Salmon and Cedar

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Thursday, October 7, 2010 | 5 photos

My name is Martyn Aim and I am a New-Zealand born photographer. I have an MA Visual Anthropology with training in documentary photography and filmmaking and an MPhil in Social Anthropology. For my fieldwork I spent a year living in Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations communities in Canada. Some of this work can be seen in the entry images. It was during this period that I grew to believe in photography as a powerful tool to communicate across cultures. I am now wholly committed to becoming a professional photographer. In some ways I already am - I have happily invested considerable time, effort and finances traveling and photographing. Yet, so far, I have not netted that elusive first break allowing me to fully make photography my life. Following is an introduction to my submitted photograph story entitled:

Salmon and Cedar

The novelist Victor Hugo wrote that, ”anywhere one can dream is good, provided the place is obscure, and the horizon is vast‚ The west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, is such a place. To do justice to this mythic landscape is near impossible, but few writers and artists who visited would be able to resist an attempt. Clayoquot Sound is a rugged paradise, home to the Nuu-chah-nulth people, a political alliance of First Nations related through blood, culture, and language. Life's beauty and violence, struggle and celebration, are played out in these coastal villages, far removed from the gleeful tourism brochures of the Pacific Northwest.

Thank you for your time and consideration.