Calgary, AB (Rural Roots Canada) – Some people are searching for a place they left decades ago. Others are looking for the land they just bought, wanting to see what stood there before. Kim Bessette can help either way.
Bessette and his wife run Homestead Aerial Photo out of Calgary. The company does aerial photography using drones, but it’s their archive that draws the strongest reactions.
The collection holds about 1.5 million aerial images, mostly covering western Canada but extending into Ontario and even the Maritimes. The oldest photos date back to 195,3 when photographers flew systematic grid patterns over the prairies each summer.
The archive nearly disappeared in 1993 when its original owner decided to retire. Bessette and his wife, both raised on Saskatchewan farms, recognized what would be lost.
“We wanted to make certain if we could bring it back and let people actually have access to it,” he said.
They had no background in photography, but they understood what these photos meant to rural families.
The details captured in the earlier images are incredible. With no flight restrictions in the 1950s, planes flew extremely low.
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“Sometimes you would see the plane so low that the shadow of the wings would be right on the barn,” Bessette said. “Very low photography showing amazing detail of the farmyard.”
That detail means people often recognize themselves in photos taken 60 or 70 years ago. Bessette recalls one man who ordered a four-by-six-foot print because he was standing in the middle of the yard looking up at the plane.
“He remembers that day,” Bessette said.
They see all age groups looking for photos, from elderly people looking back at their childhoods to young farmers who’ve taken over family land.
“They’re going to take the buildings down, farm right over that and put it back into flat land,” Bessette said. “So now they’re coming back to us and say, you know what, we never took any aerial photos or any photos of the buildings before we knocked them over.”
When old buildings get torn down and land returns to crop production, families often realize they never took photos. That’s when they come looking for Bessette’s archive.
The business has spent the past seven years digitizing the archive to preserve it. The original negatives remain in good condition, but Bessette knows they won’t last forever. Each image preserves another piece of prairie history before it’s lost.
Photo Credit: Homestead Aerial Photo. Photo taken in 1958 of a farmyard in the Smoky Lake District of Alberta.
