The purpose of this site is to show, indeed the subway of Montreal, but mainly the fascinating universe of forms, volumes, lines and colors that one may find in the 65 stations and 66 kilometers of tunnels. I was really impressed by some of them, which look like they popped out of a sci-fi movie.
I hope I will be able to share with you my vision and to get you to see what we don't see in this place, which I like to nickname the "freak show" when I'm being cynical. But you will have to come to Montreal to discover this aspect!
This website was also the opportunity for me to discover website building. You are visiting the second version of this website, which was entirely rebuild during summer 2005. I tried to make it as appealing, navigable and close to what I like as possible.
Perhaps you might think that some pictures are very similar. Let me quote the Marquis de Sade about this matter. Here what he wrote in The 120 Days of Sodom (1785):
"It is the story of the magnificent banquet: six hundred different plates offer themselves to your appetite; are you going to eat them all? No, surely not, but the prodigious variety enlarges the bounds of your choice and, delighted by this increase of possibilities, it surely never occurs to you to scold the Amphitryon who regales you. Do likewise here: choose and let lie the rest without declaiming against that rest simply because it does not have the power to please you. Consider that it will enchant someone else and be a philosopher.
As for the diversity, it is authentic, you may be sure of it; study closely that passion which to your first consideration seems perfectly to resemble another, and you will see that a difference does exist and that, however slightly it may be, it possesses precisely that refinement, that touch which distinguishes and characterizes the kind of libertinage wherewith we are here involved."
(Translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhause, supervert.com)
Short history of the website:
- 23 January 2005: first time online.
- Progressive addition of pictures of the stations and evolution of the navigation interface.
- 1st April 2005: English version online.
- 20th May 2005: addition of the last remaining stations, renewal of the whole site (especially the links page, the Best Of and the "About the site" page) and small changes of presentation.
- 27th May 2005: original and unified navigation buttons for the whole site.
- June 2005: clickable map of the subway.
- August 2005: building the website as you can view it now.
Every photography of this website have been taken in the Montreal subway, from January to April 2005, without tripod, with a digital camera Olympus Camedia C-760 Ultra Zoom.
The background images used in the station pages have all been created from pictures of the walls of the stations. Each station walls are differents, except the Berri-UQAM and Peel stations where walls are covered by the same tiles.
