J.L. Fizzell

Northern Ontario: Held in many hands. Shaped by one place.

A visual ode to the untamed beauty of Northern Ontario — a love letter written slowly, through many eyes.

The inspiration behind this project:

I didn’t always love where I’m from. Growing up, small-town life felt limiting, slow, and isolating. I couldn’t wait to leave and see the world beyond.
It wasn’t until my mid-twenties, spending time at our family cottage near Chapleau, that I fell in love with Northern Ontario. Casting lines off the dock, stargazing, foraging, and exploring secret lakes reminded me that my happiest memories have always been outdoors. Nature here has a quiet magic — it turns ordinary days into adventure.

Northern Ontario isn’t for everyone — it takes toughness to brave harsh winters — but it’s a place to slow down, breathe, and reconnect. Its arts, culture, and nature tourism thrive, offering space to explore, reflect, and find yourself.

This gallery is yet another love letter to the North, and perhaps my way of reconciling all the years I could not see her for what she was — rugged, untamed, and full of her own wild magic.

It is also, at its heart, a psychogeography project — an exploration of how place shapes us, how landscape leaves its mark on who we become. These photographs are not simply images of Northern Ontario.

They are evidence of relationship and of people who have been formed by a particular sky, a particular shoreline, a particular quality of silence.

This project is an open call to local photographers to capture what it’s like to live and breathe this land. The goal is to inspire those who are much like my younger self — lost in the challenges that accompany this rugged, almost frontier life — to fall in love with the land and see all the ways that its ruggedness and beauty have been reflected back into who they have become.

Living, Northern is one thread in a larger practice of championing Northern Ontario voices and stories — alongside the Paper Town Writers Collective and the Northern Voices: A Home For Untamed Creativity. Different forms, the same belief: this place and the people shaped by it deserve to be seen.

I urge you to sit with these photos, contemplate the feelings that arise, and leave your thoughts in the discussion section.

Wander, explore, and fall in love.

Submissions

If you’d like to add your images to this collection, send your submission to j.l.fizzell@outlook.com alongside your preferred name and the region of Northern Ontario where the photograph was taken.

All submitted photographs remain the property of their creators. By submitting, participants grant permission for their work to be displayed on Living, Northern for community viewing. If you would like your photo removed at any time, please reach out via the email above.

“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.”
— L. M. Montgomery