Fraser Valley Foodie Tours – with a Conscience

Posted on 19. Feb, 2010 by Kerry Banks in Featured, Living

PROFILE

Brian Harris is a B.C.-based photographer focused on building a better world – through FarmFolk/CityFolk

by Kerry Banks

Brian Harris’s most famous photograph was taken outside the doors of a nunnery in Dharamsala, India, the adopted home of the Dalai Lama. The shot depicts two shaven-headed Buddhist nuns laughing. “They had just come outside to bang a gong to signal lunch, and I asked them if I could take their picture. Evidently, they thought this was pretty hilarious,” recalls Harris, whose iconic photo captured the nuns’ joyful amusement. The image subsequently appeared on the cover of his 1996 book Tibetan Voices: A Traditional Memoir, and later on posters and greeting cards. However, it was just one of thousands of shots Harris took during a 20-year span working as a photographer and fundraiser for Seva Canada, an organization with a mandate to eliminate treatable blindness in India, Tibet, Nepal and Tanzania.

“You look around and see all this wealth, and you think, ‘Man, most of the world doesn’t live like this.”

The 57-year-old Vancouverite began taking photos at 16, but didn’t take up the camera professionally until he was in his mid-thirties, after working as a baker, then as a counsellor for the mentally challenged. But from the beginning of his photography career the focus was the people of the Himalayas – whom Harris, a Buddhist since age 25, calls “a source of spiritual inspiration.” He found that he felt more alive in the region, particularly in India, with its noisy, chaotic energy. “In Canada, it’s like Sunday morning every day. There are hardly any cars on the streets. There’s no activity. You look around and see all this wealth and very few people, relatively speaking, and you think, ‘Man, most of the world doesn’t live like this.’”

Recently, however, Harris has focused his lens on subjects closer to home, photographing small, sustainable community and cooperative farms in the Lower Mainland as well as urban agricultural projects for Vancouver’s FarmFolk/CityFolk Society. Founded in 1993, the non-profit works to cultivate a local, sustainable food system by developing and operating projects that provide access to and protection of agricultural lands. It also supports local, small-scale growers and producers and educates, communicates and celebrates with local food communities.

It has been said that ‘beauty is the splendour of the true.’ And for Vancouver-based photographer Brian Harris, a successful photograph approaches this goal. ‘Beauty’ meaning not just attractiveness ‘but the awareness of the profound nature of reality.’

Still, Harris’s work for FarmFolk/CityFolk remains consistent with his overriding mantra: “Beauty in Service.” Simply taking pretty pictures isn’t enough; the photos have to serve a larger goal. “I wouldn’t work simply as a commercial photographer,” he says. And though the subject matter of his work may be different from that at the roof of the world, there are similarities. “I’m drawn to the same things I was in the Himalayas: beauty, a way of life that is substantively real, and using my photography to motivate people toward beneficial actions in their lives.”

Twelve of Harris’s photos of small, local sustainable farms, for example, were used to illustrate the FarmFolk/CityFolk 2009 calendar, alongside recipes provided by restaurants and food organizations promoting a grow-and-eat-local perspective. It’s an approach that FarmFolk/CityFolk is also exploring through the Community Farms Program, a collaboration with B.C.’s Land Conservancy. The goal is to expand local food production: by helping new farmers access affordable land, by researching the best practices of existing collectively owned farms and by creating a network of potential farms, landowners and community organizations.

Harris says a new model of farming is needed because so few young people are entering the field. “Most farmers today are over 60, and when they die, the farms are usually passed on to their children. But it’s so difficult to make a living farming that the land is often then sold. It remains in the Land Reserve, but it isn’t used for farming.”

Other FarmFolk/CityFolk projects aimed at increasing consumption of local foods include “Meet Your Maker,” which brings together farmers, buyers and distributors so they can create networks. In summer, the organization also conducts farm tours – day trips to local farms (see below). Meanwhile, Harris has finalized a 2010 Vancouver Museum exhibit focused on food and sustainability that features his photography, installations and a film and speaker series, all part of his continuing quest to help make the world a better place. As he says, “Seeing with the eyes of the heart is a way into the deep and meaningful understanding of existence.”