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Roads, a book of my photographs, will be released by Fifth House Publishers (a Fitzhenry & Whiteside company) in October 2010. Roads will feature photographs from across Canada. There will be a road, somewhere, in every image.

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.  The photographs in Roads 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. 

I carried this 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.

Many of the images displayed in this portfolio will appear in Roads. I hope you enjoy looking at them and will consider purchasing the book in October 2010.

I am grateful to the governments of Alberta, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon, as well as to the Canadian Tourism Commission, for providing support to cover some of my travel costs.