For as long as I can remember, I have been traveling across North America to visit my father's family in Calgary every year. By now I have developed a strange sort of familiarity with this western Canadian city. I feel at home in these alien surroundings, but this is largely because I spend my time there sequestered in my grandmother's house, my uncle's house, or my aunt's. I rarely venture far enough from these locations to feel that I'm in an unfamiliar city.
     Something was different on my last trip, however. It may have been because I had not made it to Calgary for all of two years, or perhaps I was looking at the city more through the eyes of a photographer than I had in the past. It may just have been the way the late morning sun was hitting the prairies and strip-malls and highway overpasses as I drove to my aunt's from the airport.

     Whatever it was, Calgary suddenly looked like a bizarre, alien, and intensely fascinating photographic subject. I found myself following my camera into areas of the city I had never seen or even heard of: sprawling industrial parks, railroad yards, the city landfill, the abandoned and crumbling King Edward Hotel ("Calgary's Home of the Blues"). This gallery is simply a collection of photographs of the buildings, parking lots, and barren expanses that caught my eye and attracted my camera. More than anything else, these photographs focus on the sun of the western Canadian winter, and the way it illuminates the urban artifacts of human history and modernity which seem, in comparison to the sky and horizon, terrifyingly small.

     Thank you for viewing my work. To contact me please send an email to kaziops@gmail.com.