Resettlement
Photography
These photographs come from Newfoundland outports emptied by government resettlement. For ten years I worked through that aftermath with my father, locating sites by map and GPS and reaching them on foot, by ATV, or by boat. Round Harbour and Tilt Cove are among twenty communities in uneven states of remaining: houses and wharves still standing, interiors in slow collapse, clearings where even the footprint of a settlement has gone. Figures are withheld. Absence fills the frame until it reads as a presence of its own: the pattern of a room against weather and rock, architecture that outlasts the social life it was built to hold.
After Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, successive resettlement programs moved thousands of people from isolated outports into designated “growth” centres. The policy was framed as modernization: better services, economic opportunity, an answer to rural poverty. On the ground it produced a different record: harbours without boats, names struck from maps, and a deliberate severing of people from place. Official language held that these communities had “no great future.”
Made after I had left Newfoundland for Montreal, the series is also a study in distance. Documentary photography here does not restore what resettlement removed. It stays with a gap between homeland as it persists in memory and the material fact of places that can no longer be entered as they were: an attempt to look carefully at loss without translating it into nostalgia, and to ask what a photograph can hold of a geography official history preferred to clear away.
