The North End Revisited: Photographs by John Paskievich by John Paskievich

Reviewed by: The North End Revisited: Photographs by John Paskievich by John Paskievich Sarah Ciurysek The North End Revisited: Photographs by John Paskievich .By John Paskievich. Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba Press, 2017. 235 pp. Illustrations. $39.95 CAD, $39.95 USD, paper. 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 its striking, poignant, and often funny street photographs. The photographs represent people and places within the working-class North End of Winnipeg. Most of the photos are from the 1970s to the 1990s and document what used to be primarily a Ukrainian and Jewish neighborhood. Recent and additional photos in this third edition tell more stories though: there are 200 images as compared to 160 in The North End (2007) and 71 in A Place Not Our Own (1978). The North End Revisited makes me glad for the infrequent chance to say that documentary photography impacts contemporary public discourse. Paskievich’s photos are considered and discussed by many Winnipeggers. One person who moved from Philadelphia to Winnipeg said that Paskievich’s books told him that this city, unfamiliar to him and “off the map” to most people who live elsewhere, has a history and also civic pride (something not always present in underrepresented and thus under-mythologized Canadian cities). Another person remembered a packed event at the public library celebrating Paskievich’s work. For locals and nonlocals alike, this book helps readers know that people care about this place, it is real to those who live here. It matters. The book’s relationship to nostalgia in a time of reconciliation requires further examination. One might think that looking back, with affection, at when the eastern European community thrived in the North End precludes similarly positive feelings about the current reality—where the North End is now more known for its Indigenous demographic. But it doesn’t have to. And I believe it doesn’t in this book, in which change and diversity are represented respectfully. Notably, Paskievich points to the future by ending with an image of two young First Nations women, rather than with the two elderly Slavic women closing the previous books. But I came to my conclusion after careful observation, and one could too easily draw a different conclusion when quickly looking at the book’s ratio of mostly older photographs, sprinkled with new—especially when Paskievich is known for the former. An opportunity to more fully and explicitly explore a worthwhile topic of reconciliation—nostalgia’s coexistence with change—was missed, in the texts or perhaps in the photos’ editing. It is still available to those considering and discussing Paskievich’s photographs. As George Melynk writes in The North End Revisited, the fact that the book has been published three times indicates that there is something enduring about the concept of the North [End Page 90] End. Certainly the neighborhood’s iconic stature is due to events such as the 1919 General Strike born there, as well as to its poverty and its distinct identities, but it is also due to the ongoing impact of John Paskievich’s photographs. Sarah Ciurysek School of Art University of Manitoba Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

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