Through a changing landscape photographing place and community in Waterloo Region, By PhilippeElsworthy, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 2022. 200 pages. $38.99 (hardback). ISBN: 9781771125659

Local historian and cabinet maker Philippe Elsworthy takes readers through a journey of the Waterloo Region in Ontario, Canada, in his compilation photobook, Through a changing landscape photographing place and community in Waterloo Region. The book consists of a concise introduction contextualizing the region, a collection of 75 photos each with a short paragraph description, mostly from the 1990s, followed by an author interview and final word by Adam Crerar. Paging through this book is to journey through an everyday landscape, but also to time travel. The photos, mostly of buildings and streetscapes, feature areas shaped by living communities but perhaps are not overly notable. These are not photos for tourism or place branding. In fact, the entire book evokes a Tuesday walk home on a day that blends in with a million other Tuesdays. However, this book is exceptional due to the ordinariness of the everyday found within the photos. Few photos stand out as spectacular. There is an evenness to the quality of the collected work within the book; a steadiness to moving through the Waterloo landscape that belies a relaxed hand and an ease of movement that is connected to place. Like Elsworthy, this is a landscape I am familiar with, but I have not spent much time in it over the last decades. Going to high school in Guelph in the 1990s, looking at these photos was a return to a known landscape and community that was simultaneously comforting and jarring. The photos are what I remember, and now are presented, as the past. The past and temporalities are of central interest to these photos and the discussion. Photo 31 shows a long streetscape to the Epton factory with a large Tim Hortons sign splashing colour against the dull winter grey. It exemplifies the confluences of the mundane and extraordinariness of any given moment. Looking at that photo, I know the colour of the yellow and how it stands against the snow, although the logo has long since changed. Unlike my experience looking at the pictures, change in this book is gradual and layered—as Elsworthy describes in his interview; like waves of paint. This is nicely demonstrated by Photo 12 showing an evening streetscape, along which the author walked home from work for 13 years. The photo captures familiarity built over many visits. The rustiness of the change documented in the photos is also in the little details—e.g., the presence of a phone booth, as in Photo 3. Of course, phone booths are largely absent in present landscapes and yet the tangibility of the photo remains. Further, change is marked in the social norms present in the descriptions, as in Photo 21, where the text mentions the lingering smell of cigarette smoke in the bingo hall. Elsworthy's decision to monochrome and connect colour through the photos created unity across the decades of photos and also creates a distance where the photos are not marked by progress, but are united by the concept of communities constantly shifting and adapting. Interestingly, the role of place and community are highlighted in the written text. Elsworthy and Crerar both acknowledge the lack of people in the landscapes and what this implies in a study of community. Indeed, the lack of people adds a tinge of sadness to the landscapes and together with the monochrome, gives a feeling of a world lost to time. The buildings have strong presence in their respective histories and materially in the photographs themselves. However, there are glimpses of a community and of an emotional experience beyond those buildings. In certain photos, almost as if Elsworthy must tell more, we get glimpses of the lived, felt, and sensorial experiences of these places, embodied despite the material emphasis on buildings. For example, in Photo 44 we see a corner store, Mario's Milk, where he bought milk for coffee; and in reference to Photo 55, Elsworthy reveals he went to concerts in the old YWCA building. This felt sense of place comes to the fore for readers too, with the harshness of a Waterloo winter's ice, slush, and light: Photo 18 shows us a back alley filled with ice and hanging icicles. Looking at the photo, I could almost feel myself moving through the space, searching for black ice to avoid slipping and being aware of icicles overhead. This photo took me to the feeling of what it means to be in and move through a southwestern Ontario winter. The photos are linked to a sense of place in the ways by which readers are invited to search for detail and engage with ways of knowing. Yet the absence of people in these photos raises interesting questions about spaces of community and place attachment. Indeed, this way of presenting local knowing and feeling is, perhaps, the greatest strength of the book for a wider audience beyond those interested in the Waterloo region itself. The book is an exercise in challenging geographers to think about our relationship to a sense of place, community, and belonging in our own work. Elsworthy challenges the normativity of the written word as the best way to present findings and explore place attachment, emotions, and our relationships to spaces and the built environment. This book deftly evokes layers and feelings to place attachment with photos, as if it were guiding us onto the streets. Spending time in Waterloo through this book reminds readers of the importance of feeling and sensing space and place, and how often these sites are lackluster, maybe even unremarkable in the day-to-day—yet mundane spaces and places are significant in the long story of lived experience. While the book would have been strengthened by a wider range of activities in the photos themselves, the visual representation of change and the everyday remain an important reminder to geographers that we feel spatially, and our lives are emplaced in the (literal) muckiness of the everyday.

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