Photography show at L.P. Fisher Public Library tells ‘hard truths’
Award-winning documentary photographer Chris Donovan helped kick off Dooryard Arts Festival this year with his art show, which opened at the L.P. Fisher Public Library in Woodstock on July 15.
The small but big-hitting show features a selection of six photographs from Donovan’s project The Cloud Factory, all taken in his home city of Saint John. The pictures were previously part of a group show at the National Gallery, and the rest of his current show is in Hamilton, Ontario.
Around 15 people gathered in the library’s Thompson Gallery to learn more.
“I’ve been working on this project for around a decade,” Donovan explained in his artist’s talk. “My first newspaper job was for the Telegraph Journal. I was assigned to photograph the London family in Saint John for a project about inter-generational poverty and breaking the cycle of poverty.”
As he learned more about poverty in Saint John, home to one of the country’s poorest neighbourhoods, and saw the impact on neighbourhoods in the city of several industrial disasters, which he says were highly under-reported, the project developed a much larger scope.
Donovan said The Cloud Factory is named for a childhood memory of asking his father if the city’s paper mill steam stacks made all of the world’s clouds, to which his father replied, “No. They make money.”
“It’s a common experience in Saint John, a company town that’s home to Canada’s largest oil refinery,” he noted. “I’ve met people from other industrial communities who wondered the same thing.”
In April 2025, Donovan’s story was published in the New York Times, the same month The Cloud Factory was published in hardback by GOST Books, supported by THE INCITE PROJECT.
“It’s about Saint John, but not just Saint John,” says Donovan. “It’s about the monopoly of the province. My co-author, Alain Deneault, talks about New Brunswick as a resource colony, with continued extraction of resources. My goal is to for there to be more robust archive records of the complex economic realities of the place.”
The artist and educator is currently working on photojournalist projects about the Saint John/Wolastoq/Saint Jean River watershed and Punk music in Saint John, as well as a documentary film about the “mystery disease” in New Brunswick.
Donovan studied photography at Mount Allison University and furthered his studies in Ontario with the photojournalism program at Loyalist College, followed by the Master of Fine Arts program at Ryerson, now Toronto Metropolitan University.
After 10 years in Ontario, Donovan moved back to New Brunswick with his wife Tess Allen, and he continues to work on his doctoral dissertation project in his home city.
“I think I’ll probably photograph Saint John for the rest of my life,” he said.
The Cloud Factory photography show will be displayed at the L.P. Fisher library free of charge through the end of August.
