Chris Donovan - The Cloud Factory

'As a child I looked up at the smokestacks and asked my father 'do they make all the world's clouds?' 'no,' he replied 'they make money' In 2014, photographer Chris Donovan began documenting his hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick on Canada's east coast. Saint John is a small, heavily industrialised city which is home to Canada's largest oil refinery, one of the country's wealthiest families, and one of its highest rates of child poverty. As Donovan began to photograph the city and its residents—driven to explore the proximity of extreme wealth and poverty— he became increasingly aware of the realities of environmental classism and ecological injustices in the city. The photographs in his forthcoming book show the vibrant neighbourhoods and their inhabitants living in close proximity to and in the shadows of polluted industrial sites, and 'the cloud factory’—an undefined industrial site which references both the refinery and large pulp mill in the city. As a boy growing up in the Sai