A store window on Cote St. Luc Road

Underpass on Cote St. Luc Road

These photographs of an underpass on Cote St. Luc Road in Montreal, near where we live, seem at first like they could be any urban scene. It is a rather unpleasant place with a peculiar ordour that I have never been able to identify, but almost like the smell of corn. Equally unpleasant is the pigeon poop on the sidewalk, and the pigeons overhead nesting in the underpass. Nevertheless, there is also an architectural quality to the place, the eleven columns, the four lanes divided by the supporting columns, and the descent and ascent of the road. There was also, that day, a quality that I am always aware of when it happens, or when it makes its presence known to me, and that is a quality of silence or quiet that can sometimes be found in places like this, or anywhere it makes itself known. That quiet is what I am trying to evoke in my photographs. There is the moment between traffic, the quiet, the presence of quiet for the pedestrian if he or she is open to this experience. I am conscious of an experience of quiet and silence in the urban environment that changes the quality of life in cities and is part of an aesthetic or spiritual experience that I try to express in photographs.