My photographic series Lisbon-Moscow presents 27 villages and towns in Ontario named after significant European cities.
I immigrated to Canada from Poland as a young adult and I have spent more than half of my life here. This is perhaps why I got intrigued by the names of the places, which came here a long time ago from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean — like I did, and got settled in their new home for good, so well that now some people don’t even realize that these names were not born in this land.
Names like “Paris” or “Moscow” seem to be the remnants of the influence which Europe bore on shaping Canadian culture. On the other hand, in most cases it would be hard to trace any connection between those Ontario towns and the old cities, which lent them their names.
Some of the places I photographed are just small villages, some are flourishing cities, but all of them represent very well how most of the inhabited Ontario looks like outside of Toronto and Ottawa. That’s Ontario countryside, Ontario suburbs, Ontario mid-size cities.
— Andrzej Maciejewski, Yarker, Ontario, Canada
