Certain works neither entirely belong to the visible nor the invisible world, but seem suspended in a troubling in-between. Marshall To’s images stand precisely on this edge. Bridging the landscapes of Canada’s great west and the ancestral Taoist stories passed down by his parents, he weaves a personal mythology where photography becomes a medium between two realities.
The photographer’s childhood unfolded in Red Deer, a small Alberta town where his Chinese-Canadian family practiced their spirituality daily and runned a Chinese restaurant. His father believed that humans lived in a physical world that existed simultaneously with the supernatural world, surrounded by the spirits of loved ones: those awaiting reincarnation and those who remained, restless and vengeful.
These beliefs permeated young Marshall To’s imagination. “It seemed only natural that the veil separating the living and the dead might be as thin as the line between life and death,” he recalls. What if the visible were merely the surface of a vaster reality, populated by hidden entities? This impression runs through Blank Notes, built around the Hungry Ghost Festival.
According to Taoist cosmology, on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, the gates of hell open and wandering souls temporarily reincarnate as earthly creatures to seek sustenance. On this day, Taoist families venerate the dead, offer prayers to their deceased ancestors for protection, and burn “hell notes,” money intended to help ghosts live comfortably in the afterlife.
Caution is essential. The prowling spirits are dangerous, assuming the guise of owls, snakes, moths, moose, or wolves. Some can even assume the appearance of an attractive man or woman to possess the living. “This time of year is both a celebration and a warning: one must tread carefully, not offend those we don’t see, because the gates are open and the ghosts are hungry.” It is this interstitial space that the artist tracks.
Shadows and light
Marshall To’s journey passed through the kitchen before reaching the image. By becoming a chef in Vancouver, he extended a family tradition where food is integral to culture. Above all, it served as a language for communication when words failed between immigrant generations. Culinary photography, which he practiced simultaneously, revealed his fascination with light and its capacity to sculpt or dissolve reality.
This sensitivity, acquired by styling dishes for local magazines, drew him toward wilder territories. Marshall To gradually abandoned the stoves in pursuit of animals that populate the Canadian expanses. “I do see the connection between the two,” he explains to Blind. “Food is such an important aspect of communication and love, it can disarm a person immediately. I believe photos can do similar things.”
Through his escapades “for fun and intrigue,” his photography transformed into an existential quest. The creatures with branching antlers, nocturnal raptors, and other ghostly silhouettes of wolves that he captures in the darkness acquire a totemic dimension. “There are also animals and landscapes that you can only find in Alberta or British Columbia. I shoot through glasses of water or cling film and wide open shutter.”
His black and white derives from necessity rather than aesthetic preference. By depriving his images of color, Marshall To plunges us into an indeterminate temporality where contemporary Canada merges with millennial legends. The thick grain of his prints, the halos of light that devour contours, the blurs that dissolve silhouettes—all are processes that materialize the Taoist idea of a reality in perpetual metamorphosis.
The tremor of his photography finds its full incarnation in nocturnal scenes where animals—eagles perched on skeletal branches, deer whose eyes reflect light like supernatural orbs, birds in flight—seem to emerge from another plane of reality. For Marshall To, photographing is not fixing but revealing the fundamental instability of the world, its fluctuating, dreamlike character.
“It’s a life I’ve always lived so yes I believe that it does,” he confides. “The barrier between those two things used to be much larger as I wasn’t always so open or comfortable in my skin but as I’ve gotten older that barrier has broken down and now work in relative harmony.”
His images are like dream fragments from which we would retain only the visual flashes upon waking, precise enough to attest to a presence, yet blurred enough to maintain doubt. The resulting images possess a rare intensity. We sense the presence of the photographing body, its fragility, its contained terror, its fascination mixed with reverence for creatures that consent to be glimpsed.
The book object itself, with its matte paper and painted black edges, extends this sensation of gradual shift into another world, as if the physical object participated in the ritual.
A diasporic self-portrait
Beyond its exploration of the Taoist supernatural, Blank Notes also constitutes an oblique self-portrait of diasporic identity. Marshall To belongs to that generation of immigrants’ children who grew up constantly negotiating between heterogeneous, sometimes contradictory value systems. For a long time, he compartmentalized his identity: on one side the rational Western Canadian, on the other the son of a Chinese family steeped in traditions. But with this book, he refuses this fragmentation and embraces complexity.
“I think it was a simple as choosing to photograph what I didn’t find interesting at first but what was right in front of me the whole time,” the artist continues. “I was always chasing exciting things to photograph. It was only when I realized that what makes my work unique is everything that makes it what it is, my interests, my family, my present. There are pictures of my father, nephew and niece in my book so it was intentional for me to integrate them as I was watching my family go in different directions, young and old, sick and healthy.”
The photogenic Alberta landscapes, photographed in timeless black and white, the wild animals of Canada invested with the symbolic weight of Taoist spirits—everything converges to create a profoundly syncretic work. Marshall To does not seek to reconcile these heritages but to let them coexist in their productive tension, to make this discordance a creative space.
Blank Notes thus becomes a book about identity as much as spirituality, a tribute to the hybrid beings that immigrants and their descendants are, capable of navigating between several worlds without fully belonging to any, transforming this indeterminacy into richness rather than lack. In this light, the Hungry Ghosts are not merely figures from Taoist folklore, but also metaphors for the diasporic experience itself.
Beings who wander between two realities, seeking sustenance and recognition. Isn’t that the essence of the artist?
Blank Notes by Marshall To is published by Charcoal Press and available for $65.
