the district

text & photography Patrick La Roque

I shot these pictures in the northern end of Montreal, around rue St-Hubert. Many areas in the city have undergone or are currently experiencing a process of intense gentrification, creating odd contrasts, sometimes within a single neighbourhood. While this district has never been amongst the most impoverished, there is still a very clear cut between the mushrooming condos of Quartier 54 and the streets surrounding it.

Real estate projects such as these are often seen as a sign of economic health. But it’s a double edged sword: with every influx of wealthy condo dwellers comes a corresponding push of the less fortunate to the outskirts.

The question then becomes: where does it stop?

...

The district lives — breathing, teething, falling. Picking itself up again. Slaps on lipstick & eyeliner to impress new friends
the hip, the busy, the upwardly mobile
all storming the gates.

The faithful ditched by the roadside, pushed to the outer limits, banging on doors when there’s nobody home.

It lives to battle the sorrows of winter
in sparkly bright apparels
 & will give no quarter.

we hold on

TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY PATRICK LA ROQUE

We hold on. Through the thin, the thick, the unthinkable and the grandiose. We grow and we wither, breathing as one, fighters and poets and ghosts caught in a common interlude.

These are rallying points. Moments when we band together and push back, screaming, laughing.

We know all about faith and about equilibrium, the pull of time into some greying unknown. We know about the tides and the movements of the sun.

We know.

But today we choose to forget.

Chinatown etc | street. life. regeneration.

text & photography patrick la roque

Our parents would take us to Montreal’s Chinatown when we were kids. For children of the suburbs, this might as well have been Jupiter. I remember the smells, the ducks hanging in the windows, the tiny restaurant where we’d always stop for lunch, all red and black and bathed in bright neon light. We were in a new land then, everything alien and mysterious - beautiful. 

Eventually Chinatown was choked by the city’s evolution. What used to be an entire district was relegated to a couple of streets and alleys, given a plaque and a few token statues where tourists pose for snapshots. The Peking ducks dangling in the shop windows were deemed unsanitary by the type of stupid bylaws professing to move us forward, only really stifling identity and uniqueness. And yet… The community is still present, surviving between the high rises, hotels and congress center. The smells are more timid but still there, floating on a spring breeze like an old dream. Like a child’s rêverie. 

Last Friday, I needed oxygen and carbon dioxide all at once. I needed streets around which to wrap my camera and gather my thoughts. I needed regeneration. Without thinking I gravitated to those old foreign quarters. Before even taking a single shot a retired photographer came up to me, having spotted my X100. Soon, we were talking shop and Josef Koudelka, right there under a bright April sun. The tone was set.

I walked and walked, drinking in as many images as I possibly could. And it felt like a dance, forever moving, like cinema and theater, scenes unfolding, screaming to be captured and remembered. A freakin’ multitude waiting for the eyes of the world. Such a flow, such waves washing over me. The streets.

I stood on corners, sat on new lawns hunting for movement. I walked into a modern art fair and out again, wanting more. I watched and learned and reached for air in the lungs of the city.

Man, if I could only frame everything.