Montreal pathways - Street photography

See all the photos in this series at Picasa.

Urban Pathways is a series of photographs of people in four cities: Montreal, Paris, Brooklyn and Hiroshima.

I was inspired by the multidisciplinary artist Françoise Sullivan, who photographed Montreal on a walk in 1970 from the Museum of Contemporary Art, then situated at Cité du Havre, to the Museum of Fine Arts on Sherbrooke Street and back again.

Like Sullivan, I decided to explore the urban pathways that link important places in my life. My points of reference for the series were the homes of two friends in each of four cities. In Montreal, Paris, Brooklyn and Hiroshima, I walked from the home of one friend to the home of another and observed the people I saw along the way.

I started the series in Montreal on October 6, 2004. I explored the path that leads from my home on Hutchison Street in Mile End to the home of a friend who lives on Ste-Élisabeth Street in the Quartier Latin. It's a walk that usually takes 45 minutes, but on this morning I lingered to look more closely at the people sharing the urban landscape with me.

The map below shows the approximate path I followed.

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