Peter Pitseolak, photographer, artist, writer (b on Nottingham I, NWT Nov 1902; d at Cape Dorset, NWT 30 Sept 1973). A camp leader, he recognized early that traditional Inuit life was disappearing and strove to record its passing, writing diaries, notes and manuscripts, drawing Inuit customs and legends, and photographing the life around him.
He photographed over a 20-year period, and after his death more than 1500 negatives, images increasingly valued as an insider's record of the final moments of Inuit camp life, were purchased from his widow for the National Museums of Canada. A fine artist, he is credited too with Cape Dorset's earliest contemporary works on paper: watercolour drawings executed in 1939 for John N.S. Buchan, later 2nd Baron Tweedsmuir, at the time a fur trader with the Hudson's Bay Co. Shortly before his death, Pitseolak put down in Inuit syllabics the story of his early life (published in 1975 as People from Our Side, with oral biography by D. Eber) and an account of near disaster among the ice floes (published in 1977 as Peter Pitseolak's Escape from Death, D. Eber, ed).
See also Inuit Art; Inuit Printmaking.