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Soon after Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949 the federal and provincial governments implemented programs designed to move the costal populations to centralized “growth centres.” Their aim was to provide people with better educational and employment opportunities, and better access to healthcare. In practice, however, the programs were extremely controversial. Nearly 30,000 people were uprooted, and more than 300 communities were abandoned, some with histories stretching back more than three centuries. During the summer of 1998 I traveled to many of the isolated ghost towns left behind as a result of resettlement and photographed their remnants with my large- and medium-format cameras. The forty-eight images in the series have been displayed at the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, and at the Cambridge Galleries in Cambridge, Ontario. The project as a whole is about the loss of place (i.e. significance) that the resettled communities exhibit. This subject is dealt with metaphorically in the images, where the physical disintegration that is directly depicted stands proxy for the disintegration of place that is the result of the abandonment. My book based on the project, Places Lost: In Search of Newfoundland’s Resettled Communities, is on the surface a travelogue telling the story of my visits to the former communities and conveying slivers of their histories. As well, however, the book is an exploration into the acquisition and loss of significance. For me, the physical remnants acquired significance as I learned about their rich social histories. And yet—ironically—this acquisition of significance mirrors in reverse the loss of significance the physical remnants are undergoing for Newfoundlanders as those who once lived in the communities grow old and die. The book is available online in Canada and in the United States. |