Dion Manastyrski says he’s fascinated by the things that used to be on the Prairies but actually never left.
The west coast photographer with an interest in abandoned spaces spent the past decade building a portfolio of images of farmhouses and long forgotten equipment.
The aging buildings and rusty antiques are common sites from prairie roadways, and Manastyrski is no stranger to them.
His visits hearken back to his days growing up on a small farm near Rose Valley, Sask.
“I remember when I was seven years old, we would get on our bikes and we would disappear for the whole day, exploring all over the place,” said Manastyrski, whose grandparents came to Saskatchewan as homesteaders.
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“We would go to some of these old places. Even back then, I just thought it was fascinating.”
Manastyrski, who now lives in Victoria, left the province following high school, but said he retained a connection to the Prairies. Over the years, he’d return to his family farm and observe how farming was changing and rural communities evolving from a time when small family farms covered the landscape.
“I saw enough to know how rich that whole rural life was and still is,” he said. “It’s just changed a lot.”
Beginning in 2003, he began making trips back to Western Canada with his camera, taking drives through Saskatchewan and Manitoba and snapping shots of the ramshackle, often decrepit and sometimes hidden structures that remain from some of Saskatchewan’s earliest settlers.
“I enjoy the subject matter. I find a lot of people do as well. I don’t know exactly why,” he said.
“I think there’s mystery in it and there’s a nostalgia to it.”
Manastyrski’s earliest trips were made with a photo book in mind, but the idea eventually began to expand.
He interviewed 70 rural residents, mostly senior citizens and retired farmers, about their lifestyle and aspirations growing up: farming before modern machinery, attending one room schools and adapting to new technology.
He also asked them how they felt about changes in rural Canada.
Manastyrski hopes the book he is working on will blend his photos, archival images and the words of his interviewees.
“It’s really intended to be the beautiful story that it is. What happened in the last 100 years on the Prairies was incredible,” he said.
“You had people coming in from all over the world with huge hopes and dreams to start new lives. They had an opportunity to have something you could never have back in their home countries: their own land and a farm.”
Manastyrski is raising money to self-publish his hardcover photo book, Prairie Sunset: A Story of Change, on the crowd-funding web-site Indiegogo.
“Who were these people? What were their lives like and why did they leave everything behind,” says Manastyrski in a video on his website.
Customers who pledge to Manastyrski’s campaign are buying a copy of the book before it’s published.
“Most of the work here is trying to get people to believe in crowd-funding,” he said.
