This past summer I spent some time photographing on the outskirts
of Ottawa, at the intersection where the city meets the country.

Here’s my writing about the project (a riff on nostalgia) and a few
of the pix……

INTERSECTION

You can’t find this intersection on any map. It’s not there, it has no real
defined latitude and longitude. It keeps shifting. It morphs. Slowly. Surely.

But if you look around you can see it right before your eyes. There, as you
drive by (you hardly ever walk), something new growing at the edge of a
field, the tree line in the near distance.

In my head (before I started this assignment) I pictured a photographic
treatise on the romance of the edge of Ottawa, on the topographic of my
youth. The landscape that I saw sitting in the back of the family Studebaker,
all those years ago, as we drove (for some reason) to the edge of town. Motels
that aren’t Super 8’s, a general store, not a 7 eleven, righteous diners instead
of fast food. I wanted to show these old structures and commercial concerns
resisting the erosion of the city’s relentless expansion.

But once I started this project I quickly came to the realization that you can’t
go back. (I knew it all along.) The camera is a time machine, but it can only
freeze the present, it can’t look back. That’s up to you.

So here are some scenes from the edge of town, 2007. One day in the future you’ll
be driving by, further out, looking at an entirely different (but eerily similar) landscape
and think to yourself: I remember when…..