, and the recurring presence of wildfire.

Dennison’s photographs sometimes recall the sublime landscapes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, yet that tradition has become difficult to sustain in the same way. The untouched wilderness once celebrated by landscape photography now feels increasingly bankrupt, pre-packaged, and distant from the histories of landscape as a site of social struggle, resource extraction, ethnic cleansing or class war. What changes is that Dennison’s images of mountains, water, and sky cannot really be seen apart from the work that produced them. They cannot be made without toiling on the open water, working the night shift, or standing watch. Their grandeur and natural sublimity remain inseparable from the circumstances of their making.

Night is the book’s governing condition. Many of these photographs seem possible only because Dennison was standing the night watch. There are repeated views of ink-black water, mountains reduced to silhouettes, vessels moving through darkness, their working lights suspended in the distance like small constellations. These are not always haunting or ominous images. At times they yield moments of startling calm, as on the book’s cover, where moonlight spreads across the water and reveals the monumental shape of mountains along the horizon. But the calm of these images is bound to the demands of working at night.

The final photograph in the book shows Dennison standing on the deck of a vessel, looking out into a fog-shrouded field of water. It is among the book’s most serene images. To the untrained eye, the image is deceptive: the same fog that softens the horizon also obscures what lies ahead and conceals what lies beneath. To stand watch is to remain alert to the possibility of disaster — the vessel that capsizes or the barge that breaks loose, all those unseen obstacles that can alter the course of a day’s work. Working on the water depends on navigating this fog, as well as countless other hazards, relying on experience and attention to what cannot be immediately perceived. Photography requires a similar patience and attention: knowing where to look and cultivating the awareness needed to recognize what might otherwise go unnoticed.