This photograph is one of 18,000 frames I took at the Canadian Cheer National Championships in Niagara Falls. That’s an absurd amount of pictures, but with dozens of performances to capture, it seems fittingly excessive for a story documenting the very extreme sport of competitive cheer.
Reporter Jana G. Pruden and videographer Timothy Moore and I spent three days in April documenting the sparkle, bounce and shouts of 8,000 cheer athletes from all over Canada. Here, the jubilant team members of the Montreal-based Coyotes Savage Pack celebrate their divisional win. A shiny, shrieking, hair-flying sport like no other.
Marcus Gee and I visited downtown Oshawa a number of times in 2023 to document the people and places that have been affected by a triple crisis of drug addiction, mental illness and homelessness. This photograph was for a story in January about the warmth and support that Nicole Teelucksingh, the convenience store owner on the right, offers to those who are struggling in the neighbourhood. We caught serene moments like this one between Daniel Renaud and Amber Kellas, who spend a lot of time at Convenience Plus.
Later in the evening, just down the street, two people were taken to hospital after separate opioid overdoses within the same block.
Cambria Harris, of Long Plain First Nation in Manitoba, is the daughter of Morgan Harris, one of the victims of an alleged serial killer. It’s suspected her mother’s remains, along with those of another woman, are in the Prairie Green landfill near Winnipeg. When this photo was taken in January at the Brady Road Landfill protest site, Ms. Harris had already spoken at Parliament asking for police to search the landfill for the women’s remains.
As the landfill search became a provincial election campaign topic, Ms. Harris continued to advocate with other family members and Indigenous leaders for police and government to search the landfills. Her determination is clear in her gaze.
Every day in the late afternoon at the Dajabon border with Ouanaminthe, Haiti, caged immigration buses and repurposed school buses arrive crammed to the windows with deportees. Children and families, many collected by soldiers in the middle of the night without belongings or shoes and sometimes held for days at detention centres, are sent back across the border. Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, shares the island with the Dominican Republic, the largest economy in the Caribbean. The extreme disparity has led to an increase of would-be migrants.
This photo from March is of Gesnal Duval, who was on one of the school buses. He said he had been arrested with his wife and three children the night before along with every Haitian on his block. Reporter Adrian Morrow only spoke to him for a minute before he was ushered across the border back to Haiti, carrying only his daughter.
On the border with Haiti in Dajabon, Dominican Republic, sits an enormous market where Haitians are allowed to cross without a passport to work or sell goods for the day. Nearby, the Dominican government has been erecting a wall to keep out Haitian migrants.
Reporter Adrian Morrow and I watched this seemingly endless lineup of thousands of people at the border. At 8 a.m., the gates open and Haitians lugging their wares shuffle across the bridge. They spend the day working at the market, selling mostly secondhand items from the U.S., transporting goods for Dominican vendors or buying food, before returning to Haiti as the sun sets.
For a deep dive into fair trade chocolate, reporter Adrian Morrow and I visited cocoa farms in the Dominican Republic. In this photo, a worker is pulling a 70-kilogram bag of cocoa beans from piles that nearly fill a fair trade co-op’s cavernous processing centre.
The dried and roasted beans will be distributed to companies who use them to make cocoa powder, cocoa nibs, cocoa liquor, cocoa butter and chocolate. The fair trade label indicates cocoa farmers have followed labour and environmental standards and generally have been paid more.
In late October, three weeks into Israel’s war on Hamas, the country stepped up operations in Jenin in the West Bank, killing many Palestinians and arresting hundreds. I have covered conflict in Jenin as far back as 2002. This time, I attended the funeral after an Israeli raid killed two Islamic Jihad militants. As the body was being carried out of the mosque, one man placed his hand on the dead man’s head as if saying goodbye.
An estimated 60,000 people live at Al Roj and Al Hol prison camps in northeast Syria, with women and children making up the majority of those detained on suspicion of having ties to the Islamic State. I photographed this young girl standing with her family at a market in the Al Hol camp.
In this image from Vietnam, two people attempt to fish a river at low tide in the town of Tran De near the Mekong River, which has been dammed to prevent inland salination from rising seas. With so much garbage and so little water, they look like they are fishing in mud.
It illustrates climate change in the area well. It’s beautiful when the tide is high and you can’t see the garbage, although that brings the threat of saltwater destroying agricultural crops. When the water pulls out, it looks like a disaster.
Embedded with the Syrian Democratic Forces in April, I documented this counterterrorism raid in Deir ez-Zor, Syria. It was a rare look into the Kurdish-controlled territory where the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria uses the SDF to attempt to control areas in the aftermath of the war against the Islamic State. On this night the soldiers arrested a suspect, rounding up scared family members lit by the military vehicles’ light.
Years ago, I photographed protests in the West Bank just like this one in Ramallah on Oct. 27. I was surprised to see Israeli forces were using live ammunition, not rubber bullets, and women were collecting rocks for the young men to throw toward the border guards.
I was wearing heavy, press-labeled safety equipment, and with the threat of live ammunition, these Ramallah protests were more difficult to photograph. I stood away from the boys – they were mostly teenagers – when they threw the rocks, and didn’t photograph the border guards.
Photographing puppies is not the usual Report on Business assignment. But for a story on a company that holds dog-centric events, I found myself, along with the company’s founders, trying to wrangle two puppies for a portrait. Puppies tend to do their own thing and don’t often take direction well. While finishing up portraits with the other puppy, I noticed Oberon, an Olde English BullDogge, just sitting on the floor, staring at himself in a mirror.
News of an incident of intimate partner violence that left one woman and three children dead and another woman injured in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., had me on the road to meet up with a reporter also heading up that night. These stories can be difficult to photograph as there is little information available.
On my last day there, as I headed out in the early morning, I made one last drive past a home where a memorial had been set up. Lights had been left on throughout the night, as if to offer a beacon of support for the family and neighbours.
I shot a protest against gender-identity education this fall at Queen’s Park for a story on the parents’ rights movement. The group opposed to gender ideology in schools staked out space by a monument, and counter-protesters eventually began to gather there as well. The two groups engaged in trying to drown out the other side’s voices and block each other’s signs. A transgender flag backlit by the noon sun stands out against the silhouetted figures of the protesters.
Decades after being transported from their communities in the north to southern hospitals to be treated for tuberculosis, a group of survivors returned to the Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton. They attended workshops to help them heal from the trauma they suffered as a result of being taken from their traditional lands.
Part of the group’s itinerary included a visit to the former site of the sanatorium, where a large cross they could see from their rooms was still standing. When they exited the bus and saw the cross, emotions poured out and they held each other in support. Photographing intimate moments like this is always difficult because we want to respect people’s privacy while helping tell their story.
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow’s election night party was held was in an intimate space. As soon as I began to follow her in, I realized there was no way I was going to be able to make my way through the densely packed crowds. I managed to get near the stage behind a row of people, some of whom let me squeeze in.
The only way to get the photographs I needed to show the jubilation of the night was to hold my camera over my head and look at the screen while shooting, not ideal. While I still wished I could have made it to the upper level to shoot this moment, the lower angle showed the view from her supporters’ perspective.