Specters

Images from the Pine-Park Interchange
Montreal, 2005
35mm Film

The Pine-Park interchange was a concrete labyrinth of roads just north of Montreal’s downtown core. In the mid-2000s it was torn down and replaced with a more conventional intersection. Like most people, I was happy that a broken, antiquated, urban eyesore would be replaced with something more befitting a modern city. But I knew there was something that was going to be lost.

Over the years, graffiti artists had covered parts of the interchange with a diverse collection of characters. I don’t know any of the people who did the work, how many artists made contributions, when or over how much time they were done, but I always liked catching glimpses of them out the window of the city buses that traveled through the maze. So early one Sunday morning, before any serious demolition work started, I ventured in on foot to take one last, close look, and capture the strange community of characters, before they were gone for good.