Chris Donovan has been photographing Saint John, New Brunswick, since 2014. It is a small, heavily industrialised city on Canada’s east coast that is home to Canada’s largest oil refinery, one of the country’s wealthiest families, and one of its highest rates of child poverty. He began with no fixed thesis beyond that proximity, wanting to see what this arrangement looked like up close. What he found shapes The Cloud Factory: vibrant neighbourhoods and their inhabitants living close to—and in the shadow of—polluted industrial sites, and a local environmental narrative that has been kept quiet for decades.
The title is Donovan’s phrase for the industrial complex looming over the city, referring at once to a refinery and a large pulp mill. An exchange from his childhood, in which he asked his father whether the smokestacks make all the world’s clouds and was told they make money, gives the book’s tone: wry, local, and unsentimental about what those stacks actually produce. The photographs carry a similar double register, attentive to daily life on one hand and to environmental classism and ecological injustice on the other.
Donovan’s vantage point is not that of a visiting documentarian. He grew up in the area and once worked as a photographer for the local paper, the Telegraph-Journal, where he came up against the limits of what could be published; the paper was then owned by the Irving family, whose interests touch the refinery. In 2018, after he had left the paper, a butane leak from the Irving Oil Refinery—the largest in Canada—forced the evacuation of a neighbourhood and received little media attention. Donovan sought out those affected and encountered a culture of fear among a largely impoverished population worried about retribution for speaking out. That pressure, rather than any single dramatic image, gives the book its shape.
GOST Books publishes The Cloud Factory in April 2025 as a 180-page hardback, 240 by 300 millimetres. For readers drawn to photobooks that examine a specific place over many years, and to work in the tradition of environmental and industrial documentary, it offers a sustained body of photographs and a grounded account of how a company town manages its own story.
