Taylor Roades (b. 1990) is a Canadian documentary photographer based in Victoria, British Columbia. Her work is grounded in place and the natural sciences, exploring our connection to land, culture, climate and the environment.
Taylor Roades (b. 1990) is a Canadian documentary photographer based in Victoria, British Columbia. Her work is grounded in place and the natural sciences, exploring our connection to land, culture, climate and the environment.
A Ribbon of Highway
Locations: every province and territory of Canada
Foreward: Jacqueline Salomé
Locations: every province and territory of Canada
Foreward: Jacqueline Salomé
Photographed: 2011-2023
Published: Rocky Mountain Books 2023
Published: Rocky Mountain Books 2023
Hop in the window seat folks, this is a road story.
It’s a tale told in visions, captured in a blink as this big country flash-flashes by, the way it does when you’re travelling down the Trans-Canada Highway.
This is a story about Canadian identity. But you won’t find any firm answers here, just experiences, interpretations. Looking through photographer Taylor Roades’s eyes, but seeing with your own. What a delightful, liberating conundrum! Answers can be killjoys. It’s that shape-shifting wonder that inspires us, drives us like the road itself.
In A Ribbon of Highway, you may find something you know. The frosty-face feeling of racing sleds down a backyard hill in winter, the slice-slice sound of skates on ice, the sweet smell of gasoline and cedar in a roaring bonfire. A plane taking off from some somewhere to a far domestic somewhere else, or geese flying just about anywhere. Fur pelts, dead maybe, or alive if you’re lucky enough to glimpse it.
That feeling of shock-awe humbleness that envelopes you at the foot of a colossal mountain or towering tree, you know, the one that reminds you just how small you are against the sheer magnitude of this land. A plaid-jacket neighbour chop-chopping wood and punctuating her sentences with “eh” like an un-ironic stereotype.
There are gas stations, bus stops, a cheap old motels in every small town from here to there. Every cabin wall with dark knots in the wood, and maps with so much blue, blue that comes to life as rushing rivers, loon calls reverberating over lakes, and fishing boats afloat on great oceans, with waves thrashing on sandy beaches, frozen beaches, rocky beaches awash with driftwood, kelp, starfish and seashell treasures.
There’s that vast, beautiful nothingness between destinations on the road in Canada – just you, the yellow line dash-dashing under your tires, and those unforgettable strangers you meet with their hats-off kind of kindness.
Maybe you’ve seen it, or maybe you’re about to for the very first time. In either case, I bet you will feel it. And that’s the point. Influenced by Roades’s keen interest in tasting the flavours of local life, her images are like visceral portals taking you into every hometown, every living room across this country. You know what they say: home is not a place but a feeling.
—Jacqueline Salomé