LAC-MEGANTIC, QUEBEC, 2013

MICHEL HUNEAULT

In the early hours of July 6, 2013, a train carrying 7.7m litres of crude oil from North Dakota derailed in the midst of residential neighbourhoods in the small town of Lac-Megantic in the Eastern Townships region of Quebec in Canada. An explosion ripped through the town centre. Some 47 people died as a result and the heart of the place burned to the ground. Shops, the library, the municipal archives and 90 private residences were destroyed or later condemned.

The photographer Michel Huneault arrived on the scene the day after the tragedy and started to take pictures. The flames were still burning in the darkness, as you can see here. Over the next year Huneault returned again and again to the town, taking photographs that would be a memento of the loss that sat heavily on the place. Photography as testimony, if you will. The images that resulted make up his new book The Long Night of Megantic.

Before he became a full-time photographer in 2008, Huneault worked in the field of international development and at the University of California in Berkeley he had studied the subject of collective memory in large-scale traumatic recovery.

In The Long Night of the Megantic he lends his eye to the very same study. Through his eye he reveals the damage done. But maybe there are consolations too. Along with the grief and the suffering he gives us the natural world. The trees, the ice and snow, the deer in the headlights.

In the midst of death we are in life, if you like.

Taken from The Long Night of Megantic by Michel Huneault, published by Schilt Publishing, priced £27.50