There is a photograph by Gabor Szilasi in the CCA Collection of Témiscaming, Québec, at dusk. The viewpoint is high, and the frame is crossed by low hills: an unbroken line of olive-coloured scrub leading from left to right in the foreground, and in the far background two hillsides, one sprinkled with the lights and vague forms of the town, and the other dark with trees. Below, the various buildings of the Tembec pulp and paper mill, and glimpses of Gordon Creek behind it, form a silvery middle ground. Windows and exterior lamps glow yellow and orange, and twisting clouds emerge from chimneys into the low, grey-blue sky. The image does not beautify the industrial site, but it locates a beauty that exists there. In this, it is an exemplary Szilasi photograph.

Panorama of Témiscaming at dusk looking northwest is from a series commissioned by the CCA for the 1996 exhibition Power and Planning: Industrial Towns in Québec, 1890–1950, curated by Robert Fortier. It was the fifth CCA commission awarded to Szilasi: he had already created series on the CCA’s building and garden just before their respective openings in 1989 and 1990, and on Ernest Cormier’s work for the Université de Montréal and Carrefour St. Denis. Of all the photographers the CCA has worked with over the years, none has been a more frequent collaborator than Szilasi. He passed away in April 2026, leaving many in the photography field to reflect again on the legacy of his seventy-year career. Nearly throughout, his attention was focused on Québec, his adopted home.

For Power and Planning, the CCA provided Szilasi with a list of thirty-six sites in Shawinigan, Témiscaming, and Arvida—company towns planned from 1899 to 1925 to exploit the water power and natural resources of the land they occupied. Fourteen of these listed sites were identified as musts, but Szilasi was free to choose from among the rest. And while his contract with the CCA was specific on technicalities—he was to shoot large- and medium-format colour film and provide 11x14 and 16x20 Ektacolor prints—Fortier was clear that the creative vision for the images would be Szilasi’s. The photographer’s challenge, according to Fortier, was to convey “the uniqueness of a city (or certain parts of it) as conceived by urban planners, engineers, and architects, and as it has been built and preserved.”¹

Szilasi set off in summer 1994. He did not stick to Fortier’s list of desired subjects. He photographed several locations that had not been asked of him, and several of the indicated “musts” are not among the final prints. Perhaps he could not always find viewpoints that pleased him, or the CCA’s curators. Conversely, he found others they had not known they needed.

One of these unrequested scenes is a view of houses in Baie-de-Shawinigan below a retired smelter of the Northern Aluminum Company (later Alcan). Szilasi’s camera faces two houses nearly straight on. Built close together, they appear from this angle to be nearly joined, as though in mutual support. Directly above them, on a plateau, sit a handful of buildings of the decommissioned smelting complex.

What is remarkable about the picture is the benign aspect of this industrial environment. This carries through the series in general. The sky is almost always blue, the towns’ streets quiet but not lifeless, the architecture of heavy industry neither majestic nor threatening, but simply present. In the Baie-de-Shawinigan photograph, the sense that predominates is one of balance, achieved through repetitions in colour and form: the colours of the houses in the middle ground and the brick buildings above them echo the colours of their immediate surrounds; swaths of terracotta-coloured roofs on other houses appear at either side of the frame; electrical towers top each of the image’s two hills; three pairs of electrical wires bisect the picture in its middle. The eye follows a parade of triangles around the frame—pitched roofs at every side, from foreground to background. What Szilasi could have represented as an alarming adjacency of residential and industrial structures—and indeed, such adjacencies are almost a trope in architecture photography—instead appears neat and organized, as planned as the towns he was charged with exploring.

Only one work in the series illustrates beyond any doubt the natural resources that drove the development of these towns: a two-part panorama of Shawinigan Falls.¹ The falls are raging in these pictures, white with foam. They spill across the two photographs and into the gorge at Szilasi’s feet. In the far background are a power station, a spillway, and a Canadian Pacific bridge. Fortier hadn’t considered such an image a critical inclusion, and in some ways, it disrupts the focus of the commission. The Falls have everything to do with Shawinigan, but also nothing to do with Shawinigan. They exist out of time. In the panorama, the human elements, while telling, are not the point.

Fortier included thirty-five of Szilasi’s works in the exhibition, all of which the CCA acquired for its Collection. As Fortier and Szilasi expressly wished, the photographs form a body of work independent of the exhibition. They are not tied to it, and in fact were not included in the accompanying publication, Villes industrielles planifiées, which favoured historical imagery. But since the exhibition’s presentation at the CCA and subsequently in museums in Témiscaming, Jonquière, Sept-Îles, and Shawinigan, the series has been little published or discussed. Szilasi was interested in producing a book of the work around the time that he completed it, but this was not realized.

The same art world in which Szilasi was, for decades, a preeminent figure often has trouble reconciling a photographer’s commissioned and self-directed work. Perhaps, as a commissioned series with precise depictive aims, it has not been obvious that what Szilasi referred to, as the “company towns” project forms part of his artistic oeuvre. But he is very much present in these photographs. They are about rural Québec and its transformations, the subject of some of his most celebrated work. And they are equally about his effort, as a documentary photographer, to describe and suggest rather than inform—to communicate honestly and subtly. As he stated, “I try to go beyond recording what is in front of me. I try to introduce elements that require some explanation, so that everything is not said outright in the photograph, so that the expression of the subject or certain relationships between the subject and his surroundings…create tensions, juxtapositions or contrasts. These are the tensions that make the photograph more than just a record. This is what I try to find in my subjects and create in my photographs, this kind of tension.”² Individually, the photographs reveal much and little, a paradoxical zone in which Szilasi thrived.