Graffiti addressed to people like me

In the summer of 1992, my wife & I, with some friends and their
eight-year-old son, visited St-Pierre-et-Miquelon (SPM). St Pierre is a
part of France, but it is only fifteen kilometres from the island of
Newfoundland. It is in North America, but there is no ambiguity there
about its being French -- everything looks and feels and smells like
France.

Two months before our visit, SPM had lost a long-standing court case
against Canada; the international court's decision reduced French control
of the sea around SPM to a tiny fraction of what they'd argued for. Thus
this, and similar, graffiti alerting visitors like us, in English, to the
economic hard times that had settled on SPM as a result of Canada's
position. In a tiny place like SPM even 600 lay-offs was a very substantial
number.

But sadly for our sympathies, in the meantime (just one month before I took
this picture) the Canadian government had -- as a result of decades of
mismanagement of fish stocks -- shut down the main fisheries in
Newfoundland and adjacent parts of Canada. It was estimated that 20,000
Newfoundlanders were immediately idled by the decision. So it was
difficult for us to see the SPM situation as anything but part of the
larger fisheries collapse.

Whatever hard feelings to Canadians there were in SPM in mid-1992 seemed to
disappear over the coming years. And their tourism has become more
developed in that time. It is still a great place to visit.


Ilford FP4 in Pentax SP500.