Ontario is full of places most people drive past without a second glance: overgrown foundations along back roads, rusting machinery half-hidden in the trees, entire former communities slowly being reclaimed by the forest. Ontario Exploration grew out of a habit of stopping to look at those places and wanting to understand what happened there. The project documents abandoned sites across the province, from ghost towns in the mining north to forgotten homestead clearings on the Canadian Shield, combining photography with whatever historical records can still be found.
Much of the early work focused on the Ottawa Valley and Eastern Ontario, where the lumber era left behind a remarkable landscape of stone mill foundations and empty villages. Coverage has since expanded to include Georgian Bay, the Near North, and other parts of the province. The goal is preservation through documentation: photographs and written records may be all that survives of these places in another generation.