‘Art in the ruins of the world’

Long Exposure
by Stephanie Bolster

Windsor: Palimpsest Press, 2025
$21.95 / 9781997508014

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

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The white pages of Stephanie Bolster’s Long Exposure are gallery walls. On them she has curated two exhibitions.

The first is a series of long exposure photographs, on the model of Robert Polidori’s After the Flood, his photographs of ruins in New Orleans, and Zones of Exclusion, his photos of Chernobyl and its service city, Pripyat. 

The poems Bolster exhibits are ruins of human dwelling (verb). They are not dwellings (noun). The distinction is important, because these are rooms with no human presence, except in being observed. They are photographs. No one lives in them. No one can.

The second exhibition is a series of quick polaroid snapshots, on two models: firefighters destroyed after just seconds of exposure to the burning reactor core of Chernobyl, and of Japanese haiku, honouring the Japanese Canadians interred in camps in British Columbia in 1942.

In both series, the link between photographic exposure and lengths of exposure to water (New Orleans) and radiation (Chernobyl) is deliberate. Bolster’s poems represent varying exposures to light shining on and reflecting off dehumanized space. 

The dehumanized space includes Bolster’s: more that of a camera lens than an organic eye. Her exposures to light create mirror images of the projections of “home” that humans previously made on now-ruined material spaces. Her organic eye is here, though: watching the lens. 

To put that in a metaphor from the book, disaster has revealed the hard metal at the back of mirrors, in place of human faces staring into them. West coast-born and raised, Bolster (A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth) bravely refuses to turn away and travels to New Orleans and the Tashme and Sandon internment camps to witness herself witnessing her craft encountering the end of the world. 

The exposure has a cost: human narrative effects of language are weakened, rhythms are simplified, periods or emptiness often replace commas (which have a shorter half life than periods, in which action and life stop), and mutations in syntax push verbs, the actions of living bodies and minds, to become nouns and adjectives. On the page, it all looks like this (from “Shelter Object (Chernobyl Fire, 1986)”):

The constellations made of fear. Chaos
where a shape was. Stars where a roof.

A fire where a place. The world
asleep in its bed. World irrevocable.

The heat unfathomable. They worked
shirtless. Already acute in hospital.

Soon coffins of zinc. Soon
they’d gut the wards of the dead.

Tried robots but robot death
seized their limbs if they were limbs.

Note the conflation of the short period of time each firefighter at Chernobyl could spend exposed to the burning reactor core and the end-stopped fragments the text has become. Note, too, the mutations: the adjective “acute” becomes a noun; the verb “Tried” becomes an adjective; the conditional “if” becomes the indeterminateness of identity itself as the entire phrase mutates into one indeterminate noun.

As human lives are displaced by water, by radiation, and by art, to read and even to observe as Bolster has done after flying in from Canada is to be a tourist protected by distance. As Bolster suggests, though, Canadians are not protected at all. Here’s an example of exposure—from “Wave”—in which ruin continues past flood to include the tourists who follow it:

That’s when she lost it. Prom dress
flood-lined in the closet. Sludge
lines on the bus shelters along Canal. Then
new palm trees for the tourists. $35K a pop.

In this apocalyptic world, length of exposure is critical to developing a clear picture of human social organization. For example, Bolster documents how elite neighbourhoods in New Orleans were built on prime ground, ensuring shorter exposure to water’s destruction, and were rebuilt within two years. Impoverished neighbourhoods, bearing the full brunt of exposure to mismanagement and then to water, remained ruins after ten.

It’s similar in Pripyat. A young firefighter at Chernobyl becomes toxic nuclear waste in a few minutes, and lingers on in hospital for two weeks. During that time, his pregnant young wife cares for him despite warnings, and exposes herself, losing her unborn child in the process and ruining her own health, while his body deteriorates. 

Metaphorically, Bolster is this young woman caring for the bodies of her art in the ruins of the world. Grief is swallowed into a silent scream. Worlds that should be dwellings are now nothing. This “nothing” is not the same as space. It is a thing here, reforming human life as nothing by casting it in its own image. 

It is, in other words, a mirror, deep within a camera. Its aesthetic gaze removes the human gaze, relocates it, and depersonalizes it, an unpitying eye slouching around a centre of human care that cannot hold. In the current cultural fascination with artificial intelligence, this is a timely book.

The second section of Long Exposure attempts to strip off Canadian illusions of separation by lining its gallery walls with a series of quick polaroid snapshots. Together, they are a perennial present, one with only imagined pasts and futures, flashing through many instances of apocalypse. 

Poetry, however, has a hard time bearing the exposure. Here’s an example—from “SANDON (BC, So Dark, 1942-)”—that uses pop culture images of Japanese haiku and language simplified to prose:

That first winter 100 froze.
Not a round number.

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20 000 visitors a year.
A few residents.
Fleet of trolley buses.
No name on the map for the road.

The blend of Bolster’s two approaches is uneven. Caught up in a post-existential world, Bolster can make only the briefest sites of comfort. The “things” that held life, including metrical verse, have been liquidated. The reference includes capitalism’s economic model and the botched liquidation of exposed assets (ruined by water or radiation) in New Orleans and Pripyat, in which contaminated materials were buried and then immediately dug up and resold, contaminating others. 

As Bolster visits Tashme, the Japanese internment camp east of Hope which was repurposed as Sunshine Valley, a mountain and ski resort, in the 1980s, she attempts to avoid such recontamination by including other catastrophes: Cambodia’s killing fields, the tsunamis in Fukushima and Thailand, the Covid Pandemic of 2020, and, perceptively, Expo 86 in Vancouver, which Bolster, with her long Vancouver history, presents as the end of the world. 

In all of them, childhood’s acceptance of wholeness are broken by the intrusion of a larger world that repurposes organic, lived environments—all, however, flashing past so quickly that they appear as little more than slogans. Eschewing pathos, the result risks trivializing the terrible.

To demonstrate, perhaps, that Expo’s effects were the result of a long exposure, not the short one of a single summer, Bolster conflates (in “LOWER NINE (New Orleans, Still Here, 2016)”) the Tashme internment Camp with the memorial for the Hope slide of January 9, 1965 when half a mountain fell on Highway 3 just to the west:

Two bodies still somewhere under
the Hope Slide, a marker
there for decades. Six minutes
up the road where Tashme was
a sign for the first time.

I am not sure that’s a fair representation of time. Because the slide memorial didn’t mention Tashme, to contemporary eyes it might appear as an act of ruin porn. To British Columbians who followed the unfolding story of the slide, though, it was more: their link to the modern world had been broken, their link to government had been snapped by its inaction on geological warnings, and people were individually presented with the ethical question of whether they would have stopped that day, at great risk, to help other travellers or if they would have driven on to safety. Those are the questions of Bolster’s book, too.

What people did have, however, was a graveyard. Graveyards are human spaces. Time is part of the loss here, but also part of the minding. So is this book. They can be honoured together.

Some obvious additions to apocalypse are missing. Examples include Apocalypse Now’s critique of American soldiers in Vietnam as tourists; the general decay of small towns in Cascadia; and residential schools and Indian Reservations in British Columbia (and beyond). As a result, Bolster’s critique is less of culture in general than of the role of artists (including government sign-makers) and cultural entertainments (including Disneyland.) 

Fair enough. Mention of ruin porn sites beyond Chernobyl and Katrina hopefully shock readers into moments of understanding that even as tourists reading the short exposure of a book of poems their exposure is actually long and by inference they are themselves in the process of decay as cultural objects, as was the firefighter’s wife in Pripyat. 

What Bolster doesn’t report, however, is that this young woman’s reckless act was done out of love, and that this love and attachment are life. In its place, there is an intellectual eye, making brilliant poetry out of moments of its own demise, which it finds intensely compelling, irresistible, and, because of short exposure, explainable and endurable. 

It isn’t. Bolster didn’t write this book as a containment dome. She wrote it as an exposure.

[Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-five books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the Grass, Motherstone, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blog Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold has recently reviewed books by Lorne Daniel, Sharron J. Simpson, Tom Wayman, Estlin McPhee, Al Rempel, Hari Alluri, Brian Day, Jason Emde, John Givins, DC Reid, Kim Trainor, Dallas Hunt, and Tim Bowling for BCR. His newest book, The Salmon Shanties, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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