Aline Fortin - Longtime Photographer Showing Works at Library

“What drew me to taking photos was that I wanted to capture what I saw while on my travels and then showing them to my friends,” said Fortin, recalling a time in her 20s. “They kept telling me that the photos were very good. That made me look and evaluate them in a new light.”

While she has shown her recent photo works at the Table ronde sur l’art de Mont-Royal (TRAM) exhibitions around Town of Mount Royal, Fortin will now have a month-long solo show at the Reginald-J.-P.-Dawson library (1967, boulevard Graham) starting tomorrow, November 9, and continuing until December 6. It’s part of a series of artistic works shown this year by members of the TRAM which she joined in 2004.

Entitled “On the Road” (Par les Chemins), the show will feature many scenes of natural paths from her overseas trips: a trail through a forest; a valley leading to the Austrian alps; a look through a portal on the island of Bali; or a snowblower slowly removing snow from a local street.

Throughout her many years as an Université de Montréal professor of educational management, Fortin kept up her interest in photography. Technically, she has learned how to use coloured-slide films, enlarge her own photos, scan negatives onto her computer, and do photo-editing. Though digital cameras have been around for about 10 years, she’s only now considering to buy one.

“It’s an amazing feeling when you can make just a slight improvement in colours and in cropping and get a photo look totally different,” said Fortin, who has been a resident for almost 30 years.

And while she took a few workshops as a member of the Montreal Camera Club for several years, she is very much a self-taught photographer. “When I want to do something new, it’s important for me to learn how to do it well,” she explained. “My way of learning is buying a book, reading it and practicing.”

Some of her photos have brought her prizes. In January 2000, Fortin won the “Print Competition” at the Montreal Camera Club. Three years later, she won an honourable mention for her photo of Lake Moraine (near Banff) in a contest sponsored by the Géo Plein Air Magazine. And at the 2006 TRAM Art Salon, she earned a second-place prize (chosen by a jury) for her “Sky is the Limit” photo.

Her keen interest in artistic photography in the last 10 or so years, she opined, is mostly due to her overwhelmingly intellectual activities as a management professor for many years. “Now that I’m not working, I’ve been investing in these artistic pursuits.”

Besides taking photos, she also feels exciting about photo-editing. “It’s an amazing feeling when you can make just a slight improvement in colours and in cropping and get a photo look totally different,” said Fortin, who has been a resident for almost 30 years.

In the dining-room of her residence, Fortin proudly show off two other outstanding shots where she magnificently captures shadows and angles. One is a photo of a sand dune near the western Australian coast at dusk and the other a shot of the water pavilion in Vichy, France, with sunshine flowing through its arches.

Within the TRAM artistic group, there are only about a half-dozen photographers. Last May, they contributed to a photo exhibit at the library to help highlight the Town’s new sustainable-development and tree-protection policies. Now that small group is hoping to hold

an exhibit of only photos sometime next year.

Fortin’s upcoming library show will feature photos taken on 35mm colour film with a Nikon camera with negatives digitally scanned and computer processed.

(Photo: Courtesy)