12 Photographs from Fort Saskatchewan and 12 from Toronto. (A Show Submission, First Draft, Ft Sask Library)


My relationship with the Fort is elliptical. I have moved away from it and back to it, half a dozen times, not including biyearly vacations to Vancouver, Victoria and other west coast destinations since I was 15. Like most small town boys with ambitions, I feel conflicted about my hometown—I don’t like it mostly. I find it too small, too narrow and too prickly for me to stay. So I leave, I spend four months, or a year in Edmonton, 6 in Toronto, and I come back. Coming back, to this place, for me has the stench of failure. (Even in my adolescence, I took junior high and high school away from here.)

Can I admit that, in the beginning, trying to get a show here—at the library? (I have used this library for all of my life, I went to cub scouts as this library, play groups during the summer, for a year the LDS church met here, when I was still a member, and when I returned from Toronto, I returned here. Refuge and safety, the library in the small town works as churches in a medieval village—a neutral place away from power, attempting to further education and social goals. It is a place we call sanctuary. It is the closest to home.

It is also downtown, and a place that I found beautiful. I thought that I had escaped when I came to Toronto, a city of millions, and I thought of all the buildings I saw, from Robertson Romanesque, to classic modernist sky scrapers, to bricouler postmodernism, and why I loved the small, vernacular intimacies of the library, the post office, the Brant hotel, the Fort Hotel, the houses in the old part of town, near Ross and Lowe Drive, was because that was the best we had. Had is the operative word here, all of the places that I have mentioned are downtown. With Westpark estates working in symbiotic relationships with the highway strip. Those in Westpark, work in the plants, and shop at wal mart, and do not have to interact with the downtown---imagine their presence as slowly, but surely cutting off the oxygen. But then we do not often think of preserving these old buildings anyways.

The White Clapboard United Church is torn down, the burnished maple and pebbled linoleum is gone from the post office, and we no longer have a Saan Store (Our Fields is also in jeopardy.) Every time I come back home, the west park, and the businesses near the highway, are growing and the downtown is dying. The downtown is what marks us psycho-geographically.

The 12 photos of Fort Saskatchewan are what I would show Toronto folks, to indicate why I think the town is worth preserving, they are the small negations of place and time that make Alberta towns so different and so consistent They are the Alberta that my mother’s father in Harmattan and my father’s mother in Galahad saw. The small town details. The Polaroid exaggerates colours, they make the sky more blue, the canola more yellow and the plastic signs more red—but the colours on the prairie are exaggerated already. They also act as a ritual of remembrance. I do not think I can stay here, and sooner rather then later, when I am in some bedsit on College and Lawrence or Jane and Finch, I want to remind myself of the Fort, and I want to tell other people why this town is in me. I want also, to remind myself of how it existed before the death by Wal Mart.

This brings me to the 12 photos of Toronto. Taken from my trip there between mid September and early October, they also act as rituals of remembrance Sometimes obvious and touristy (the black monolith that is Mies Van Der Rohe’s center at King, or the crimson street cars..) Sometimes small and intimate (reminding myself how bathrooms in parks are such a rarity in Alberta, and how they act as public free spaces.) They are small enough to hold in my hands, small enough to take home with me, and small enough to act as reminder, that I want to move back here, I want to live in Toronto. This is not a popular opinon, the west hates the east—ones personal and family history is littered with slogans and dinner time conversations, about the eastern bastards freezing in the dark, and the globe and mail being for eastern elitists or phone conversations about how those in Toronto, never understand our literture. . But, to be honest to myself, as a queer man, as a man with interests outside small towns, I am reminded of the English band Bronski Beat, who sing in Small Town Boy, “Always a lonely boy/You were the one/That they’d talk about around town.” There is something to be said, about the anonymous harshness in big cities, where one is rewarded for Chutzpah and the only way that yr parents come up is if one tells.)

(That said, the photo I have shown in Toronto, and my writing career there and in other American centers, has been about Country, the music and the landscape—there is something exotic and marketable about being from the west—some remaining, cowboy ethos that is rewarded)

These photos then, work in tension with each other, as a sort of roman a livre, about ambition, and geogpraphy, in the large and small changes that occur in the places where one lives. The photos here then, are about placement, an even number, one more then my age, suggest a future looking and a past placement, in a larger poltical context.