The photograph above, along with two others, are currently available for sale via the Toronto-based Circuit Gallery. The gallery is collaborating with Alphabet City to offer a series of limited edition artworks drawn from Alphabet City’s projects and publications. The first collaboration relates to WATER, which was co-published with MIT Press. My partner in crime, Michael Cook of vanishingpoint.ca also has three photos available.
Part of the proceeds from the sale of these photographs will be used to pay for the legal fees incurred during my arrest earlier in the year. If you’ve ever been interested in purchasing one of my photos, this would be the perfect opportunity.
In case you’re wondering about the quality of the prints, from the Circuit Gallery website, These editions, supervised by the artist, are printed with archival pigment inks on a matte Fine Art paper. The ink and paper combination have a display permanence rating of 150+ years. All our prints are made with the greatest attention to quality and a concern for permanence.
Thanks to Claire and Susanna at Circuit Gallery for coordinating this, and to Michael as well.
One of the good things to come out of last year’s article in the Montreal Gazette about lost rivers was the opportunity to meet Katarina Soukup of Catbird Productions. After reading the story, Katarina emailed me expressing interest in producing a documentary on the subject using my work as a starting point. I was admittedly a bit skeptical that anything would happen, but after meeting up with her in person it became clear that this was something she was enthusiastic and intent on developing.
A few months later with a director now on board, I brought a small film crew underground during which I rambled on about my experiences and the history of Montreal’s sewer system. The result was this short promotional video that would be used to pitch the documentary to various parties. (Just in case it isn’t obvious, I’m the devilishly handsome fellow wearing the hat and chest-waders)
Since then the documentary has received funding from the National Film Board, Radio Canada and Studio XX. The scope of the project has also grown to include other cities around the world that have made attempts to recover or raise awareness of ‘lost rivers.’
Production is set to begin later this year. More details can be found here or on the project’s Facebook page.
Inside Toronto's Garrison Creek relief sewer, where problems first began.
The past month or so has been interesting, to say the least. I suppose that followers of this site are used to sporadic updates by now. Usually it’s because other things are keeping me busy or distracted and while my trip to Greece has certainly kept me busy, this last bout of inactivity stemmed from more serious matters.
A local news broadcast from Toronto is a good a primer to the situation:
So I’m back in Greece again this year. After getting married here last summer, my wife and I decided to make a return trip and stay a for an extended period of time. Four and a half months to be exact. We’re just over two weeks in and are starting to get settled into our little apartment here in Athens. I’m really looking forward to getting to know this city better. Right now the scale (and sprawl) of Athens is a bit overwhelming, but it’s nice to know I’ll have the opportunity to digest it properly.
On the topic of underground matters, in lieu of recent events (more on this later) I’ve decided to use the time here to photograph other subject matter for a change. I’m just not quite sure what that’s going to be. In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of walking around, investigating different neighbourhoods, trying to get my head around the city a bit first before I start committing things to film.
I have been playing around with an old Polaroid Land camera and Fuji instant film though. While not exactly my style, I have to admit it works well for certain things here. I don’t have a film scanner with me so I had to improvise by taping the negative to a sheet of glass, holding it up against the sky and taking a photo of it with the digital camera. A bit of tweaking in Photoshop and voila:
Butchers, Athens central market (Varvakios Agora)
Anyway, that’s all about Greece for now. I can’t say that Montreal will be on my mind so often, but there’s still a lot of material that I’ve accumulated while journeying beneath its streets, and I look forward to having the time to write about it all while here.
“The drains, too, this hot weather, at their grated bars tell tales of the stagnant petulance imprisoned within them.” – regarding the Craig Street sewer, Montreal Witness, 1872.
“It was a constant fight against humidity, disease and decay. It seemed as though all the crap that had oozed from the slums of Montreal for over a century had collected here.” – Marcel Talon’s account of the sewer, 1993.
Since launching this website just over a year ago, three questions I’ve been asked most frequently have involved what sewers smell like, how I get down there to begin with, and whether or not I’ve ever run into anyone else while inside of them. The first two make a good deal of sense. After all, who wouldn’t want to know what raw sewage smells like? And how does one get inside a sewer?
But the third question involving encounters with other people is a curious one mostly because it hasn’t happened yet. Not only that, but I can’t ever imagine it happening either- at least not here in Montreal. Our sewers aren’t exactly the most easily accessible things in the world, nor are they the most hospitable of places. I’m not even sure how often people working for the city venture underground to have a look at things these days. The preferred method seems to involve the use of remote controlled video inspection systems.
The question likely stems from the often mythical stories from elsewhere around the world involving people found underground, from the “Mole People” of New York City, to the Cataphiles of Paris. Of course, Hollywood movies and various popular works of fiction have long relied on the underground as a staple home to a variety of miscreants and monsters. Perhaps it’s scenes such as this that come to mind whenever a city’s sewers are mentioned:
Most well-known stories involving the underground tend to be set in places other than Montreal though. CBC journalist Brian Stewart once stated: “No one has ever sought to rhapsodize over Montreal’s sewers, however, and certainly no one ever famous has seen fit to hide there.”
But despite this, it would be a mistake to pretend that there hasn’t been a long history of people who have passed through these systems.
For the most part, this aspect of Montreal’s history may not exactly be the stuff that legends are made of, but it is one that deserves to be documented in more detail than it has already.
Just a quick note to mention that I’ve added a new gallery to the site containing a good deal of historical photos that I’ve scanned from the Montreal City Archives. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of photographic material out there and next to nothing that predates the 1920s. Most of these were taken between 1955-65 and only really show the one style of construction that was popular at the time. Of course, I think the faces of the people in a lot of the photos more than make up for this.
While in Toronto this past weekend, I managed to take a (very) quick dip down into an overflow section of the Garrison sewer system. Thanks to Michael, Jon, Jeremy and Bryan for the short but sweet tour. I plan on setting aside an entire weekend in the near future to be able to see more of what this historic system has to offer.
I’ve always been curious about how well underground locations can be recorded using digital video. Up until fairly recently my only experiences with video came through point and shoot digital cameras. Of course the quality left a lot to be desired and I wasn’t really sure what it would take to get better results. So when a friend of mine in Toronto told me that he wanted to film a piece underground using some professional recording gear on loan from Ryerson University, I was more than eager to help him out.
I ended up taking him (along with a sound man and my wife) to ‘Humble Howard’ , a beautiful century-old brick sewer that I thought would work well enough. That said, I was initially disappointed by the raw footage that I first saw from the camera. Despite my best attempts to illuminate the 3 meter high pipe using all the light power I had with me at the time, things still looked relatively dark and grainy. I’m starting to think there’s no way around it unless you’re shooting in relatively close quarters.
Regardless of that, though, he did end up putting together the lovely mosaic above and while it lacks in brightness, it does a great job of depicting the actual experience of being underground. Being there is often slow and repetitive, and even meditative to a certain extent. Continue reading…
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