“It's Canada as seen from highways, dirt roads, urban thoroughfares and small-town streets,” says Ottawa’s Mark Schacter of Roads, his new book that combines dramatic landscape photography with essays detailing his techniques and experiences in the field.

“150 photographs from every corner of the country; and in each photograph, somewhere, a road,” Schacter adds. “I spent more than a year gathering the material for Roads, and took about 15,000 photographs.”

Processed with digital editing software for what Schacter calls “maximum impact,” the photographs strike a balance between loneliness and majesty, fullness and emptiness.

Published by Fifth House Publishing, Roads will be available in early November at bookstores and online at amazon.ca and chaptersindigo.ca.

The author will be on hand at a launch reception for the book at Exposure Gallery (1255 Wellington Street West) on Thursday, October 21, 6 to 8 pm., where 20 photographs from the book will be exhibited and Benjamin Books will sell advance copies of the book.

The following excerpt is from Schacter’s preface in Roads:

_______________

Canada occupies nearly 10 million square kilometers of territory that are occupied by a scant 34 million people, making it one of the emptiest tracts of land on the planet. Of 239 countries in the world, only eleven of them are less densely populated than Canada.

I am drawn to emptiness: its look and sound and feel. And I am fascinated by signs of human effort—which may be variously poignant, heroic, magnificent, tragic, comic, ridiculous, or fruitless—to fill the void. As an archaeologist might be, I’m interested in experiencing landscapes as being full of evidence that people have been there, built something, scratched a living out of the earth, come, and gone, to be followed by others who build something else. I use “landscape” loosely, to cover cities as well. I think this is fair in Canada where, in contrast to much of Europe and many parts of the United States, many cities are still ragged at the edges and never too far from what Canadians refer to as “the land.” This was brought home to me last August while travelling through southern Manitoba. The air, even in the heart of Winnipeg, was full of the smell of stubble burning in the wheat fields to the south around Winkler and Morris.

Perhaps it’s because Canada is still so young and raw as a settled, urban place that the tension created by the encroachment of the landscape on our living spaces could possibly make sense as a defining characteristic of the Canadian “sense of place.” Somewhere in the shared Canadian memory there must be a recollection of efforts to hold onto a place to live in an unforgiving environment. I suspect that even Canadians born and raised in large cities may feel this. The painter and sculptor Harold Town in his introduction to Canada with Love, a book of Canadian photographs, wrote that this country has “no superb urban centres to soundproof us from the call of the wild.” No matter how settled we may feel there is a part of us that understands the fragility, the tenuousness, of our position, and the magnitude of what we are up against.

This idea accompanied me as I travelled around Canada. The connecting thread was the road, the ubiquitous sign of human presence in and movement across the landscape. Everywhere, in every image, the road is a reminder of the human urge—benevolent or malignant, as the case may be—to conquer, to overcome, to withstand, to appropriate, to build, to make a mark, to communicate, to carve out territory, and, above all, to get somewhere. Every road carries its own stories of human ambition and frustration and longing and striving—stories that echo off the unhearing landscape, and that, like tire tracks in dust, fade and are overwritten.