The Cloud Factory - Chris Donovan

Description

As a child I looked up at the smokestacks and asked my father 'do they make all the world's clouds?' 'no,' he replied 'they make money'

In 2014, photographer Chris Donovan began documenting his hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick on Canada's east coast. Saint John is a small, heavily industrialised city which is home to Canada's largest oil refinery, one of the country's wealthiest families, and one of its highest rates of child poverty. As Donovan began to photograph the city and its residents—driven to explore the proximity of extreme wealth and poverty— he became increasingly aware of the realities of environmental classism and ecological injustices in the city.

The photographs in his forthcoming book show the vibrant neighbourhoods and their inhabitants living in close proximity to and in the shadows of polluted industrial sites, and 'the cloud factory’—an undefined industrial site which references both the refinery and large pulp mill in the city.
 
As a boy growing up in the Saint John area, Donovan’s first job as a photographer was working at the local paper he had grown up reading—the Telegraph-Journal. He quickly realised the extent of censorship at the newspaper which at the time was published by Brunswick News Inc owned the Irving family—one of the richest families in Canada. In 2018, when he was no longer working for the paper, there was a butane leak from the Irving Oil Refinery, the largest in Canada. A neighbourhood was evacuated but the event received little media attention. Donovan went to speak to and meet those impacted by the leak and encountered a culture of fear amongst a largely impoverished population who feared retribution if they spoke out about the environmental catastrophe. Donovan had not set out looking for a connection to the region’s monopolised industrial ecomony but this is what he found—a censored environmental narrative which had tightened its grip on the community for decades.

Technical Data

Published April 2025
240 x 300mm
180 pages
Hardback

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