John Paskievich has been photographing the North End of Winnipeg for more than thirty years, and the body of work that he has built up in that time is a revelation of the particularity of people and place. His genius is to have created or perhaps discovered a singular photography: as Fred Herzog can be said to have created a Vancouver photography and Michel Lambeth a Toronto photography, so has John Paskievich created a Winnipeg photography.
Cities and the people who live in them are the classic subjects of photography. One of Daguerre’s earliest photographs is a view of a busy Paris street in 1838, but the people and the vehicles streaming by are moving too quickly to leave an impression on his very slow emulsion: only the unmoving lower leg of a man having his shoe shined remains to be seen in an apparently empty street. As materials and equipment were refined in the following decades, the images of passersby began to register more and more frequently in photographs, and by the middle of the twentieth century, modern photography had become steeped in the instantaneous. City streets even at night were viable settings for encounters between passersby and the camera, and in the work of Brassai and Cartier-Bresson (who conceived of the “decisive moment”) in Paris and Lisette Model on the Riviera, an urban photography emerged that consisted largely of encounters and confrontation between photographers and an anonymous citizenry. An exception was Eugene Atget, who prowled the streets of old Paris for decades with an antique field camera, intent on his mission of recording (on slow emulsion) a city and a way of living that was disappearing rather than passing by. Atget’s enormous body of work, which includes no image of the Eiffel Tower, the most prominent landmark in Paris, was “discovered” in 1925 by Berenice Abbott (herself an inventor of an urban photography of New York City that might be compared to jazz), who wrote of the “shock of realism unadorned” that she experienced upon first seeing Atget’s work.
