Where the Disorders Began
Coping with age, family, and depression by photographing the ordinary
Gaspé was and is one of the poorest regions in Canada. A mountainous peninsula at the mouth of Québec’s St. Lawrence River, it is about the same size as the state of Hawaii, but with just 150,000 residents living mostly on the shoreline. Gaspé is the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq Nation, but was claimed by France in 1534.
My British ancestors started to settle there in the late 18th century and my grandparents lived much as their great-grandparents did; eking out a living by farming, fishing, hunting, trapping and logging. They built their own houses, without electricity or running water and heated by wood. Summers are short, winters are long and cold with 10 feet of snow in the hills and the surrounding sea frozen solid.
Most of these photographs were taken in the little hamlet of Sunny Bank, just a few miles upriver from the town of Gaspé. 1n 1914 my grandfather built his house there, at the end of the road and in the hundred years since, there’s just been one other house built nearby.
My grandmother raised nine kids in a four-bedroom house while my grandfather worked in the woods. Most of the kids left for greener pastures, but my father stayed to work in the local mine. Having reluctantly let my brother, sister and I go off to university my parents only left the region after the mine closed.
Now in their 80s, my parents migrate back to Gaspé every summer for an extended visit. Increasingly worried about their ability to look after themselves, my siblings and I decided to accompany our parents back home in the summer of 2014. We did chores around the old farmhouse and ran errands when necessary. It was also a chance for us to revisit a part of our childhood that we hadn’t seen in many years.
I would also be revisiting the location where I first developed mental illness, where I had my first brush with despair and suicide. Thirty-five years later, I have a much better understanding of mood disorders, but as a teen I could see no future for myself. I was a dispirited teen who could only envision a future of darkness and hopelessness. I wanted to be dead.
I survived my dark night of the soul by understanding that “something” is better than “nothing.” I lived in a beautiful and tranquil environment that had been sustaining my family for 200 years. The land and sea fed us; the rivers brought us the water we drank; the surrounding forest created the oxygen we breathed. It was a sacred place I could not desecrate with my blood.
These photographs are an attempt to regain control over my traumatic memories. In depicting the mundanity of that old house, I’m able to come to a new understanding of who that troubled kid was. Where there was loneliness there is now solitude. Where there was isolation there is now tranquility.
Although I continue to live with depression, I’ve long since learned how to tell stories with images. I’ve made documentary television for 20 years and what I am only now learning is how to tell my own story. I’ve come to believe that we can control the narrative of our lives through art, that pain shared is pain lessoned. I’ve traded misery for melancholy.
