The Place at the End of the Rapids

The Place at the End of the Rapids was made during my first visit to my wife’s family in Canada since Covid.

The project follows the Ontonabee River and the chain of lakes that lead into the Kawartha region of Central Ontario. Its title is drawn from an Ojibway name for this landscape.

While making the work, I was reading Backwoods of Canada, a nineteenth-century settler account of the region. The text became a quiet companion, used to trace a historical journey through the river and lake system rather than as a definitive description of place. My own movement through the landscape unfolds in dialogue with this earlier, partial way of seeing.

The photographs are presented as a book by Out of Place, sequenced as a slow journey along the river and lakes. Alongside the images are extracts from my notebooks and reimagined fragments responding to Backwoods of Canada, written by the poet Harry Man.

Backwoods of Canada is a nineteenth-century settler text and reflects the limitations and assumptions of its time. In this project, it is used as a historical reference point to structure a journey through the Ontonabee River and surrounding lakes, not as an authoritative account of the land or its histories. The work treats the text as one mediated lens among many, acknowledging that the landscape predates both the book and the journey undertaken for this project.