Overview

Winnipeg’s North End has informed the Canadian mythology and influenced the national psyche. The North End also divides and defines the city of Winnipeg, shaping its politics and sense of identity. It is here where First Nations and Old and New World immigrants cross the boundaries of ethnicity, class, and culture, creating a complex multicultural community. There is joy here, and pride, and poverty, and richness, and beauty. John Paskievich grew up in the North End. In these photographs, taken between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, he set out to explore the North End he knew in his youth. What he found were traces of it, captured in the stillness in which the past still lingers and in the dignity and singularity of its inhabitants.

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Reviews

Paskievich's art is born of a patience and honesty. Funny, poignant, angry by turns, it brims with rare compassion. - Macleans

Paskievich's art is born of a patience and honesty. Funny, poignant, angry by turns, it brims with rare compassion. -- Maclean's A worthy update! Paskievich has found the elusive balance between historical documentation and esthetic perfection found in the likes of Robert Frank's The Americans. --Mike Aporius Winnipeg Free Press John Paskievich is a distinguished documentary filmmaker. Some of his work is about people for whom being at home in the world is difficult, impossible or an act of the imagination: Roma in Slovakia, Russians in the Canadian prairies, Inuit artists at home in the North. In The North End, he has performed a similar act of troubled, amused, sympathetic observation, this time with black-and-white photographs, shot over three decades, of people who live and work (or do not work, as the case may be) in Winnipeg's North End. -- The Globe and Mail Like the films of Guy Maddin and the rock songs of John K. Samson, Paskievich's photographs capture a world that is both personal and eccentric. His is not the North End as endorsed by the chamber of commerce, but it is nevertheless one marked by dignity and humanity. --Morley Walker Winnipeg Free Press Paskievich's book evidences the evolution of an admirably enduring relationship between a man and a place. Such long-term commitments have always called for more than just persistence; for an artist, they also require considerable courage. This is especially so today when an artist's success increasingly demands the unceasing production of the fresh and the new. Too often it seems that the sparkly simplicity of a surface skim rather than the shaded complexity of the deep dive The North End Revisited so obviously represents is what is expected.--Richard Holden Border Crossings Paskievich's real, unadorned glimpse into the community and its people is striking, but most of the scenes and characters captured here aren't pretty in the conventional sense. It's his inclusion of these tarnished details - gritty streets, peeling piont and wrinkled, weary faces - that truly gives the work its unfiltered beauty. Similar to Winnipeg's North End itself, Paskievish's new book is a gem that can only be discovered, explored and cherished by a patient and sympathetic eye. -- Up! Magazine This is a much-expanded edition of Paskievich's 2007 collection of his several decades of street photography in North Winnipeg. Paskievich has an eye for the infinite strands of civic vitality in his turbulent home neighbourhood, and a magical ability to pluck the perfect moment from the vanishing collisions of time and place. There's tremendous depth in these photos, and a humour that never fades. --Robert Everett-Green The Globe and Mail Whether sitting, walking, lying, standing, marching, dancing, or simply staring into his lens, Paskievich's characters steal the show and turn his book of stills into a slide show that moves, informs and entertains from cover to cover. - New Pathways, January 31, 2008

Author Information

John Paskievich was born in Austria of Ukrainian parents and immigrated to Canada as a young child. His photographs have been widely exhibited and published in various periodicals and in several books, including A Voiceless Song: Photographs of the Slavic Lands, introduced by Josef Skvorecky, and A Place Not Our Own. His documentary films have garnered critical praise and won numerous awards. Paskievich lives in Winnipeg. Stephen Osborne is the founder and editor of Geist magazine and is the author of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World.

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