Revisiting John's Paskievich's The North End

  • October 4, 2017

Please join us for the launch of The North End Revisited: Photographs by John Paskievich with special guest Alison Gillmor.

When: Wednesday, October 4, 7:00 p.m.
Where: McNally Robinson Booksellers (1120 Grant Avenue), Winnipeg.
Cost: FREE

Light refreshments will be served.

About the Book
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.

About the Speakers
Alison Gillmor is a Winnipeg-based freelance journalist and educator. As well as being a pop culture columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press, she has written on art, design, books and film for The Walrus, Border Crossings, Canadian Notes & Queries, Canadian Geographic, Canada’s History, Herizons, The Globe and Mail and The Winnipeg Review. She has also taught in the History of Art program at the University of Winnipeg as a contract academic staff member.

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.