Ice
Shacks

When winter comes, the ice shacks begin to appear on the frozen lakes and rivers of Canada. Small, improbable structures — built by hand, hauled out by snowmobile, sometimes no larger than a phone booth — they dot the white expanse like punctuation marks on a blank page.

I've been photographing them since 2019. Every season I strap on my nordic skis and head out onto the ice, camera in hand, following whatever draws me further out. Sometimes I find a solitary shack miles from any other. Other times I'll come across a whole cluster of them — a tiny village on a barren landscape, smoke rising from a stovepipe, the ice groaning beneath it all.

The Ice Shacks series is, on one level, a study in vernacular architecture — the improvised, the functional, the quietly eccentric. Each shack is a self-portrait of its builder. The hand-painted signs, the salvaged materials, the particular angle a door was hung. No two are the same.

On another level, it's a cultural archive of life in the North. A seasonal ritual that has been happening for generations, largely undocumented, out on the ice where no one much is watching. A little piece of Canadiana that disappears every spring and returns every winter, unchanged and changing.

The project is ongoing. As long as the lakes freeze, I'll keep going back.