Winnipeg’s North End has informed the Canadian mythology and influenced the national psyche. The North End also divides and defines the city of Winnipeg, shaping its politics and sense of identity. It is here where First Nations and Old and New World immigrants cross the boundaries of ethnicity, class, and culture, creating a complex multicultural community. There is joy here, and pride, and poverty, and richness, and beauty. John Paskievich grew up in the North End. In these photographs, taken between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, he set out to explore the North End he knew in his youth. What he found were traces of it, captured in the stillness in which the past still lingers and in the dignity and singularity of its inhabitants.

John Paskievich was born in Austria of Ukrainian parents and immigrated to Canada as a young child. His photographs have been widely exhibited and published in various periodicals and in several books, including A Voiceless Song: Photographs of the Slavic Lands, introduced by Josef Skvorecky, and A Place Not Our Own. His documentary films have garnered critical praise and won numerous awards. Paskievich lives in Winnipeg.

John Paskievich's profile page

Stephen Osborne was born in Pangnirtung in 1947. In 2004 he was a recipient of the CBC Literary Award, the Vancouver Arts Award for Writing and Publishing, and the National Magazine Foundation Special Achievement Award. He won the first Event Creative Non-fiction Prize, and is an award-winning columnist for Geist magazine, where many of the pieces in Ice & Fire got their start. He is the founder of Arsenal Pulp Press and editor and founder of Geist magazine. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals, and the title story in his collection was translated into Inuktitut and appeared in Inuktitut magazine.

Stephen Osborne's profile page

• Short-listed, KOBZAR Literary Award, The Shevchenko Foundation
• Winner, Mary Scorer Book Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher

“Whether sitting, walking, lying, standing, marching, dancing, or simply staring into his lens, Paskievich’s characters steal the show and turn his book of stills into a slide show that moves, informs and entertains from cover to cover.”– New Pathways, January 31, 2008

New Pathways

“Paskievich’s real, unadorned glimpse into the community and its people is striking, but most of the scenes and characters captured here aren’t pretty in the conventional sense. It’s his inclusion of these tarnished details—gritty streets, peeling paint and wrinkled, weary faces—that truly gives the work its unfiltered beauty. Similar to Winnipeg’s North End itself, Paskievish’s new book is a gem that can only be discovered, explored and cherished by a patient and sympathetic eye.”

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