Town
“Repetition, in this context, isn’t just method—it’s a form of remembering.”
Town is an ongoing project I began in 2012. I make photographs in my hometown of Bowmanville by revisiting places that shaped my adolescence. The locations range from corner stores where I asked strangers to buy me cigarettes, to the post office where we’d skateboard, to the old tire plant where we would hold bush parties. These places, ordinary as they seemed, played a role in shaping how I came to understand myself. What a time, what a place—towns can be.
This work explores the triangular relationship between memory, place, and the quiet movements that make up everyday life. It’s about how we return, how spaces carry the residue of who we were, and how meaning builds slowly in the margins.
The act of photographing these places again and again—sometimes years apart—is central to the process. I walk the same streets with a camera now instead of a skateboard, passing the same parking lots, fields, and alleyways I once moved through without thinking. Some locations have changed. Others haven’t. I’m interested in that tension between what remains and what disappears, and how memory reshapes what we see.
Repetition, in this context, isn’t just method—it’s a form of remembering. It’s how I trace the quiet weight of familiarity and mark the slow accumulation of meaning over time. Through these images, I’m not trying to reclaim the past or preserve it, but to stay with it a little longer. To see what’s still there. And maybe, to understand what it left behind.
