Forest City?

Two words; “Forest City”, are virtually synonymous with my city’s actual name. For better or worse, the nickname takes precedence over mere “London, Ontario, Canada”. Yet, as the rural and urban fabrics which give rise to this city are eternally augmented, so too is its identity. My personal identity is inseparable from that. While this city doesn’t define me, it’s very much so a part of who am I today: I’ve always been keen on exploring my surroundings and watching them change, but for much of my life – my childhood – without a tool to document what I witnessed. Living in the first house on the block for the earliest years of my life was an experience that fundamentally shaped the years to come. The bog behind my house and the local suburbs were a condensed version of the world that I investigated with my sense of childhood wonder: I could navigate the interface between the plants and the animals, the houses and the humans; a newly-built world dynamically intermeshing with the preexisting one. Photography enables me to do much the same by documenting that space of exploration and inquiry in my younger years – and extrapolating my search to the entirety of London. The Forest City is not the same as it once seemed – for example, where are all those namesake forests? The status of this city from one moment to the next is always fleeting: New roads are paved, more skyscrapers rise, and countless new homes dot what was once green space. Slowly and steadily, London, Ontario transcends itself. Yet, vestiges of the past remain. As I document them before vanishing completely, not only do I build a nuanced understanding of my surroundings, but of myself too: What was right, what was wrong; what was mere childhood fantasy? My understanding of this city has it has proven to be as ephemeral as the city itself. Through shooting this project, an important distinction revealed itself: The difference between “how it was once” and “how it once appeared”. “Forest City?” is a subjective, unintentional, and eternal exploration of my own phenomenology, as much as it is an objective document of a slice of the world that presently lies before me.