Face to Face (photograph)
photo taken in 1990 during the Oka Crisis
Face to Face is a photograph of Canadian Army soldier Patrick Cloutier and Ojibwe activist Brad Larocque staring each other down during the Oka Crisis. It was taken on September 1, 1990, by Shaney Komulainen, and has become one of Canada's most famous images.
Events
Komulainen was working as a freelance photographer for The Canadian Press. On September 1, she had been assigned to the South Shore, the site of the Mohawk blockade of the Mercier Bridge. She heard on the radio that the Canadian Army was moving, and called to secure permission from Canadian Press manager Bill Grimshaw to go to the area known as "The Pines" where the photograph was taken.
When Komulainen saw the face-to-face confrontation, she was struck by Cloutier's face: "It just struck me that his face was so young. He was military, but he was so young." At least three warriors approached Cloutier in this time of confrontations. In video of the standoff, the voice of Larocque can be heard speaking to Cloutier: "Are you nervous? [...] Not scared, though, are you?" Komulainen recalls that Larocque explained to the man in front of him the sensation of a bullet entering the human body. The voice was later misidentified as belonging to Ronald "Lasagna" Cross who had featured prominently earlier in the dispute.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Face to Face (photograph)” is photo taken in 1990 during the Oka Crisis. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Face, photograph and photo, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “photo taken in 1990 during the Oka Crisis” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q97666444. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Face to Face (photograph)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.