Image Description: Julia Skikavich, a white person with short dark hair and glasses, smiles thinly, looking seriously toward the camera.
Julia Skikavich is an award-winning creator, photographer, screenwriter and journalist. Her journalistic photography has been featured in newspapers and magazines in Canada and the United States. She has also held positions as a photo editor, reporter, senior news writer and producer for news organizations that have included CBC, Sun Media and Yahoo! Canada. She’s been published by The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Time Magazine, and more. Her coverage and photography has spanned major events and breaking news stories, including election campaigns, murder trials, the Canada Games, the Olympics, sled dog races and Sasquatch sightings.
Much of Julia’s photography is based in the abstract and captures subjects at unexpected angles, encouraging viewers to carefully observe while also drawing their attention to subtle details, textures and lines. She is currently working on a daily photo and literary project chronicling her lived experiences commuting between small town Ontario and Toronto for medical treatment. The effort is designed to encapsulate the feelings, emotions and sensations associated with chronic illness, rare disease, disability, (in)accessibility, and the healthcare system.
In recent years my photography has become an outlet for the exploration of my experiences living with rare disease and its resulting chronic illness and disabilities. I’ve spent much of the past five years travelling from small town Ontario into to urban Toronto for cycles of treatment that require injections and IV therapy. For the past 18 months I’ve captured a photo near daily. The effort is meant to encapsulate the experiences, emotions and sensations associated with rare disease, chronic illness, disability, (in)accessibility, and Ontario’s healthcare system. The collection has become an inventory of my lived experiences. “Goodbye Sidewalks” is a moment captured as part of that project: Five Year Plan.
My photographic work in Five Year Plan is meant to challenge viewer’s perceptions of disability, barriers and isolation while encouraging them to expand their understanding of the human experience and true definition of accessibility and ability in the context of daily life. The captured ethereal moments of stillness can be both comforting and unsettling, evoking contemplation. The images in the collection depict both rural and urban settings, showcasing my time at home and in travelling into Toronto hospitals. They are my life as a person and my life as a patient — personal and medical — creating a montage of contrasting and unstaged moments of singularity and aloneness set within the viewer’s perceived social constructs.
Much of my photography is based in the abstract, and captures subjects at unexpected angles, encouraging viewers to carefully observe while also drawing their attention to subtle details, textures and lines. I do much of my shooting in monochrome, and/or through desaturated muted colours while processing — playing with light and shadow, seen and unseen.
Society often defines illness and disability as very black-and-white. This washes over the grey area many living with chronic illness and disability exist within, while also trying to push us further into the shadows due to societal discomfort around confronting physical fallibility and our internalized ableism. My photographic work invites the viewer to pause and reflect on their perceptions and biases around what the disability experience looks like in daily life. It also serves as a reminder there remains an overriding beauty in the challenge and the experience of all life — however hard we, or others, may feel it is to look at or sit with.
Goodbye Sidewalks
This black-and-white photograph depicts a residential street entirely blanketed in snow. In the middle ground, at our left, a person bundled up in a patterned winter coat walks a dog down the middle of the snowy street. The medium-sized, dark-coloured dog walks beside the person on a twisted leash. They walk along compacted tire tracks in the ankle deep snow, passing waist-high piles of snow lining the street at the ends of driveways. The scene includes bare trees with snow-laden branches, snow-covered sidewalks, and snow-topped power lines stretching across the frame. In the foreground, a utility pole support wire covered in snow cuts diagonally across the right side of the image. The choice of black-and-white emphasizes the contrast between the fresh white snow, and the darker elements in the photograph.