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The right honourable Paul Martin's office

African Lumberjacks in Northern Québec

A growing number of forest workers in the northern Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec province come from West Africa. I recently took this photo at a camp 120 miles north of Quebec City I visited with journalist Michel Arseneault.

The camp is run by Aménagement MYR, which hired its first African employee, a man from Ivory Coast, in the late 1990s. Now, 60 per cent of the camp’s 90 employees are African-born, and the company is training two dozen more. Another local company, Foresterie DLM, is also staffed mainly by African immigrants and refugees.The workers use German-made brush cutters, power saws that look like oversize weed whackers but roar like motorcycles, to “thin” the forest - removing small deciduous trees, usually birch saplings, to allow commercially valuable spruce and fir trees to thrive. It is physically demanding work, similar to what traditional loggers did before they traded their chainsaws for massive harvesting machines, and unlike anything these men did in Africa.

Most of them speak a polished French that indicates urban middle-class backgrounds and university educations. But those qualifications often are not recognized in their new surroundings, and so to pursue their Canadian dreams - or simply to survive - they take on the punishing forestry jobs that old-stock, white Quebeckers no longer want to do.

Après-bal 2004-2008

Jimmy Hayes followed me around during my last production year of After Prom. Here is the very inspired short documentary he produced.

Sergeant veteran Caroline Annandale (new work preview)

Here's a few contact sheet scans from my most recent trip down south. A custom agent opened my box of exposed sheets of film. Let's keep it to that. Today, in retrospect, I would like to thank him very much. (Click on images for larger preview.)

Flash Forward 2008

October 9, 2008 @ Lennox Contemporary, Toronto, 12 Ossington Ave, 7pm-10 pm. (Click on image for larger preview.)

After Prom 2008 (final year)

Five years project completed. Crossing my fingers for its publication in 2009. Here's a few samples from this year's production. In the next couple weeks I will post a short documentary that Jimmy Hayes shot that night. (Click on images for larger preview.)

Seven portraits of sergeant veteran Caroline Annandale

It was Christmas Eve, dark, but 115 degrees. We marched to the air field. Weapons on shoulders, we stood in somber formation around the tarmac. All were quiet. The only sound was the mourning hum of the C1-30. Then a single voice ordered our arms and a thousand salutes cut a moment in our lives. While the left foot struck the ground, the priest waved his invisible cross over the caskets with his invisible wand. I wondered if these wooden boxes would be delivered in time for Christmas and arrive like packages under the tree, like a stork and dead baby. Might their mothers have baked cookies, might their little brothers have stayed awake waiting for Santa the night before? Then suddenly, my wish to be home for Christmas disappeared.

One night, shortly before my deployment to Iraq, I sat in the dim drunken light of a local bar. I was there with my comrade to celebrate our last night on American soil. The callused bartender eyed me. He beckoned me to lean forward and he hoarsely whispered in my ear. He quoted Robert E. Lee “It is good war is hell, lest we would love it too much.” His tone implied that this was a regular message he imparted to soldiers on the eve of deployment. My comrade asked what the bartender had whispered. I was intoxicated and repeated the words with a slight slur. Drinking our fourth and fifth beer we fantasized over our imminent adventure as soldiers in a foreign land, tasting a strange culture, encountering a dark religion, and engaging in the risks of war. Indeed, sitting at that bar, being a soldier at war sounded wildly adventurous. We were swept away by our romantic notions. Forty-eight hours later, I stepped off the troop transporter into the Iraqi desert and my romantic vision was sand blasted.

Bloody horror stories constantly circulated through camp. Tales of sniper fire, defacing gunners in the turrets of HUMMWV’s, were the meat and potatoes of mess hall chow. I started wearing more body armor. I saw soldiers missing arms and legs being evacuated in black hawks. Though not a religious person, I started whispering to God before rolling outside the wire for the next mission. When the first improvised explosive detonated beneath my commander’s truck, our hearts filled with anger and revenge. But when the next one ripped into the belly of my truck, I lost my hearing, my heart beat became irregular, and I knew my days were probably numbered.

Then I met PFC Rodriguez. This “newbie” was eighteen years old and fresh out of basic. I liked his boyish smile and suddenly felt very mature even at the age of twenty two. The next morning at dawn, PFC Rodriguez rolled out on his first mission. Newbie had been trained as a driver, but no amount of training on an American military base can prepare you for the Improvised roadside explosives. He never knew what hit him. It took the combat medic and two other soldiers nearly an hour close ambush fire to scrape his remains from the chared medal and asphalt into a body bag. Late that afternoon, I stood in my first ceremonial formation for our fallen comrade as he was loaded onto the plane and sent home. I whispered goodbye to Rodriguez as we saluted. I will never forget his face though I had only known him for a few hours. That night I referred to him as newbie in my journal. I did not know his first name.

A few weeks later I saw SPC Torres playing his guitar outside his tent. I made sure I asked for his first name and gave him mine. Kevin and I quickly became friends. The following month, Kevin rolled on his routine patrols. His convoy rolled down a side street in Kirkuk. All was quiet, a bad sign. The rocket propelled grenade entered the HUMMWV through the open turret. The explosion turned the inside of the truck into an incinerator. Four soldiers were partially cremated. By luck of the draw, Kevin had dismounted the truck before the R.P.G. struck. Early the next morning I stood next to Kevin in formation. We saluted the coffins as they departed on their final trip home. That night Kevin came to my tent. He didn’t have to wake me up, I could not sleep. That was the beginning of many nights, filled with fear of hellish nightmares.

As a young girl I had always dreamed of a white Christmas. As a soldier standing in ceremonial formation that Christmas Eve, it crossed my mind that my fallen comrades might arrive home for a snowy holiday burial. I was scheduled to be stuck in this hell hole desert for ten more months. But at least I was alive. One by one the caskets were carried into the open belly of the C1-30. A soldier behind me was humming Silent Night.

Christmas Eve by Caroline Annandale April 2007
(Click on images for larger preview.)

After Prom featured by The Walrus.

This month's Walrus magazine (april 2008) features a selection of images taken from the After Prom larger body of work. Creative Director-Antonio E. De Luca, Picture Editor-Bree Seeley (Click on images for larger preview.)

After Prom: Somewhere Between a Blade of Grass and a Blade of Steel

Over the last 5 years, I have been given the opportunity to access, witness and document a most precious and sacred milestone. Shot on the south shore of Québec City, in a small town called Lévis: this body of work portrays local graduating students at their after prom party.

Initially, the idea behind this study was to simply explore a place of transition. However, the richness and power of these subjects began to define the series not only as a mere take on passage, but as an iconic and subtly provocative visual essay on youth culture itself.

Through the stark, deliberate stares of each photographed individual, the viewers begin to enter into a powerful dialogue- a dialogue that not only challenges one’s preconceived notions of selfhood, but one’s very associations with and identifications to such a transformative period. In gaining access to the private settings of a new generation, ever-wider audiences have the unique opportunity to explore their own understandings of ritual and reminiscence.

As for the kids, the remoteness and highly secretive nature of these particular party locations, provides a place of endless possibility: a place far outside parental guidance and academic walls. This in turn, continues to deepen the already enormous emotional charge that usually accompanies coming of age. It is precisely what kept me going back summer after summer and has propelled me into a five-year commitment.

After Prom: Somewhere Between a Blade of Grass and a Blade of Steel, will consist of 20 to 25 large format black and white photographs and will be available for exhibition purposes at some point in 2009. (Click on images for larger preview.)

Til kingdom comes...(or a slight difficulty to breathe)

Two years ago, a cab driver hollered out « tout est mal faite! » while driving me home from work one day. (Translation: “everything is inherently flawed!”)

Today, this heavily charged statement permeates Til Kingdom Comes…(or a Slight Difficulty to Breathe); an evolving series of eight large-format color photographs that illustrate our zeitgeist (spirit of the times), by addressing global concerns in a new age of empire building.

Each rather isolated iconic image asks the viewer to contemplate upon a number of world issues ranging from globalization, corporatization, consumption and climate change, to power, oppression and violence. By illustrating some defective ends and results of our clearly imperfect world, these frozen narrative fragments hope to create an ever-wider dialogue that traverses across the micro and macro while building bridges between individual and global struggle.

Finally, it is important to note that though these images capture the general malaise of our times, they are not trying to tell us that this is reality. Instead, their alarming views engage us into a greater understanding, becoming, somehow, the incentive to our own personal reconciliation with the fact that this is also a reality.

So it is that everything may very well be inherently flawed…What is certain, however, is the immense beauty, power and hope found within our humanness- our imperfection: nothing short of great room for change. (Click on images for larger preview.)