Picturing Loss

“Michel Huneault: La longue nuit de Mégantic”
by Laurence Butet-Roch

“I’d often ask Éric ‘Weather’s always nice here, isn’t it?’ He’d answer, ‘Well, dad, today it’s raining’ and I’d tell him ‘Right, but even when it rains, it’s nice here because there’s no stress, no fights. We’re home,” recalled Clermont with longing. Eric, his son, was one of the forty-seven victims who perished when a freight train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in the center of Lac-Mégantic, a town of about six thousand in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. In an instant, at quarter past one in the morning of July 6th, 2013, what was a lovely warm night turned into a prolonged darkness. The midsummer dream became a nightmare.

Months later, Clermont was sharing his thoughts with Michel Huneault, a Montreal-based photographer intent on documenting the aftermath of the tragedy. Like most, he had learned about the catastrophe on the morning news. At the time, information was scarce, facts seemed to contradict one another, and no one could agree on the scope of the destruction. “When an event shrouded in such mystery and uncertainty, the thing to do is to go see for yourself, to bear witness and to look for missing details,” explains the thirty-eight year-old who, following his journalistic instincts, arrived on site later that evening. A few flames continued to bask the town in a sinister orange glow and thick smoke engulfed the streets. Stunned, locals sought refuge where they could.

“I had been filing photos at the local pizzeria, one of the only places still open with a decent Internet connection. As I was putting my computer away in my car, a Méganticois approached me. He looked forlorn. I asked him how he was doing and we chatted for 20 minutes. It was clear that he needed to talk, to unload what had been burdening him. As soon as he left, someone else showed up wanting to do the same,” Huneault recalls. It became clear to him that the long process to recovery for the townspeople would require a benevolent ear and a compassionate gaze.

“La longue nuit de Mégantic,” a photographic series, which won last year’s Portfolio Reviews Exhibition Award at the CONTACT festival and currently on view at the Toronto gallery, offers a glimpse into the personal and collective grief of the shattered Quebec community. Taken mostly in the dim light of dusk and dawn, the images hint at the emotions felt by those affected by the tragedy from sorrow to anger to forbearance. A deer caught in headlight conjures bewilderment, a man skiing by the railroad track on New Year’s Eve evokes resilience; a train fighting its way through a snowstorm inspire fear. “Grief is not something that evolves in a linear fashion. There are moments of utmost darkness, and there are some sunny spells,” notes Michel Huneault, who traveled to the stricken region several times over the course of a year.

Though moving, his work avoids the pitfall of being overly sentimental or intrusive. Having grown up in a similar municipality in the Laurentides, he was able to understand and relate to the Méganticois he met effortlessly. He knew which distance to keep, when to bring out the camera, and also when to excuse himself to give them breathing space. “Because we were made from the same cloth, we understood each other without words. There was no need for extensive questioning which could have become unnecessarily invasive. Sometimes, nods and small gestures told me as much as I need to know,” he says. Similarly, his photos do not show trauma or recovery, they suggest it.

In such tragic circumstances, the role of the photographer is a delicate one, especially when he commits himself overtime. He becomes a friend, a therapist, a mirror and a megaphone. Michel Huneault, thanks to previous experiences, navigates these seamlessly. As a Berkeley graduate student, he examined how collective memory is constructed in the aftermath of large social trauma, such as the genocide in Guatemala. At the time, he also met Gilles Peress, a member of the renowned Magnum photo agency, who opened his eyes to the part that imagery plays in helping societies shape shared narratives. But, it was only after a stint at Canadian International Development Agency, one that took him to Afghanistan, that he embraced photography as a full-time endeavor. Thereafter, he traveled to places in the midst of reconstruction: Ukraine during the Orange revolution, Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, the Japanese Tohoku coast post-tsunami.

Hence, “La longue nuit de Mégantic” is not merely the culmination of a year of travels to grieving Lac-Mégantic presenting the breadth of the loss, but also the latest installment of a serial exploring how societies overcome troubled pasts.

“La longue nuit de Mégantic” is on view at CONTACT Gallery, 80 Spadina (suite 205), Toronto, until March 13, 2015. The exhibition will then travel to Lac-Mégantic in spring.

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Laurence Butet-Roch is a freelance writer, photo editor and photographer. After completing a B.A. in International Relations at the University of British Columbia, she pursued photography at the School of Photographic Arts: Ottawa. Today, she is a member of the Boreal collective and collaborates with several publications in English and French.