Winter in Quebec
In December 2022 I took a trip to Quebec. I lived in Montreal for four years when I was a kid, but I hadn’t visited Quebec in probably 20 years, and I had never spent much time in the rural areas. This trip, which started and ended in Quebec City and took in the regions of of Chaudiere-Appalaches and part of the Bas-Saint-Laurant, focused on photographing barns, minimalist rural scenes and croix de chemin (roadside crosses). The conditions were great and I was really happy with the results of the trip.
If you’d like to read about the trip and see some behind-the-scenes images, take a look at my blog post.
There is a series within the series: the croix de chemin (roadside crosses). There are between 2,500 and 3,000 croix de chemin scattered all over rural Québec, the historic centre of North American Catholicism. Despite the decrease in influence of the Catholic Church during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and the prediction that, as a result, croix de chemin would disappear from the rural landscape, recent surveys have shown that around 80% of the croix that were surveyed in the 70s and 80s are still standing. Croix de chemin are large (15 to 20 feet tall) crosses that where originally “erected to fulfill a vow, to sacralize the land, or to ward off calamities” (Kaell, p. 135). They hark back to the cross that Jacques Cartier erected on the Canadian mainland, in Gaspé, on July 24, 1534 on his first exploration trip of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but also represent their owners’ Catholic devotion and are examples of beautiful rural folk art. Croix de chemin are most often made of wood (though some more modern ones are made of metal) and are decorated with iconography of the Passion. Each year their caretakers try to repaint them and every 40 or 50 years they have to be replaced altogether. There are three main types of croix de chemin: (1) the simple croix de chemin which may have some decorative elements at the end or centre, (2) the croix de chemin featuring instruments of the Passion which are decorated with a lance, nails, hammer, whip, ladder, crown of thorns, and/or rooster and (3) the calvaire, which depicts the crucifixion scene.
Kaell, H. (2017) Marking memory: Heritage work and devotional labor at Québec’s croix de chemin. In K. Norget (Ed.), The Anthropology of Catholicism (pp. 122-138). University of California Press.
