Stay Solid or Go West photos (Image: submitted)
Photographer Chris Donovan’s photo book, Stay Solid Or Go West, was first published in late September by Boreal Collective Press. It captures the unique Maritime dichotomy of working and living out West when home is in the East.
The Press is part of the Boreal Collective, which was founded in Toronto in 2010. It consists of five photographers across Canada, from the east to west to north coasts. Their new mandate is to build photo books and build up the Canadian photo book scene.
“There’s also not a lot of understanding about narrative photo books in general,” explained Donovan, adding he wants to expose people to the medium and how they tell a story through photos. “With all of my work I’m trying to tell a story through images, that is about something but it’s also subjective enough that people can read it and take what they will from it.”
Donovan wanted to make a book about the dichotomy between Toronto, the place where lives and is doing an MFA at Ryerson University, and the place that is home, the Maritimes.
“It’s such a common story that people live these two lives between these modalities and two places with the idea of ‘west of here,’ he said. “It could be Montreal, could be Toronto, could be Vancouver, could be Alberta; it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.”
He was also inspired by his favourite novel No Great Mischief, by Alistair MacLeod, which he reread several times throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
The original working title [of the photo book] was ‘And at Rivière-du-Loup, we turn south,’ which was describing the drive from Toronto to the Maritimes, a drive that I’ve taken many times,” shared Donovan.
“Ultimately, it’s meant to be about the dichotomy between those two places, the mythologies around moving west as a Maritimer, but it’s also about personal history and memory.”
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- Chris Donovan’s Stay Solid or Go West photo book (Image: submitted)
Solid or Go West’s photographs, taken over four years, are of Donovan’s personal “east” and “west,” from Toronto’s Roncesvalles neighbourhood to Saint John’s Wolastaq River, North and South Ends, and his family home in Ingonish, Cape Breton.
He was influenced by Japanese photographers such as Daidō Moriyama and his “’are, bure, bokeh‘” [ ‘grainy / rough, blurry, and out-of-focus’] method and used disposable cameras to capture more soulful pictures.
“Photography is about evoking a feeling, it’s not a very descriptive medium like prose writing,” Donavan explained. “I see sense of place and sense of identity as more a feeling than something that can be described with words, so I thought that photography was the appropriate medium to talk about these things.”
Stay Solid or Go West is available to purchase online and at Indigo East Point. Some long-term photo books he is currently working on include The Cloud Factory, about Saint John and environmental classism and Those Who Stay Will Be Champions, about Flint, Michigan’s last remaining basketball team, along with doing exhibitions in Toronto and the Maritimes.
Donovan says the pandemic gave him the time and opportunity to finally make Solid or Go West after having thought about making the project for years.
“Basically, for the first few months of the pandemic, I spent hours every day working on this thing,” he said, adding there has been a publishing boom in photo books on an international level. “So many people had projects that they didn’t have time to turn into a book until we had that world pause – based on a timeline of how books are created now coming out, it’s quite interesting to see.”
This story was originally published on Huddle.Today – an Acadia Broadcasting Limited content partner.
