Putting the interest in human interest

News photographers are always their papers’ greatest ambassadors. While reporters show up to ask intrusive questions — threatening to reveal your deepest secrets — photographers are there to capture your image in the best possible light, to make you immortal.

But even by that happy standard, Dirk Aberson, a photographer for The Brandon Sun for 32 years between 1963 and 1995, was something of a civic institution.

I was a reporter at the Sun in the late 1970s, one of a legion of youngsters who learned their craft faster and better because they got to work beside Dirk. Unfailingly cheerful, unstintingly gracious and endlessly curious, Dirk could walk up any street or into any room and, if he didn’t have friends there already, he’d make one in minutes.

On a typical assignment — some weekend adventure to cover a farm fest in Souris or Boissevain — we’d fly there in Dirk’s 1946 Piper Cub. We’d land in some bumpy field and he’d get out to mollify the owner.

And minutes later, as I was discovering for the first time that you could use a violin bow to coax “music” out of a handsaw, I’d see Dirk — not taking photos, but chatting up the musician, some old acquaintance from farm fests past.

Dirk and I covered fires and floods, murders and their aftermath and I marvelled, always, at how he put the interest in human interest. He was forever interrupting my interviews to ask a better question than the ones I was asking, and I was grateful he did so.

He got better answers.

It was obvious to the subject that Dirk wasn’t asking because he wanted a story: he was asking because he cared.

And, having asked, he would put down his camera and listen — really listen — to the answer. What came next was always a revelation.

Dirk Aberson was born in Dauphin on Feb. 12, 1930, the third of three boys. As a young man, he tried everything from banking to road building before going to Toronto Metropolitan University (then Ryerson Polytechnic) for a three-year program in photography.

To the city’s great benefit, his next (and last) job was at The Brandon Sun.

He met and married Bev Chapin in 1969 and he bought a house on a farm property on Grand Valley Road, adding a small airplane hangar and cutting a diagonal swath across the front field where he could land the Piper Cub. For years in the late ’70s and early ’80s, that became an alternative runway where the controllers at the Brandon Municipal Airport would send the pilots of other old airplanes passing through the neighbourhood.

Dirk’s love for flying also led to one of our greatest adventures.

In 1978, in the wake of a shootout in Virden and a hostage-taking in Oak Lake, Dirk convinced then-managing editor Haroon Siddiqui that he should send us both to Sault Ste. Marie to interview and photograph Candace Adele Smith, a young RCMP officer who had been critically injured in the shooting. For the trip, Dirk rented a rented Cessna 182 from his older brother and we set out for Ontario. Just as we were approaching the Duluth International Airport, Dirk said, “I wonder what I should do now?”

This was an odd question; I’d flown with Dirk lots of times, so I had total faith in his ability. But I was still nervous about sitting in a noisy pod hanging from a plank in the sky. So, I said, “What do you mean, ‘What should you do?’”

As the radio crackled with that dry professional commentary that you hear from airport control towers, Dirk said, “Well, I wonder if I should tell them we’re here?”

It turned out that, despite years in the air, Dirk had never before flown through controlled airspace.

Around Brandon — at a time long before you could check GPS co-ordinates on your watch — his strategy for in-flight navigation was to follow the roads and, when in doubt, to dip down low enough to read the name of the town on the side of the grain elevator.

We figured it out. We made the trip and Dirk’s photos were excellent — as they continued to be for many more years.

He retired in 1995, eased out the door at a time when being 65 years old was considered a terminal fault.

It was a premature loss.

After Bev died in the late ’90s, Dirk married Jessie Washington in 2001, and the two travelled the world and, ultimately, moved to Peachland, B.C., where after a years-long struggle with dementia, Dirk died peacefully on Sept. 11.

He will be missed — but it is a lasting gift that we still have the images (as well as the memories) that he left behind.

» Richard Littlemore is a journalist, speechwriter and author living in Vancouver, B.C.