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The Cloud Factory - Signed

The Cloud Factory - Signed

by Chris Donovan

$85.00
$85.00
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Pre-order. Expected March 2025.

'As a child I looked up at the smokestacks and asked my father 'do they make all the world's clouds?' 'no,' he replied 'they make money'

In 2014, photographer Chris Donovan began documenting his hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick on Canada's east coast. Saint John is a small, heavily industrialised city which is home to Canada's largest oil refinery, one of the country's wealthiest families, and one of its highest rates of child poverty. As Donovan began to photograph the city and its residents—driven to explore the proximity of extreme wealth and poverty— he became increasingly aware of the realities of environmental classism and ecological injustices in the city.

More about this book

e photographs in his forthcoming book show the vibrant neighbourhoods and their inhabitants living in close proximity to and in the shadows of polluted industrial sites, and 'the cloud factory’—an undefined industrial site which references both the refinery and large pulp mill in the city.
 
As a boy growing up in the Saint John area, Donovan’s first job as a photographer was working at the local paper he had grown up reading—the Telegraph-Journal. He quickly realised the extent of censorship at the newspaper which at the time was published by Brunswick News Inc owned the Irving family—one of the richest families in Canada. In 2018, when he was no longer working for the paper, there was a butane leak from the Irving Oil Refinery, the largest in Canada. A neighbourhood was evacuated but the event received little media attention. Donovan went to speak to and meet those impacted by the leak and encountered a culture of fear amongst a largely impoverished population who feared retribution if they spoke out about the environmental catastrophe. Donovan had not set out looking for a connection to the region’s monopolised industrial ecomony but this is what he found—a censored environmental narrative which had tightened its grip on the community for decades.
 

Published March 2025
240 x 300mm
180 pages
Hardback
ISBN 978-1-915423-78-8

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From the author

  • Chris Donovan is a documentary photographer based in eastern Canada. He is also an educator and PhD candidate at Toronto Metropolitan University. Donovan's work has been recognised by the World Press Photo Awards, Pictures of the Year International, the Ian Parry Photojournalism Grant, and the Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award. His regular editorial clients include The New York Times and The Globe and Mail. Inspired by his industrialised hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick, Donovan's work focuses on visual representations of communities with industrialised and post-industrial economies, with a particular focus on Atlantic Canada and the American Midwest. 

  • ‘This book is my protest. This book is my refusal to be silent about environmental classism and the crimes of the ruling class. It is also my love letter to the city of Saint John, a magical city that, despite its difficulties, I genuinely believe to be full of beauty, hope, perseverance, truth and love.’

    - Chris Donovan