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.
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.
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.
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…
I just returned from Vancouver where for the past two weeks I’ve been working on Vectorial Elevation– a large-scale interactive light installation created by artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. The piece uses 20 10,000-watt robotic searchlights situated around English Bay. Just a touch more light than I’m used to working with. Using www.vectorialvancouver.net, people can create their own virtual light “sculpture” online which will eventually appear in real life. Fun stuff, if I don’t say so myself.
In other news, I’ll be giving a presentation about my experiences underneath Montreal this Thursday at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. More details here.
So this is what happens when your Canon 30D decides to take a photo one second after falling into three feet of water/sewage. Kind of pretty, isn’t it? Unfortunately I wasn’t really going for the experimental look, though. This was bound to happen eventually since I’m constantly pushing the limits of what my tripod is capable of handling. The water in this stretch wasn’t flowing particularly fast, but I guess it was deep enough to cause some instability when I wasn’t keeping an eye on things.
Since last night I’ve applied a number of extreme measures to help save the camera including dunking it in distilled water, rinsing it out with isopropyl alcohol. My lens, which is probably worth more than the camera itself at this point, doesn’t look very good right now either, but hopefully some silica gel packets (if I can find them) will help clear out the fog and microbe infested water droplets inside.
In other (better) news, a podcast segment I did for Spacing Magazine about exploring the sewers of Montreal was put online today.
I also found out that I’ll be working as a designer for Rafael Lozano-Hemmer‘s studio here in Montreal which I couldn’t be more excited about.
So basically other than the camera thing, life is pretty good.
Update: The camera’s functioning again except for the LCD screen, but I think that can probably be replaced easily enough. The important thing is that it’s still able to take pictures and write to the memory card. I was also able to get all the water out of the lens by dismantling it as much as I could and running a hairdryer through it for about half an hour. And to think I almost sent it off to the manufacturer to be repaired..
Here’s a little quote that I discovered the other day that I’m quite fond of. Taken from the book City A-Z, which conveniently enough, can be browsed through online.
The sewers are the hidden underground beyond time. Unlike the carefully counted, quantified, rationalized into the time-space orders of the above-ground city, the sewers are the randomness of what is left over. These are mythic bowels of the city, repository of unacknowledged histories. This is where all sorts of family dirt ends up.
*Insert obligatory “sorry for the lack up updates” statement here*
A fresh post is coming up tomorrow and it’ll be far better than this one, I promise.
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