Robert Joseph Flaherty photographs of Arctic peoples

Robert Joseph Flaherty (1884-1951) was born in Iron Mountain, Michigan, and spent his childhood traveling with his family to the mining regions in Michigan, Minnesota, and Canada. Formally educated at Upper Canada College and Michigan College of Mines, he mostly studied geology and engineering subjects. After leaving the Michigan College of Mines and marrying Frances Hubbard, Flaherty settled in Port Arthur (Thunder Bay), working as a surveyor and prospector across Canada. His father introduced him to Sir William Mackenzie, who was building a trans-Canada railroad (now the Canadian National Railway), and Mackenzie commissioned Flaherty to study the Nastapoka Islands. During this expedition (1910-1911), Flaherty developed a relationship with the Great Whale Inuit Camp. He completed three more expeditions (1911-1912, 1913-1914, and 1915-1916) for Mackenzie, during which he took numerous photographs and filmed the Inuit during his later expeditoins to Baffin Island and Belcher Islands. In 1920, Flaherty met Captain Thierry Mallet of Revillon Freres and convinced him to support a filmmaking expedition to the company's sub-arctic fur trading post, Port Harrison on Cape Dufferin. By the 1920-1921 expedition to Port Harrison (Inukjuak), Flaherty was focusing almost exclusively on film documentation, and most of his photographic work appears oriented toward the production of the film. Ultimately, Flaherty produced the first commercially successful feature length documentary film and the pioneering ethnographic film, Nanook of of the North (1922).