Roads, a book of my photographs that will be published in October 2010 by Fifth House Publishers (a Fitzhenry & Whiteside company).

The motivation behind Roads was simple. On reviewing my photographs one day, I noticed that I included roads in many of them. This led to the idea of producing a collection of images from all over Canada, with each one including (not necessarily in a prominent position, but somewhere) a road; of having a balance of landscape, rural/small town and urban photographs; and of covering as much of Canada as I could within the time and resource constraints that I faced, and (for reasons related to ease of travel) to do a relatively small amount of the work in winter. Apart from these general considerations, I did not have a plan to photograph specific scenes or locales. 

A particular way of seeing the country evolved out of the decision to include a road in every photograph. Whether or not people are visible in the frame, there is a human presence in the landscape in every image. As well, including a road narrowed the field of possible images – only a tiny portion of Canada’s landmass is accessible by road – but even within that stricture there was room for considerable variety. Lastly – and this was something that I couldn’t fully appreciate until I was well into the project – there was an interesting challenge in terms of photographic composition. There are only so many ways to include a road in a photograph; some repetition is inevitable (and is not necessarily a bad thing). But to keep up my own interest and for the sake of viewers, I tried to avoid too much repetition. I looked for fresh points of view and different ways to incorporate a road within the frame of the photograph.

Luck and circumstance played an important role in what I was able to produce. For example, my trip through the Gaspé region of Quebec was less fruitful that it might have been because of constant rain. Even so, it was possible to create images that I liked, but the results depended to an important extent on factors beyond my control. For example, I shot the photograph “Lighthouse” in a fine, blowing mist that almost instantly coated my lens. But as luck would have it, the lighthouse was downwind of my position, so I was able to use my body as a windbreak to keep the lens dry. 

I was born and raised in northwestern Ontario, and this has left me especially sensitive to the idea of people being isolated and small in a big and harsh landscape; of carving out a place to live and prosper in that landscape; and of the impermanence and flimsiness of human endeavor relative to the landscape.   It also given me a fondness for industrial scenes – mills, mines and ports – which some regard as a blight on the landscape but which I find powerful and beautiful. The photographs in this book attempt to express these ideas and the emotions that accompany them. I want to convey a sense of place; a sense of what it feels like, to me, to be somewhere. 

Perhaps it’s because Canada is still young and raw that the tension created by the encroachment of the landscape on our living spaces could possibly make sense as a defining characteristic of the Canadian sense of place. Somewhere in the shared Canadian memory there must be a recollection of efforts to hold on to a place to live in an unforgiving environment. I suspect that even Canadians born and raised in large cities may feel this. The painter and sculptor Harold Town in his introduction to Canada with Love, a book of Canadian photographs, wrote that Canada has “no superb urban centres to soundproof us from the call of the wild.” No matter how settled we may feel, there is a part of us that understands the fragility, the tenuousness, of our position, and the magnitude of what we are up against.

I carried the same idea with me as I travelled around Canada taking photographs for Roads. The connecting thread was the road, the ubiquitous sign of man’s presence in and movement across the landscape. Everywhere, in every image, the road is a reminder of the human urge – benevolent or malignant, as the case may be – to conquer, to overcome, to appropriate, to build, to make a mark, to communicate, to carve out territory, and above all, to get somewhere. Every road carries its own stories of human ambition and frustration and longing and striving – stories that echo off the unhearing landscape, and that, like tire tracks in dust, fade and are over-written.

In all of the travel required to take these photographs, I had the opportunity to see more of Canada than most Canadians ever will. It has been the experience of a lifetime. My baggage included a particular way of seeing the country. I don’t know for certain whether this had anything to do with being Canadian, but I would like to think that it did. I keep coming back to the idea that what each one of us sees is filtered through our “essence”. As I stood on, beside and above roads all across Canada, I saw visions of a fragile and transient human presence in a landscape that was variously beautiful, harsh, magnificent and desolate. Did I see things this way because I was born and raised in Canada, and, particularly, because of where I spent my childhood? I’m sure that that is not the complete explanation; the borderless vagaries of heredity and personality certainly had something to do with what I have produced here. On the other hand, I can’t help but believe that the way of seeing captured in these photographs is somehow the product of a Canadian essence that opens our eyes to a shared sense of place.