Lorette photographer releases second rural Manitoba book
Advertisement
Dianne Demarcke loves four things: History, small towns, trivia, and photography. So, it was only natural that she would combine the four to make two coffee table books Three Days in Rural Manitoba, and her newly released second book, Three More Days in Rural Manitoba.
“What I do is (I) look to see what is unique about (the town). I try to find information on who started the town? How it came to be? Where did the name come from? and something unique about the town,” she said.
Each book covers 54 towns and has full colour photographs that accompany the write-ups.
“It inspires people to go and see these things,” she said.
Demarcke has been a professional photographer for 49 years having started when her mother saw an ad in the paper.
“My husband at the time left me so I needed a job that would support my daughter and I because he didn’t want to support us. My mother saw an ad in the paper that they were training photographers at Sooters and the government was kicking in so it was good wages at the time so I took it and eventually I opened my own franchise.”
Demarcke owned the franchise for 10 years and then opened Dianne Demercke Photography until she semi-retired in 2014. She won the Sooter Studios’ Photographer of the Year Award and served on the board of directors for the Professional Photographers Association of Manitoba. Her writing has appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul, Women’s World, and Prairie Writers.
The idea for her books came from three-day road trips she used to take with her friends around Manitoba from Lorette, her home base. The first trip was to Inglis to see the last group of five grain elevators in Canada.
“You could probably do 10 books on the towns in Manitoba. When we started out we were only doing the east and then we started venturing forth here and there,” she said.
She said her books document a point in time in rural Manitoba.
“(I’m hoping) That they’ll see that a lot of our towns are fading. They’re becoming ghost towns as everyone is going urban. I’m a small-town girl. I was born and raised in Laurier, Manitoba, and we moved to Lorette in 1961… I love small towns and people in small towns seem friendlier. When we were driving around we would be taking pictures and people would wave to us or they’d come up and say, ‘What are you doing?’ and we’d tell them and you don’t get that in the cities…We’ve gotten some really good stories from some people.”
Demarcke is surprised that her first book did so well that she ran three printings of it since its release in 2020. Her newly released second book has already sold 100 copies.
“One guy drove down from Brandon to buy my (second) book. I was shocked.”
“I’m going to be doing a book three. I already have 17 towns that I couldn’t fit into this book that are ready to go. This one will be a little bit tougher because my partners are not in good health so they can’t go too far. Just going to have to find another spotter,” she said, noting a spotter is someone who spots unique things in the town they drive through.