It occurs often enough that some notion, enclosed as a figure, brought forth for a specific occasion and bound to a particular moment, is plucked up by others, bent and stretched, accumulates and develops further meanings and applications, and is eventually received so battered and misshapen that we can only wonder what possible use it may have remaining for anyone.
Perhaps in an unacknowledged celebration of Toronto’s sesquicentennial, Montreal, late this winter, saw an uncommon host of contemporary Toronto painting.
The project began when Donigan Cumming asked at the local grocery store if he could accompany the delivery boys as they delivered their beer and groceries. (In display, the first image is usually of the empty storeroom with the sections marked off for inventory.) Together, they arrived at the customer’s home, where the photographer met the occupants and made a proposal: he wished to photograph them and offered, in return, to provide a selection of “technically proficient snapshots” for them to keep.
The development of artists often resembles the motion of nautical tacking: establishing direction, reversing, adjusting, correcting, repeating paths and avoiding dangers. In such ways artists chart courses which come to represent their unique concerns, investigations and discoveries within the regions they navigate.
Contemporary architectural debate resembles a battle of the buildings in which architects, armed not only with words but sticks and stones, struggle over the future of the environment we build.
The complex historical interaction between photography and architectural practice is reduced to the still moment of photographic exposure. The fastidious details of photo-historical connoisseurship which accompanied the images provided the signs of scholarship, but it is an exhibition of little thought.
The sources of that movement in photography called “social landscape”, with which Tom Gibson, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and others are associated, have not been adequately articulated. The fine photography tradition of social documentary, which as Gibson says, “goes back to Atget”, has been chronicled; yet the tradition alone does not account for this seemingly unpromising collection of snapshot images of the unremarkable, routine daily life with which these photographers would appear to be concerned.
Compared to the great 19th century salons and academy shows, with acres of paintings hung edge-to- edge and from floor to ceiling, contemporary group shows resemble several one-man shows sharing a room. The works of the single artist are grouped together and then each artist is separated from the others by wide margins of white wall or doorways. Each figure is granted a local domain of attention and protected from noisy neighbours.