Photographs Waiting for Their Stories

Yesterday, I found myself doing something that felt less like design work and more like archaeological digging.

I had been circling around a problem that looked simple on the surface: the cover image for my novel Nonimportantech. But as often happens with visual decisions, the “simple” part quickly dissolves once you start actually looking.

I opened my Google Drive, thinking I would quickly find something usable. Instead, I found mostly videos—recent fragments of life, short clips, work-in-progress material. Almost no still images. The kind of quiet photographs I needed for a book cover weren’t there in the present tense of my archive.

So I went out.

I walked along Notre-Dame Street in Montreal, camera in hand, trying to “solve” the cover by force—by accumulation. Brick walls, industrial textures, passing light, winter-worn surfaces. I took many shots, convinced that somewhere in the sequence, something would reveal itself as obvious.

But nothing did.

Everything felt slightly off: too literal, too noisy, too contemporary in the wrong way. It wasn’t that the images were bad. They simply didn’t belong to the same emotional register as the book I was trying to build.

At some point, I stopped looking forward and started looking backward.

Back into the cloud. Back into memory.

That’s when the process shifted.

Instead of searching for “a good photo,” I began scrolling through time itself. Months folded past. Then years. The rhythm of files changed subtly—the metadata, the naming habits, even the way I composed images at different moments in my life.

And then I found it.

A set of photographs taken three years ago, just after the Covid period had loosened its grip on daily life. We had been by the river near the Lachine Canal, a place that always carries a strange mix of industrial weight and quiet openness.

Lachine Canal

The images were not taken with a “cover” in mind. They were ordinary family photos—casual framing, unplanned composition, the kind of pictures you take when you are simply relieved to be outside again without thinking too much about documentation or aesthetics.

But something in them felt different now.

There was a distance in those images that I could not recreate in my recent walk along Notre-Dame Street. Not a geographical distance, but a temporal one. A softness produced by time itself. The light in those photos didn’t belong to a search for meaning—it belonged to recovery.

I started testing them.

One by one, I placed them behind the title of Nonimportantech, adjusting contrast, cropping edges, trying different alignments. Most of them didn’t work. Some were too crowded. Some pulled the story in the wrong direction. Some simply dissolved under the weight of typography.

And then I reached a photograph that featured the Canada Malting Silos.

Canada Malting Silos

The image wasn’t perfect.

In fact, if I were being strict about design principles, I could easily list its flaws: the balance is slightly uneven, the sky is not dramatic enough, the composition leans more documentary than conceptual. It does not announce itself as a “cover image.”

But something about it held.

The silos stood there like a kind of industrial memory—large, silent, almost indifferent to interpretation. Behind them, the river carried its usual slow motion. The scene didn’t try to explain itself. It simply existed, with a kind of patience that felt aligned with the book’s own tone.

Nonimportantech, at its core, is not a story that demands spectacle. It is a story built from fragments, misalignments, quiet observations, and the strange emotional weight of things that appear insignificant until you look at them from far enough away.

And that is what this image gave me: distance without detachment.

After a long loop of hesitation, I decided to accept it.

Not because it is the “best” image in any technical sense, but because it survives contact with the text. It does not compete with the title. It does not over-explain the narrative. It simply holds a space for it.

There is something slightly uncomfortable about making a final decision like this. Especially when you know how many possible versions of “better” still exist inside your archive, or outside on the streets you just walked through.

But at some point, design stops being a search for perfection and becomes a choice about resonance.

I realized that I had been trying to produce a cover, when in fact I needed to recognize one.

That recognition didn’t happen in the streets of Notre-Dame, even though I thought it would. It didn’t happen in the present tense of new photography. It happened in a folder from the past, inside a set of images taken without intention.

This is perhaps the most interesting part of working with personal archives: they are never truly “past.” They are simply unassigned. Waiting for context that hasn’t arrived yet.

Now the cover of Nonimportantech carries that layered temporality. A photograph taken without purpose, selected years later for a story that didn’t yet exist at the time it was captured.

And maybe that is what the book is about as well: not the importance of things, but the delayed meaning of them.

I still think the image is not perfect.

But I have stopped expecting it to be.