Provoking with irreverence and style

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This article was published 29/11/2013 (1389 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Stuck in the Middle

Dissenting Views of Winnipeg

Photos by Bryan Scott, text by Bartley Kives, foreword by John K. Samson

Great Plains Publications, 200 pages, $30

THIS book, by Winnipeg photographer Bryan Scott and Winnipeg journalist Bartley Kives, is by no means the usual coffee table book of pretty pictures and saccharine sentiment.

In keeping with its fitting subtitle, it belongs more on the dinner table, where it will surely provoke timely discussion of the authors' thesis that this city is now on the precipice of a momentous choice: either to reinvigorate its inner core and support only development that makes environmental and economic sense or to slide into mediocrity by continuing the usual business of incoherent planning and endless sprawl.

If you care about this city, you will love Scott's atmospheric, chiaroscuro-style photos and Kives's irreverent humour, as they make their case by taking us on a whirlwind tour from the end of the last continental Ice Age to the return of the Jets.

— John K. Collins