When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then become attached to it in some way (naming is one such way) it becomes a place.
- Tim Creswell In 1988, to mark the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography, the city of Montreal designated six streets within a new housing development in Riviere-des-Prairies-Pointe-aux-Trembles to be named after important historical photographers from Montreal. Plans for the new neighbourhood were drawn up and the names of William Notman, Ovilla Allard, George Arless, Edgar Gariepy, Conrad Poirer and Alexander Henderson found their place onto the official map of the city. They remained there for the ensuing 19 years until 2007, when the Montreal administration finally admitted that the streets were never going to be built and removed the photographers' names from the maps. Today, the designated area remains a wasteland, though, eerily, the shape of the developments, as well as all of the photographer-based street names, still appear on Google Maps. Photographer Velibor Bozovic's work focuses on the curious story of this development that never was, using it as a jumping off point to explore Montreal's broader relationship to its own visual history. Nothing Will Surprise You Here collects Bozovic's photographs, stills and scripts from his short films, archival material from les Archives des Montreal, and copies of real and online maps, using them to tell a surprisingly relatable story of how places need not be physically realised to impact the people who intellectually interact with them. Velibor Bozovic's images have appeared previously in, among other outlets, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Descant, International Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune and Granta.
