The Cloud Factory

'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—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. His photographs 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. Driven to explore environmental classism and injustices perpetrated on the city by others, Donovan’s aim is to expose the culture of censorship which has controlled the environmental narrative and tightened its grip on the community for decades.