Refractions of Waterloo

Interested in Refractions of Waterloo?

Refractions of Waterloo is a very early-stage project. I've managed to print my first copy for W25 Socratica Symposium, but there's still a bunch of work to do before I'm happy with a release version. If you'd like to get your hands on a copy, sign up and you'll be kept up to date on the project, including when preorders open.

About the project

I stumbled upon Maurice Green's work, Reflections of Waterloo and Images of Waterloo, purely by chance. I hadn't expected a place like UWaterloo to have such an artistic and thoughtful piece of documentation associated with it, especially considering that I never saw any potential in UW as a place worth photographing at all. The images in the books were so beautiful, of a place that was so much of the opposite in my eyes.

I wanted to learn more about Maurice Green and the other artists who worked on the books like Chris Hughes and David Bartholomew. However, the internet and my limited scouring into the archives hardly offered any information about them. Only traces of their other work and obituaries were left.

One of my biggest fears in life is forgetting and being forgotten. I don't want the biggest regret in my life to be being too late in hearing or preserving a story and losing it forever. I think it's crushing to have had such a big impact on your community, be it your family or the foundational development of a university, only to have that slowly become a piece of lost history.

One of my favourite novels of all time is Max Brooks' World War Z (NOT the movie!). It's an anthology of stories from people who survived the zombie apocalypse, collected by the narrator to build the UN's postwar report. In the introduction, we learn that much of these stories were not included in the final report because they were too personal. Our narrator argues that these deep, emotional stories will be the only things that people of present and future generations will care about. He pleads "we can't let these stories die", only to be told "Write a book. Who's stopping you from keeping these stories alive in the pages of your own fucking book?". (This is a bit of a wild parallel to draw. I just wanted an excuse to talk about World War Z.)

This is 姥姥 (Lǎolao), tending to the chickens that my dad keeps bringing in. I'm not sure if she enjoys the work, but she always makes sure they're fed, have time to play, and lay eggs.

The original scope for this project was to do a deep dive into Maurice Green, discover as much as I could about his life and work, conduct interviews with people who knew him, and create my own photobook in dedication to him along with my research. It was quite an ambitious goal, and the mountain of work I gave myself overwhelmed me. So I put off the project, only passively taking photos here and there for three years, but not really putting in real effort in uncovering more about Maurice Green.

I realized that if I actually wanted to have this idea go anywhere, I should just work with the material I have and create something. This first v0.1 iteration of Refractions, demoed at Symposium, is just a compilation of those photographs. It's a good place to start.

I have a lot more I want to talk about. This page will probably be updated with more words in the future.

-Kevin Z, 19 March 2025