Attributable only by its title and the thumbprint of an anonymous photographer, Quebec is a work which plays with the viewer's notions of identity. This quality is surprising since the works within are not portraits, but landscapes. The images form a narrative of the limits of place, moving from the exteriors of homes, through the boundaries of fence and forest, and out to the extremities of coast. If not for the final image, taken from an ice-breaker flying the Canadian flag, the book would depict an ironic utopia, in the literal sense of utopos: "no place." The photographer's signature, a single thumbprint on the final page, adds to this final, elegant sense of irony. The mark is absolutely unique, yet in no way allows us to further connect with the photographer.

The images, then, are a poetry of displacement, in both presentation and execution. They do not so much establish their compositions as reach toward existing structure in the landscape. Their syntax is unhurried-a series of meditations on the mostly-undisturbed snowfall that envelopes buildings and trees, compressing even the broadest of spaces into a small room between white snow and gray sky.


Through the combined yet subtle forces of the blind-debossed title, the precision of the hand-binding, the deep silvers of the photos, the thick shroud of winter on the landscape, and the anonymous photographer, the viewer is cast as an extra in a cinema of shelters and snow. In one frame, sunlight barely strains through the clouds above a swath of forest embedded in snow. The world outside the book is similarly masked away as a photographer who remains hidden probes the inner feeling of a place by examining its exterior. The reader is left exposed and enamored with a half-known Quebec, absorbing in its character of brooding anonymity. —Nicholas Chiarella