SASKATOONEXPRESS - April 30-May 6, 2018 - Page 1
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Volume 17, Issue 17, Week of April 30, 2018
Thelma Pepper: A longtime love of photography
Shannon Boklaschuk Saskatoon Express helma Pepper is living proof that people should pursue their passions at any age. The Saskatoon resident was 60 years old when she rekindled an interest in photography that was first sparked during her youth. Her father and grandfather were passionate amateur photographers, and Pepper spent many hours in the darkroom printing pictures as a young woman living in Nova Scotia. Now 97 years old — she will celebrate her 98th birthday in July — Pepper continues to be a productive and influential photographer of provincial, national and international acclaim. She is known for her black and white portraits of people living in Saskatchewan, a province that she has come to identify as her adopted home. Pepper’s work has received a number of Canada Council for the Arts and Saskatchewan Arts Board grants. In 2011, when Pepper was 90, her book Human Touch: Portraits of Strength, Courage and Dignity, was shortlisted for the book-of-the-year honour at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. In 2014, Pepper was among the Lieutenant Governor’s Art Awards recipients, receiving recognition for her lifetime achievement. Now, during a ceremony in May, Pepper and five other Saskatchewan citizens will be invested with the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, the province’s highest honour. The Saskatchewan Order of Merit was established in 1985 to recognize excellence and achievements from outstanding citizens and is recognized in the national sequence of orders by the federal govern-
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Thelma Pepper will be invested with the Saskatchewan Order of Merit this month. (Photo by Gord Pepper) ment. While Pepper plans to attend the ceremony, she is humble when asked about her accomplishments. “I guess I was lucky, wasn’t I, that I had a darkroom in my home in Kingston,” said Pepper, noting the important role family has played in her life. “I give the credit to my dad, because he so believed in me and in thinking I could do things,” she said.
Pepper was born in 1920 in Kingston, N.S., where her parents operated L.D. Stevens General Store and her grandparents operated S.S. Stevens Lumber Company. A sports enthusiast, Pepper went to Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., with an entrance scholarship. She was a member of the tennis team and received her undergraduate degree in 1941, before heading to McGill University in Montreal to pursue a master’s degree in botany.
Pepper had wanted to study chemistry, but that the subject was not seen as a fit for women at the time and she was encouraged to focus on botany instead. Ironically, she met her future husband, Jim, a chemist, while she was teaching a botany lab to chemistry students at McGill in 1942. “I think I still got one of his lab sheets that says, ‘You can do better,’ ” Pepper said with a chuckle. (Continued on page 13)
May 4-6, 2018
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