Shoot Anything, Anytime!

The Northern Photography of Henry Busse

Henry Busse was born in Germany in 1896 and was a veteran of WWI who immigrated to Canada in 1927 and worked at a number of odd jobs throughout western Canada before heading north to the Northwest Territories. There his love of photography came to the forefront with a vengeance. He opened the first commercial photography studio, the first in the whole territory, in the capital of Yellowknife in 1947.

His motto ‘Shoot Anything, Anytime!’ was one he lived by and he was seldom without his camera: taking studio portraits, photos at local events, and photos out on the bush and tundra. His knack for capturing a personality, a mood, was evident as was his catalogue of Dene and Inuit subjects. He died in a northern plane crash in 1962 but his photography lives on as thousands of his negatives are now part of the Northwest Territory Archives.

An Inuk elder (sometimes mistakenly identified as Inuk artist Helen Kalvek)

Rose Drygeese (studio portrait)

Mary Louise Crapeau Baillargeon (Yellowknives Dene) with two eagles.

📷 Henry Busse | NWT Archives