Off-Season

Work in Progress

Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition.

Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Beach towns, tourist spots and the places of summer delights. In one moment they are filled with life, laughter, and energy, then in the next, they are quickly abandoned. They are left to wait, to sit, to hold onto what they once were. During the off-season these places are vacant and lifeless. Yet, traces remain of what was once there. Quiet murmurs of life continue in winter’s presence.

For Off-Season, I photographed seasonal tourist-towns in Canada during the winter. Places which see a swell of occupants during the summer months followed by a mass exodus preluding the cold seasons.These regions, deserted by the masses, have been claimed by the impenetrable grasp of winter. Attempting to smoother all that existed before it, a chainmail of snow and ice lays claim to the roads and beaches. Who is it that remains in these forgotten places?

Specifically, I have photographed the off-season in tourist towns and their surroundings in Alberta and Ontario. I was inspired to created this project by lonesome winter trips to a family cottage on the great lakes as well as the literary genre Southern Ontario Gothic. Delving into the setting of Southern Ontario Gothic literature, I wanted to photograph the unique counties that cultivated the stories and poems of Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Jane Urquhart. Where the bleak and mundane collide with the mythologies and history of the region. Southern Ontario is a land that “itself is rife with Gothic tensions and liminal spaces”^¹: an ideal setting to photograph the nuances of the off-season, as well as whom and what remains in these temporarily forgotten towns.

I am interested in the duality of these places, the emotional space that is created when a place becomes the polar opposite of what it previously was. I am intrigued by the narratives that continue in these towns when they are forgotten by most.

1 Bartz-Edge, C. D. 2012. Sinister Spaces: Liminality and the Southern Ontario Gothic in Margaret Atwoods’s Fiction in Regina, Saskatchewan. Masters Thesis, University of Regina, Regina. 9 p.

Supported by the Ontario Arts Council.