Artist Statement

I have left Maine, my home. I now live in a sort of foreign familiarity in Québec. My family emigrated from here generations ago, and now I’ve come back—what does that mean? My kids were born here; they won’t be like me. 

I think I’m haunted by waters too. I’ve been exploring them—the headwaters of the traditions that once flowed into our little communities in New England. I’m searching for something, but sometimes it feels like I’ve dragged my canoe into a dry riverbed. I wait for the snowmelt. The runoff that comes down the mountains will flood this out. It’ll drag everything down from the towns and the farms—the water gets so full of sediment it can be hard to see. At least my canoe is floating. Actually, it’s moving quite quickly now. 

My photographs. They’re like a documentary. People and places that aren’t posed or altered. They have a narrative, though. It’s not just physical, documented reality. It’s gesture toward an interior one—an emotional one, a psychological one. It’s easier this way to trace the contours, to follow the waters moving between the past and the present, memory and experience. 

Biography

Born into a small Franco-American community in Maine, Pierre Patenaude is a self-taught Canadian/ American photographer who now lives in the Estrie region of Québec. His work explores sense of place as both physical and psychological inheritance, and its connection to memory, identity and experience. He works with 35mm black-and-white film, developing and printing his photographs in a home darkroom. His first monograph—Une relique, je crois—is scheduled to be published in 2027 by Reflex Editions.