Florence Debeugny was born and raised in France and moved to Canada in 1979. Based in Vancouver, BC since 1982, she experienced a re-awakening of her early affinity for the camera. As a photographic artist, Debeugny’s practice has been deeply informed by the abundant interplay between natural and industrial landscapes in BC, a terrain transfigured by the concentrated effort of its inhabitants to bridle the region’s natural resources. In investigation of this subject, Debeugny’s approach ranges from the mode of abstraction to the deeply contextualized format of documentary photography and video.

In the years that followed, Debeugny’s lens increasingly fixed upon the raw material of ghostly structures found in the industrial districts of Greater Vancouver. At close range is seen the continual inscription of the natural world—wood rots, metal rusts, stone crumbles. With Deterioration(2002), Debeugny interrogates these substances, noting the changes in their composition as the passage of time continues, working to understand the circumstances of each. Her attention shifts between the aesthetics of decay and the rhetoric of sustainability, opening a contemplative space within which the viewer may consider how capital moves, whom it displaces, and where it leaves its footprint.

While focusing, quite literally, on the details of urban and industrial structures, Debeugny came to a startling realization—she was very often looking through one structure to “see” more closely another. Dirty glass, chain-link fence, broken plastic—all acted as permeable barriers between the pedestrian and the industrialized territory. Enabled by the telephoto lens, a photographer is able to trespass such boundaries. For Debeugny, the ramshackle boundary itself becomes of interest, and in the photographic series Through (2004) she allows it to slip in and out of focus to emphasize the tangled layers of foreground and background, subject and object. A new dimensionality is made manifest through the abstraction of form and subtle shifting of the focal plane.

It was while attempting to publish a book featuring Deterioration that a BC publisher encouraged Debeugny to explore the coast’s old settlements. On that advice, Debeugny embarked upon a photographic excursion to Ocean Falls, a former pulp mill town. There, Debeugny entered into conversation with former inhabitants whose lives had been shaped by the forest industry in meaningful ways. However, none of these impromptu interviews was recorded, an oversight which she came to regret.

Upon starting a new project on the old cannery villages of BC’s Central and Northern coast, Debeugny was afforded the opportunity once again to interview (and this time record) people she encountered. In this way she was able to incorporate their stories and memories into her still photography, thereby mitigating the resounding silence that permeates much photo-documentary work. And so, for the multi-disciplinary work Almost Gone, Remains of Cannery Villages (2006) Debeugny returns once more to the sites of displacement that so influenced the direction of her work when she was producing At the Edge of Wilderness. This montage of photographs, video footage, interviews and soundtrack juxtaposes the remains of cannery villages and memories of people who once lived and worked on the remote Central and Northern BC coasts.

A recurring object in the landscapes and ruins that are Debeugny’s subject has been the bright yellow “CAUTION” tape that is inevitably draped here and there, to varying degrees of effectiveness, on industrial worksites. Over a period of four years, Debeugny documented the life-span of “CAUTION” tapes, which are transformed by their environment from shiny new tape with sharp black letters creating a forbidding linear barrier, to a dejected-looking shapeless form—no longer able to stand at attention and perform its intended role. In the photographic series Precaution (2007), we see these bright yellow tapes everywhere. They are a powerful symbol, causing us to detour, from our intended path, around a site.

While photographing construction sites for Precaution, Debeugny again shifted her focus by taking a step back to look at the larger picture. Older homes in downtown Vancouver are regularly levelled to clear the ground for towering high-rises. In the name of increasing the city’s “housing density”, one wonders: What is being constructed? What is being disassembled? What kind of city are we creating? What kind of culture will emerge as a result? “Heritage conservation”, benevolent as it sounds, tends to describe the capitalist activities of municipalities and enterprising individuals, rather than the day-to-day efforts of the now-present communities confronted with few options for survival. The so-called “heritage home” becomes a status symbol to increase not only property value but also the divide between rich and poor, as the latter are displaced to make room for the good intentions of the former.

Beginning with the aestheticization of industrial ghettoes and arriving at larger questions about the relations between industry and culture, Debeugny’s work over the past years documents process. On the one hand we see her own process—her fascinations, methodologies, and discoveries. And on the other we see the processing of capital, from its material instances to its social networks. In the ebb and flow of capital, communities built on industry swiftly emerge and eventually disband or redistribute themselves. Through Debeugny’s artistic inquiries into this movement, we are afforded opportunities to contemplate the use-value of such transformations in a society infatuated with “progress” in the form of increasing industrialization of our global economy and the natural world.

This emergence and redistribution, the process of change, in the lives of communities, or individuals, often implies motifs of intrusion, disappearance and loss. In personal lives it is often elegiac. At first, the project Maillardville 100 ans et plus / Maillardville 100 years and beyond (2009) may seem like a complete departure for Debeugny: a warm and crowded document, part memoir, part oral history: an exhibition, followed by a book and DVD, of Maillardville people’s portraits, and their own recollections, celebrating 100 years of the flourishing of the unique francophone community in BC’s Lower Mainland. The occasion is celebratory and euphoric, the past and present co-existing in the glow of benignity and nostalgia.

But within the project persist much of the enquiry, and many of the motifs, from Debeugny’s earlier work. The tenderness of Maillardville still harbors an elegy.  The spoken memories, and the sight of faces of widely differing ages, hint at loss, at forgetting as well as remembering, an elegy on the passage of time. Even in their fond talk of Maillardville, the elders describe the abatement of the physical fabric of the community; some remark on its endurance as collective memory and linguistic preference: like the diaspora of Acadie, “The real Maillardville exists outside of itself. People [living elsewhere] said they lived in Maillardville; what mattered is where they had been.” Kids celebrate their francophone roots while they seem to have half turned away from Maillardville itself.

The decision of Fraser Mills (forest products sawmills), more than 100 years ago, to exploit a dependable labour force, gave birth to Maillardville, in a drive to hire francophones from other parts of Canada. After its early boom, the mill was devastated by the Depression, then absorbed by Crown Zellerbach, and finally, run-down and obsolete, forced to close in the bad economy of 2001. The failing fortunes of the resource sector, the flow and ebb of community, the historical tenure of this small pocket of West Coast landscape by a “rust” industry; these are implicit in the recollections of the Maillardville speakers, and in the backgrounds of the portrait photographs.

Significantly, the acknowledgment of loss within celebration was not accidental, but a clear aspect of intention in the curatorial influence of Johanne Dumas (directrice générale et artistique de la Société francophone de Maillardville) who, knowing Debeugny’s previous work, identified her as the right artist for the Maillardville project.