The North End Revisited
Photographs by John Paskievich
Cities and the people who live in them are enduring subjects of photography. Winnipeg’s North End is one of North America’s iconic neighbourhoods, a place where the city’s unique character and politics have been forged. First built when Winnipeg was the “Chicago of the North,” the North End is the great Canadian melting pot, where Indigenous peoples and Old World immigrants cross the boundaries of ethnicity, class, and culture. Like New York’s Lower East Side, the North End is also the place that helped to forge Winnipeg’s political identity of resistance and revolt.
Award-winning filmmaker John Paskievich grew up in Winnipeg’s North End, and for the last forty years he has photographed its people and captured its spirit. Paskievich’s films, many made for the National Film Board of Canada, follow the lives of different outsiders, from Slovakian Roma to stutterers.
The North End Revisited brings together many of the photographs from Paskievich’s now-classic book The North End (2007) with eighty additional images to present a deep and poignant picture of a special community. Texts by art critics Stephen Osborne and Alison Gillmor and film scholar George Melnyk explore the different aspects of Paskievich’s work and add context from Winnipeg’s history and culture.
Awards
- FINALIST, Kobzar Book Award (2020)
- NOMINEE, Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, Manitoba Book Awards (2018)
- NOMINEE, Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher, Manitoba Book Awards (2018)
- NOMINEE, The Manuela Dias Book Design and Illustration Award—General Illustration, Manitoba Book Awards (2018)
- NOMINEE, Making a Mark, Winnipeg Arts Council Arts Awards (2018)
Reviews
“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
“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
“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.”
The North End Revisited is a book of 200 black and white photographs, two essays, and one interview with the photographer, John Paskievich. It’s an easily handheld paperback with smooth pages, making it pleasant to flip through as well as to study with its striking, poignant, and often funny street photographs.”
– Sarah Ciurysek, School of Art, University of Manitoba, Great Plains Quarterly
“Paskievich’s art is born of a patience and honesty. Funny, poignant, angry by turns, it brims with rare compassion.”
– Maclean’s
“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
“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
“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
About the Author
John Paskievich was born in Austria of Ukrainian parents and immigrated to Canada as a young child. He graduated from the University of Winnipeg and studied photography and film at Ryerson University. 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.
Book Details
- The North End Revisited: Photographs by John Paskievich
- John Paskievich (Author)
- Published September 2017, 248 pages
- Paper, ISBN: 978-0-88755-797-2, 8.5 × 9, $39.95
- Topic(s): Art & Architecture, History, Social History, Urban Studies