With the highlight of competing in the 1996 Olympics for Canada, Cynthia Johnston’s basketball career spanned 20 years in both Europe and Canada,
with 14 years as part of the National Team program beginning at the age of 16. The latter part of her sport’s career overlapped with the early years of raising her children in Belgium. Somewhere in there, she also ran a bed and breakfast in Brugge with her husband. It is since she accidently won her first camera at the age of 19 that her passion for photography began, existing as a constant thread throughout these many and varied phases of her life thus far.
Following two years of commuting from Quebec City to Toronto to attain her MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University in 2019, Cynthia has returned to residing full time in Quebec City with her husband, 5 children, 3 dogs, 1 cat and 2 horses.
In barely audible exclamations, I breathe out my images as part of a desperate insatiable appetite – a hunger for time slipping, or maybe a fear that my memory shall one day fail me. Nonetheless, it is an urgency to imprint visual cues. It is an innate need to reassure that the past was not an oneiric one. Every night, I sleep with my camera next to me – a permanent fixture on my bedside table.
Experience has taught me patience but this fervent desire for visual registration has yet to expire. For the past 18 years my children have been my muses, their lives under the constant microscope of my camera. This possession of my vision resides in awe of the fragile and the resilient – something as a parent I cannot but embrace. My images slip between this polar narrative, falling quietly into the psychological dark and light. By combining my past studies of Art History and Photo-Journalism, the style of my work is a fusion of newspaper reportage with the influence of studying paintings.