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Photojournalists provide us an essential glimpse into lives outside of our own.

In a time of generative AI and a deluge of images of anything we can imagine, photojournalists ground us firmly in reality. They are by nature always out in communities — there is no work-from-home option for a photojournalism assignment — and documenting real peoples’ lived experiences.

Here, I offer some reflections on some of my favourite photos from The Narwhal’s 2024 reporting in Ontario. These spectacular images showcase some of our best on-the-ground work of the year.

‘Bou!’

After car troubles and a fake motel booking, reporter Emma McIntosh’s trip to Wawa and Marathon, Ont. — and many points in between on the Lake Superior coast — was starting to look a bit grim. She sarcastically changed the name of the group chat, on which she sent us updates, to “Emma’s trip is going so well!”

But then the message came: “Bou!”

After hours on a boat, weaving through the Slate Islands, 200-or-so kilometres from Thunder Bay, Ont., she and photographer Christopher Katsarov Luna spotted a single caribou. The buck, with a massive rack, was paddling across a straight between islands and stopped for a moment to glimpse them in the distance. Christopher didn’t flinch, capturing that moment of shared recognition.

Emma and Christopher were in northern Ontario speaking with people, and taking in the sights, to report on the state of the tiny herd of Lake Superior caribou. 

Local First Nations have been making valiant efforts to bring the population back from the brink, including relocating caribou by helicopter to islands safe from predators, but support from the provincial government has been limited.

Changes in the freeze-up of Lake Superior that brings predators to their doorstep, the abundance of lichen for them to eat and their very limited gene pool all play into the Lake Superior caribou’s chances at survival.

Good things grow

Wide swaths of land cut through many Canadian cities, carrying the power lines that let us turn on our lights and plug in our … well, everything. More often than not it’s a grassy knoll, maybe some low brush has grown up. 

In Toronto, in corridors running parallel to each other between Thorncliffe Park and Scarborough, two Indigenous farmers and their gitigaanan, or “little farm” in Ojibway, are bringing traditional agricultural practices back to Treaty 13 and Williams Treaties territory.

Unsung heroes of the pumpkin patch

We all know bees are important — right? But what we don’t always recognize is how much work native bees do, and how important it is to protect them.

While honeybees may be more easily recognizable and known by the non-apiarists among us, the roughly 800 different types of bees that are native to Canada are doing a lot of the heavy-lifting when it comes to pollination. And large-scale modern agriculture practices are putting them at risk.

I hope you enjoyed checking out few of our best photos from Ontario this year — sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on even more stories in 2025!

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