Along with all the other things it does, architecture reveals the myriad ways humankind has understood and shaped the natural world, and the ways we continue to do so. No contemporary photographer of the changing built environment has studied this body of evidence more mindfully, or with more handsome and intelligent visual results, than Toronto artist Geoffrey James.
Every architectural aficionado who visits Ottawa this summer should catch "Utopia/Dystopia," the survey of Mr. James's images on view through Oct. 19 at the National Gallery of Canada. For those who can't make the show, the gallery and Douglas & McIntyre have brought out, in book form, a thoughtful illustrated celebration of the artist's outstanding accomplishment.
In a second career spanning almost 40 years — he was a print journalist before picking up a camera in the early 1970s — Mr. James has snapped photographs in august European gardens, on rambles through the North American urban parks of Frederick Law Olmsted, overlooking open-pit asbestos mines in Quebec, abroad in the quick-built suburbs of greater Toronto's 905 region. He has documented the edge where the town of Lethbridge, Alta., meets the prairie. He has photographed Paris just as it was losing its working-class population to suburbia, and Toronto as we were losing our downtown Victorian factories to condominium infill.
But if his topics are often prosaic, the pictures never are. The best of them disclose the historical hinges or seams along which older realities are subsiding into obsolescence, and newer realities are being born.
The "dystopia" in the title of show and book is perhaps best suggested by Mr. James's photos of Quebec asbestos mines.
"This is a landscape that can be viewed as dystopian," the artist has written, "created out of brute expediency with an almost total disregard for the present, let alone the future."
And, one might add, with utter disregard for the past, inasmuch as these great eroded dumps and desolate industrial wastescapes were made without care for what stood on the ground before, whether cultural or natural.
Mr. James's incandescent silver prints record this strangely timeless terrain with dispassionate reserve. Here, and throughout his work, he relates the transformations he sees without larding his story with self-conscious ecological correctness or high moral judgment.
But if Mr. James brings no heavy ideological hand to his projects, his photographs occasionally deliver a subtle jolt of poignancy. In the series of images entitled "Running fence," he portrays the immigration-control barricade in the desert between Southern California and Mexico. The fence has been built, of course, to thwart the thousands of undocumented Mexicans who each year try to escape from poverty in their home country and reach the agricultural labour markets of the United States.
In one picture, a dystopian Mexican town is packed up against the fence, as though clenching its fist for a breakthrough; yet the barrier holds, as though successfully fighting to contain the despair of those on the Mexican side. Of all the images in this book and show, the ones of the fence are surely the saddest.
Most others are more intellectually taut. To make the Olmsted photographs, for example, Mr. James visited the many American parks designed by the great landscape architect in the 19th century. He was interested, he has said, in the "collapse, or near-disappearance … or miraculous persistence of various ideal or utopian spaces."
Olmsted's open places, including such a masterpiece as New York's Central Park, were intended to be openings of utopia in the metropolitan grid. They were meant to offer the urbanized, toiling millions quick access to woodland seclusion, forest lights and shade, and sunny meadows. Though Olmsted's urban parks are now declining and gradually sliding into dilapidation, Mr. James's photographs show us that their idealism is not wholly dimmed — that, despite civic neglect, many of these greenswards preserve traces of the old utopian spirit and philanthropic boosterism that called them into existence.
In Toronto, the artist's search for evidence of ideals and visions in crisis led him, naturally enough, to the city districts being levelled to make way for condo slabs, townhouses and other forms of residence.
One especially memorable image, from the Liberty Village development in Parkdale: an old jail, designated for preservation by the heritage industry, standing forlorn in a vast, muddy field. On the side of the jail is an advertisement, shouting "LIVE HERE!" to potential home buyers.
Many people heeded the call, and today the place is a thicket of houses. Mr. James's photograph reminds us of a moment before this was so — when homeownership on the site was still a dream, and the industrial and civic history of the land was not yet completely effaced.
In these images, and elsewhere in his work, Geoffrey James pinpoints with strong artistic force the fault-lines and fissures in the architectural history of our time.
