The Beautiful Abandoned: An interview with Andrew Emond

Photo: Andrew Emond

A few weeks ago we presented the work of photographer Andrew Emond in an essay by William Carroll. We follow up with a conversation between William and Andrew as a companion to the earlier piece. 

William Carroll: I was first shown your instagram page by a friend, and was of course immediately struck by your style and subject matter. How important has this kind of word-of-mouth publicity been to the growth of your page and profile? 

Andrew Emond: I’d say it’s been pretty essential. I haven't really gone out of my way to promote the work in any significant way so the growth of my account has happened fairly organically. I'm a bit stubborn when it comes to just letting things evolve that way-- and hopefully having people respond favourably to the work. I’m sure there are faster ways to grow an instagram account, but taking the slow and steady approach is more my style and seems to be working fairly well so far.

WC: I remember when I first contacted you I asked about the tagline in your bio which reads 'Messages from the Interior'. Having studied the American photographer Walker Evans, I asked you if this was a direct homage to Evans to which you assented. How important has Evans been, and indeed other American photographers, to the development of your style? 

AE: I didn’t study photography in school so I wasn’t really aware of Evans’ work beyond his most iconic images. I started taking photographs of abandoned spaces in 2004 and for about four years I was just doing my own thing, working in a creative vacuum and staying pretty naive when it came to the history of photography in general. Coming across Evans, and in particular his treatment of vernacular interiors was enlightening and encouraging. It’s been this way with other photographers whose work I’ve discovered along the way, ilike John Divola or Lynne Cohen.

When I find similarities in other bodies of work, I don’t get discouraged because it’s been done before, but try to use it as something I can springboard off of or respond to. What I love about Evans’ book Message From the Interior is its sense of mystery. The whole thing, even its title (what’s the message?) is a riddle. It’s also a bit of a fuck-you to the the perception that he was a social documentary photographer or even a documentary photographer to begin with. 

WC: You're based in Toronto and so the majority of your photography is informed by the city. Do you look for the same kinds of abandoned/disused spaces when you're travelling? Do you have any intentions of long-term projects outside of Toronto? 

AE: I tend to treat travelling as a way to take a break from what I’m usually photographing in Toronto or sometimes photography in general. I’ll shoot in a different style and generally be less concerned about projects or themes. I haven’t considered working on anything outside of Toronto in a very long time. I can’t imagine it happening unless I had the opportunity to spend an extended period of time in one particular location. It’s pretty hard-wired in me to look for neglected places at this point, so if I do visit them outside of Toronto, it’s more for the experience than anything.

I also feel like slipping in interiors from other places is a bit like cheating. My photographs aren’t intended to be a record of Toronto. I’m not really interested in making any particular statement about this city or even the nature of the spaces themselves. These photos are often more about me than anything else. I want the places to be anonymous, but at the same time I want them to be located here. There’s a logistical reason in that I usually don’t have more than a few hours a week to shoot, but I also get a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment by producing this body of work using what I have around me. 

Photo: Andrew Emond

WC: What other media informs your work? I'd be really interested to hear what films, literature, and even music inspire you? I often find that creatives have myriad interests, and your work conjures up quite a few in my case. I find it hard not to hear Godspeed You! Black Emperor when studying your work...

AE: Painting, sculpture, and installation art are often my biggest influences. Sometimes I’ll walk into a space and the arrangement of objects reminds me of particular works in modern or contemporary art. There’s also sometimes a fair amount of staging and intervention that takes place in my photos so I often find myself taking cues from those mediums. 

Then there are other things, like the novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Stalker by Tarkovsky, certain songs like It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue by Dylan, R.E.M.’s Chronic Town EP, that wonderfully strange room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m drawn to things that have subtle elements of surrealism. Godspeed is a little too moody for me, but the way they sway between tranquility and chaos is certainly something I try to bring into my own work.

WC: Lastly, I guess I just want to focus a bit on the state of things in 2020. Your work has taken on an eerie prescience given the current climate, which I reference in the companion article. Do you feel an unsettling clairvoyance in your work? Did you envisage these spaces becoming semi-normalised, all those years ago, when you started photographing them? 

AE: I’m not sure anyone could have predicted vacancy becoming semi-normalized even a few months ago. Toronto is like a lot of other cities around the world right now, with shuttered businesses and empty workplaces as employees are now working from home. I’m sure there are many scenes inside buildings right now that resemble ones found in my photos, but I’m resistant to creating a commentary on this current situation. 

Years ago, I was keen on making a statement about deindustrialization and the loss of jobs happening during that particular era, but these days my hope is that this body of work is a bit more timeless  and open-ended. I’m still very much conscientious of the fact that some of the places I visit are the way they are due to economic or personal misfortune-- some of it may even be COVID-19 related, but those sorts of backstories add a layer of real-world context that I try to avoid. 

Andrew Emond’s Instagram page

Yukon Dreaming

Photo: Tagish Road by TravelingOtter; Licensed by CC-BY-SA 2.0

By Ian C Smith:

Packs against a roadwork sign, Danger, shoulder soft,
A tableau vivant: a tent, all they have inside them.
They argue, rehearsal for unimagined waning days.
He holds up their Rand McNally with his sketch,
a black-outlined big red kangaroo taped to the back,
lure for lonely drivers vectoring British Columbia
to screech to a pine-scented stop for hitch-hikers
who can’t foresee what loss the rush of years holds.
He wants to claim reaching the Klondike, or Alaska,
Amundsen planting his flag beneath heaven’s vault.
A Winnebago with Texas plates cruises by,
brakes lighting up their immediate hours,
conifer mileage, big sky, postcard outpost names.
They climb aboard into blessed cool luxury.
The woman passenger swivels her seat,
rotating 180 as if in an office movie.
Her man driving, she asks, Where y’all from?
He almost wiggles his marsupial mutely as a joke,
but realising she is serious, starts babbling
about the baleful beauty of this craving for quests,
weeks of risky responsibility, short-term relief.
His wife irrupts, reprising her summer of discontent.
He bites back, all shred of manners jettisoned.
Their benefactors’ pregnant silence pulls them up.
Chagrined, he apologises, love’s nuances complex.
Oh no, the woman protests.  That was wonderful.
Your accents.  Hearing you just the way you are.   

***

Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Antipodes, cordite, Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Salzburg Review, Southerly, & Two-Thirds North.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.

Little Dyke Beach

Photo: Anne Wyman

By Joel Robert Ferguson:

First off, let's say that which can
go without saying, that the stony
beach is not the stretch it once was,
when my legs were brief from ground
to body and I held the mouth 
of a broken shell to my ear 
and heard nothing.

It's a short walk to the beach house
the one we’d always then turn
back at, ever crunching over the pebbles,
blue and pink, that outline the upper
reaches of the inter-tidal, before we return
to the town, the county hospital, where
what must happen will happen.

Prairie kid, born Winnipegger,
downplaying the duress of Confusion Corner,
your feet in the Atlantic, if
the muck of the Minas Basin
at low tide can be called ocean.

It can, if
the roofs and new asphalt
where the old folks used
to lay out the dulse with its snails
drying in the sun (to hell with toxins) 

for sale or snack,
if that dredged-forest could be called land. 

It can.

***

Joel Robert Ferguson is the author of the poetry collection The Lost Cafeteria (2020, Signature Editions). He grew up in the Nova Scotian village of Bible Hill and now divides his time between Winnipeg and Montreal, where he is finishing his Masters in English Literature at Concordia University.

Quoyle's Point... an interview with Annie Proulx

As a companion piece to the second of our essays by Anna Iltnere about literary seaside houses – Quoyle’s Point from The Shipping News – we present an interview with Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel.

Interview by Anna Iltnere:

The Shipping News (1993) by Annie Proulx is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of a family moving to Newfoundland and starting to live among local fishermen in an abandoned seaside house, moored to a rock. The house at Quoyle’s Point is a vivid character in the book, dusty, gaunt, despite the efforts, and moaning in the wind. 

I contacted Annie Proulx to ask her four questions about the role of Quoyle’s seaside house in her book and about her own relationship with water.

What is your relationship with water and with the sea? What does the sea mean for you?

Like most people I am attracted to shorelines, whether lake, river or ocean. All of these locales have been severely damaged by humankind over the millennia—wetlands drained, rivers dammed, ocean-shores faced with armored rock walls, estuaries polluted. My interest in today's warming oceans is based on concern as the waters move toward acidity, as coral reefs die, as kelp and eelgrass decline. I watch with trepidation as fish stocks dwindle and the shells of tiny pteropods dissolve. I walk regularly on the shore, picking up plastic as I go and feeling grief at the damages inflicted on these habitats. 

Quoyle is afraid of water and yet he has to overcome his aquaphobia to own a boat and live by the sea. What does his fear symbolize in the book?

I’m not big on symbols. His fear can mean whatever the reader thinks. Books are somewhat cooperative in this way, that a reader can use her or his own experience of life to interpret the actions and thoughts of a book’s protagonists.

What role does the house at Quoyle’s Point play in The Shipping News?

The house is his link with the past—it is the ancestral home of the Quoyles. It also carries bad memories for the Aunt so that what happened in that house a generation before drives the story. And it is a testament to the staying power of Newfoundlanders of the fishing-village period when people lashed their houses to the rocks against the pounding seas and hurricane-force winds. 

Would you agree to spend a summer at Quoyle’s house (if it would be still standing)?

Of course! Where do I sign up?

***

Read Anna Iltnere’s essay about Quoyle’s Point here.

Anna is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia and the author of our ‘Unreal estate’ series of essays on literary houses by the sea. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Unreal estate No.02: Quoyle's Point

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the second of a series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to Quoyle’s Point from Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Annie Proulx herself.

“The sea breathed in the distance. The coast around the house seemed beautiful to him. But the house was wrong. Had always been wrong, he thought.”
- Annie Proulx, The Shipping News, 1993

“There was something about that hard, bare rock, the whistling wind, I found very appealing,” American author Annie Proulx said about her first time in Newfoundland, when she went there on a fishing trip, for a The New York Times interview 26 years ago. “I liked the loneliness and desolateness, the heavily wooded feeling of it. I felt clasped to that stony bosom in a way. I was physically shaken.” 

The idea for The Shipping News, her second book, was born. Annie Proulx fell in love with the landscape on this large island in Atlantic Ocean off eastern Canada, and later even bought her own house in Newfoundland, a cottage where she spent part of the year, dividing time between her other house at that time in Wyoming.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News, published in 1993, is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of a family moving to Newfoundland and starting to live among local fishermen in an abandoned seaside house at Quoyle’s Point, a house that is itself a vivid character, dusty and gaunt, moaning in the wind.

“I feel that stories come out of geography, climate, weather,” Annie Proulx said in an interview for SaltWire, “out of wind and mud, the placement of houses and villages, local landscape markers and anomalies.” 

The House

Quoyle’s Point is an imagined place in Newfoundland. For forty-four years a house has stood there empty, until the protagonist Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and “thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love”, travels to Newfoundland with his two little daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, and aunt Agnis Hamm, who was born in the house years ago. Quoyle’s faithless wife, and the girls’ mother, dies in a car accident after selling her two daughters to a sexual molester. Quoyle gets his girls back and they are ready to leave the broken life in New York and start anew. Aunt isn’t sure if the house is still standing, but inwardly believes that something had held, “that time had not cheated her of this return”. For Aunt the house is filled with good and bad memories.

The house was built a long time ago on Gaze Island (also a fictional place), where all Quoyles once lived. They were pirates that lured ships onto the rocks. When Gaze Island became flooded with Christians, the Quoyles dragged the house over a frozen bay to the shore and put it “like a hat on a rock”. In the beginning of the book it is hard to imagine that Quoyle’s ancestors were pirates. He is afraid of water and is described as a failure at life. On the ferry to Newfoundland, to his new life, Quoyle sits seasick, his face “the color of a bad pearl”. 

On the western side of the fictional Omaloor Bay, the Quoyle’s Point thrusts into the Atlantic Ocean like a bent thumb. Aunt left the house behind when she was fifteen. She wonders now which has changed the most, place or self? “She leaned on the rail, looking into the dark Atlantic that snuffled at the slope of the past.” When a ferry approaches the coast, Aunt suddenly has a glimpse of the building into the stirring mist. “I saw the house. The old windows. Double chimneys. As it always was. Over there! I’m telling you I saw it!” 

When they arrive at the Quoyle’s Point, it is all foggy until the wind goes under the fog and drives it up. The gaunt building appears. The house is the green of a grass stain. Bunny hates the colour, it makes her nauseous. The distinctive feature of the house is a window flanked by two smaller ones, “as an adult might stand with protective arms around children’s shoulders.” Half the panes are gone. Paint flakes from wood. There are holes in the roof. “Miracle it’s standing. That roofline is straight as a ruler,” Aunt says. Quoyle wants to check inside, if floors haven’t fallen into the cellar, but Aunt laughs. “Not likely,” she says joyfully. “There is no cellar.” 

The house is lashed with cable to iron rings set in the rock. The cables bristle with broken wires. Long before Aunt was born, there were no cables. The house rocked in storms like a big rocking chair, back and forth. “Made the women sick, afraid,” Aunt tells Quoyle, “so they lashed it down and it doesn’t move an inch but the wind singing through those cables makes a noise you don’t forget. Oh, do I remember it in the winter storms. Like a moaning.”

“Even when fresh the rooms must have been mean and hopeless,” Quoyle thinks, when exploring the inside of the abandoned, dusty house. Through the windows he sees the cool plain of the sea. “The bay rolled and rolled.” Square rooms, lofty ceilings. The floorboards slant under the feet, wood as bare as skin. “And three lucky stones strung on a wire to keep the house safe.” 

In a couple of weeks with the help of a local carpenter Dennis Buggit the house is fixed as far as to be safe to move in. “Dad, I thought it was going to be a new house,” says Bunny, when they arrive with bags. “That Dennis was making it new. But it’s the same one. It’s ugly, Dad. I hate green houses.”

No matter what they did to the house, it kept its gaunt look, never altered from that first looming vision behind the fog. “How had it looked, new and raw on Gaze Island, or sliding over the cracking ice?” Quoyle wonders. The idea fixed in him that the journey over the frozen bay had twisted the house out of true, wrenched the timbers into a rare geometry. At one point in the book he visits the Gaze Island and finds a place of flat rocks laid out, where his house once stood. 

They had started to live at Quoyle’s Point in May; the end of September is the first time Quoyle is alone in the green house. He stomps around the still underfurnished rooms as “dusty air seemed to wrinkle as he moved through it”. At night the wind moans through the house cables, a sound that invokes a sense of hopeless abandonment. But he pulls the sleeping bag corner over his upper ear and sleeps again; “Getting used to nightmares.”

When winter nears, Aunt becomes worried. Snow could keep them trapped inside the house, quite far from everything. She encourages them to move across the bay to the city for the winter. “Consider this place a summer camp,” she says. “We can move out to the green house again in spring, as soon as the road is open. It’ll be the sweeter for waiting. I mean, if you still like it here. Or maybe you’re thinking of going back to New York?”

They can’t buy a new house for the winter season, because Quoyle has put a lot of money into the old house. He doesn’t have much left. They have to rent a place to stay. Quoyle returns to the green house, to pick up the rest of the things. The gravel road to Quoyle’s Point, had never seemed so miserable to him. Inside the house the abandoned silence. The stale smells. As it was the first time. As though they had never lived in it.

“The house was heavy around him, the pressure of the past filling the rooms like odourless gas. The sea breathed in the distance. The coast around the house seemed beautiful to him. But the house was wrong. Had always been wrong, he thought. Dragged by human labor across miles of ice, the outcasts straining against the ropes and shouting curses at the godly mob. Winched onto the rock. Groaning. A bound prisoner straining to get free. The humming of the taut cables. The vibration passed into the house, made it seem alive. That was it, in the house he felt he was inside a tethered animal, dumb but feeling. Swallowed by the shouting past.”

Winter in Newfoundland is savage cold. Early spring brings a huge storm. Wind noises at night causes nightmares to Bunny. She sees the green house being blown away by the wind. “Each of the taut cables shouted a different bull-roarer note, the mad bass driving into rock, the house beams and timbers vibrating. The walls chattered, shot nails onto the heaving floors. The house strained towards the sea.” Then cables snap one after another in her nightmare, caused by the real storm outside. Glass burst in her dream. House lifts in wind at the freed corners. “The last cables snapped, and in a great, looping roll the house toppled.” 

Was it just a dream? What Bunny saw turns out to be prophetic.

“You know I believe your ’ouse is gone. Take a look.” Archie says on the next morning with cigarette in his mouth and hands to Quoyle his old-fashioned binoculars. “No, you won’t find ’er for she’s not there. I looked out for ’er this morning, but she’s not where she was. Thought you might want to go along down and see if she was just tipped over or sailed away. Was some shocking ’ard wind we ’ad. How many years was them cables ’olding ’er down?” Quoyle didn’t know. Since before the Aunt time, what sixty-four years and many more. Since the old Quoyles dragged the house across the ice. 

“The great rock stood naked. Bolts fast in the stone, a loop of cable curled like a hawser. And nothing else. For the house of the Quoyle was gone, lifted by the wind, tumbled down the rock and into the sea in a wake of glass and snow crystals.” 

Good thing, Aunt had insured the green house, first thing she did when they arrived in Newfoundland. Quoyle didn’t know that. Aunt didn’t worry too much about the loss and planned which place to buy for the insurance money, for Quoyle and Wavey, his new love that he will marry, and girls. 

“In a way it’s a blessing the old place is gone.”

***

About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website