Capturing life in the shadows of Canada’s largest oil refinery

Growing up in the rural outskirts of Saint John, New Brunswick, Chris Donovan gazed up at the sky, watching the smokestacks at Irving Oil Refinery expel endless swells of filth into the crystal blue sky. With the innocence of youth, he asked his father if they made all the world’s clouds. ​“No,” his father replied. ​“They make money.” 

Donovan remembers: ​“The industrialisation of the city didn’t feel exceptional as a child, it was just the world I knew.” In that same way, he first picked up a camera to photograph backyard wildlife, unknowingly rooting himself in a practice that has come full circle with the recent publication of The Cloud Factory (GOST Books) – a gripping portrait of neo-feudalism built on the backs of Canada’s working poor. 

The story begins in 2014, when Donovan began documenting the communities in Saint John, who live under the shadows of the Irving Group, the fifth wealthiest family in Canada and fifth largest landowner in North America. Unlike other dynasties, the family dominates a region rather than a global industry, building an empire across New Brunswick’s oil, forestry, transport, agribusiness, and media worth an estimated 14.5 billion Canadian dollars (£7.96 billion).

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The empire began in the 1920s under scion Kenneth Colin Irving, whose three sons James, Arthur, and Jack. Following his death in 1992, they split the empire he had built among themselves. By 2024, all three had died, the state of the holdings hidden from view, much like the family themselves. What is visible, as Donovan shows, is the huge, continuing effects that they have had on the area. 

“This project is entirely about the community for me,” Donovan says. ​“The industrial forces that influence the political economy are just a backdrop to life in this place. The bosses of the company town are an unseen force. How do you photograph the unseen – the class that has purchased the right to not be seen? There is no simple answer to that question.” 

Amid the desolate landscape of industrial waste, families often found themselves bound to silence, fostered by the elite classes. Donovan, who got his start in 2016 as a photojournalist for Saint John’s daily newspaper, the Telegraph-Journal – then owned by the Irving Group – saw that culture himself.

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He remembers: ​“Growing up you knew about the ​‘Irving papers’ and what that meant. It wasn’t until I worked at one of them that I realised the extent of implicit censorship taking place culturally in these institutions. It was all unspoken, but you knew not to criticise the bosses.”

In 2018, residents in East Saint John had to be evacuated after a butane leak at the Irving Oil Refinery – the largest in Canada. For 17 hours, the explosive, toxic chemical poured into the air. In the wake of the incident, Irving Oil was fined just 200,000 Canadian dollars (£110,540). The company purchased 20 homes near the site and tore them down to establish a protected area between the refinery and the community. 

By that time Donovan had left the Telegraph-Journal, but remembers how a second incident, an explosion at the refinery on Thanksgiving Day in 2018 that left dozens of workers injured, was reported at the time. ​“The newspaper ran a headline on the front page that read: ​‘Thanksgiving Miracle,’ celebrating that nobody was killed,” he says. ​“That was one of the times that the veil really came down for the community as well, in terms of an obvious control of the narrative.” 

For Donovan, The Cloud Factory is both an act of protest and a refusal to comply with the culture of silence that afflicts Saint John’s media. ​“It is because I love this place that I need to bring attention to the harm being caused to it environmentally and socially by industrial giants who prioritise profit over human health,” he says. ​“I understand what happens to monopolised economies in the long-term. It never ends well. Perhaps it is too late to issue a warning on that front, but I feel I must try.”

The Cloud Factory by Chris Donovan is published by GOST Books.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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