BLACK LAKES
by Simon Nicoloso
portfolio shortlisted call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2025', 2025
Category: Anthropology and Territories
Black Lakes explores the former asbestos mining region of Thetford Mines, Quebec. For over a century, the extraction of chrysotile shaped both the landscape and the lives of those who depended on it. When the industry collapsed, it left behind open-pit mines, vast residue hills, contaminated soil, abandoned infrastructure. The scars of an activity now banned worldwide.
But the reality of this territory contradicts the images it conjures. Where one might expect desolation, there is a landscape in quiet transformation. Where the narrative suggests ruin, a community persists, still defined by what it once produced. The project is driven by this dissonance: the gap between what we imagine a place to be and what it actually is when we stand in it. The photographs attempt to hold both at once, capturing the tension between inherited representation and lived experience.
The work was made over multiple trips between 2022 and 2025, through slow, repeated returns to the same places and sustained encounters with residents. All photographs were shot on film and printed by hand in the color darkroom (RA-4).