Claude Guérin

For more than twenty years, Claude Guérin has traveled across various regions of Quebec and Ontario in search of a modest, ephemeral architecture, often on the verge of ruin. Fishing and hunting cabins, sheds of all kinds, old garages, farm buildings—small, unarchitected structures with uses that are sometimes clear and purposeful, and at other times undefined, simply there.

Working with a frontal approach similar to that of Edward Ruscha in the United States—who notably documented gas stations (Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963)—or that of the duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, who used the same technique to capture industrial buildings, water towers, and silos over nearly forty years, Claude Guérin has built an immense body of work devoted to these cabins scattered across our territory—an ethnological record, an inventory of a neglected ephemeral heritage.

He draws us into the path of his tender gaze upon these modest structures. More than a hundred thousand photographs bear witness to his obsession with the distinctiveness and beauty of these simple cabins. Through sustained observation, we are won over by his vision. We come to understand the personalities of fishing cabins—gems of humor and affection tied to a convivial activity where laughter is common—and, in contrast, the more discreet hunting blinds, where long, silent waits unfold, camouflaged or not. Cabins so different, yet often inhabited by the same people.

There is no one in these photographs, and yet you can feel the hours of a life spent pursuing a passion rooted in nature and in the ancestral culture of the people of our land.

Claude Guérin’s gaze—constantly sharpening and becoming more refined—also turns to cabins scattered here and there: small rural school bus shelters or old buildings with imprecise functions.

His infectious obsession opens our eyes and hearts to these simple things, revealing that happiness can spring from within a four-square-metre cabin, and that often, a cabin is more than just a cabin.