Offering views of an industrial neighbourhood in the Montreal district of Hochelaga, Ammoniaque elegantly combines the documentary approach – “the importance of the subject and the picture taking,” as Ève Dorais specifies – and the materiality of the photograph through the use of analogue cameras and photosensitive film. In Dorais’s view, Alexis Desgagnés’s “off-axis photographic gaze” and attention to details give rise to an almost-spiritual dimension. Desgagnés – who is also an art historian, curator, and poet –explores words written on a corrugated-iron wall to uncover urban poetry. Similar to Claude Gauvreau’s Exploréen language, the words are imbued with “pain, incongruity, and euphoria.” This is an essential book, Dorais says, because it makes us aware of an urban space that falls between the cracks but is full of humanity, and it “encourages us to reconsider our conceptions of landscape and of beautiful photography.”