Mick Hartley

Set up for ice fishing on the lakes of Canada during the winter months, these structures are necessarily make-shift and temporary: they have to go before the warm weather returns. Photographer Richard Johnson has been documenting them:

As the ice reaches thicknesses over four inches, it becomes safe to walk on, and at more than five inches, it is usually safe for snowmobiles. Then, in droves, residents take to the lakes. Ontario’s 279-square-mile Lake Simcoe, for example, draws more people for its ice fishing than any other lake in North America, attracting upwards of 4,000 huts each year.

The colorful villages of hand-built structures that populate many popular spots during the coldest months caught the eye of Toronto-based architectural photographer Richard Johnson (1957-2021), who captured hundreds of the structures, from the artistic to the ad-hoc, in a series of bold portraits taken between 2007 and 2019.

[Photos © Richard Johnson]