Empty streets, quiet details, places in transition…

My personal project over the last decade has been a portrait series showing Ottawa’s future crashing into its past, like a wave into a shoreline, destroying and creating at the same time.

Ottawa’s ceremonial, civic, institutional and commercial personas are at war, and the victor on any given day is determined more often by politics and economics than by our best-laid plans. Photographs show what was at a point in time, and some of these pictures inevitably show things we have lost to redevelopment, demolition or neglect. They offer evidence of Ottawa’s values, and not all of them reflect the city’s sanitized version of itself. However, they represent no agenda on my part other than to show unappreciated beauty in our everyday surroundings. As a series, they also represent a set of solutions to several self-imposed constraints: they have all been shot with the same wide-angle lens, cropped to a 2:1 aspect ratio, and desaturated to leave only shades ranging from black to white.

I find that Ottawa reveals itself most clearly around dawn on a summer Sunday morning, when virtually all of these images were made. It is then that its monuments, buildings, streets and waterways show themselves most candidly, and its role as a stage for urban life is most vivid. Without the usual cover of activity, the city presents a different and sometimes unexpected self — just as an empty stage can surprise an inquisitive visitor with its secrets.

These photographs — now numbering in the hundreds, with just a few dozen here — give us time and space to absorb things that we are normally too busy, or moving too fast, to truly take in. Many of them show places that are overlooked or unknown even to most longtime residents.

Together, they document what I call the city less seen.