Psychadelic MTL

October 2023. Montreal. I had been on exchange at McGill since August, through to December. I had bought a roll of LomoChrome Turquoise from a developer I knew there, a few weeks after arriving. I had had months to prepare this series. This film does strange things with color: I had decided that Montreal in autumn was the right place to see what it would do.

LomoChrome Turquoise is an experimental emulsion. It shifts hues according to its own logic: greens become blue, blues turn cyan, reds lean toward mauve. On Montreal's 1970s modernist architecture, it produces something I hadn't seen on any other film. The city becomes a palette that doesn't exist in reality. Not a filter: a different reality.

I walked a lot around the Quartier des Spectacles and near UQAM. The Kapital Circle is a sculpture on a street corner that I photographed because it looked like a pupil. The skater in Forever in the Air, I waited twenty minutes at the bottom of a ramp before he attempted the right jump. Monde Inversé is the Montreal skyline reflected in a puddle from the previous night's rain.

When the images came back, the coherence was immediate: every photograph is about transformation. The city turned upside down, the man in the air, the construction cones shifting color, the geometric architecture going aquatic. Montreal in October, with this film, became a city unlike any image of Montreal I had ever seen.