Becoming: Photographs from the Collection of John and Ginny Soule at the Art Gallery of Hamilton
Until Jan. 15, 123 King St. West, Hamilton; artgalleryofhamilton.com
Still easing your way into 2012? Let me help.
Do not listen to chat shows about dieting. Avoid any store running a Valentine’s Day racket. And, take a gentle hour to wander through the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s Becoming: Photographs from the Collection of John and Ginny Soule – an unpretentious, modest display that resonates with quiet, but earned, confidence.
As the subtitle tells us, Becoming is comprised of works culled from the collection of the Soule family, who have been buying photography since the 1960s. Their collection includes works from the first days of photographic practice until the present – i.e. from the 19th to 21st centuries – and is marked, at least as presented in this array by Melissa Bennett (the AGH’s contemporary-art curator), by an intriguing lack of rigidity or imposed cohesiveness. The Soule Collection is wonderfully free of the usual specificity narratives that define high-art collections, nor is it bound by an obvious thread of intent or thematic interest. Suits me fine.
The Soules appear to buy whatever catches their fancy: be it a landscape photo, a portrait, a journalistic capture, or a post-digital manipulation. Personally, I detest fussy collecting – it just leads to exactism and completionism, the two great deadeners of the joy of amassing pleasure-giving objects. And the Soules, if this survey from their hoard is to be believed, are far from fussy. Discerning, yes, but not obsessive or fixed in taste. More the benefit to us humble viewers.
If there is a thread in the show, however, it’s a simple chronological one; namely, the emergence of photography from its early days as a novelty, or, at best, a kind of low-cost, high-speed response to illustration, to its current status as a coveted fine art. But, as I have noted before in this space, I distrust chronological readings of art, and progress models in general, and this distrust causes me to read even the most casual of early photographs as works made in pursuit of artistic, or at least aesthetic, goals. So, the gimmick-to-art-form angle in Becoming, while undoubtedly present, is one I would happily set aside.
Thus, Becoming, for me, is less about the (alleged) growth of photography into high art and more about the changing technologies associated with the practice – and this is where the exhibition shines. There really is nothing more illuminating than looking at a duo gravure from 1907 and then turning to look at a chromogenic print from 2005. Illuminating and question-inducing.
Did technological improvements alter not only the way the camera is used, but also what the camera records? Or, are technological changes merely concurrent adjuncts to the increasing imposition of art-fuelled readings onto photographic imagery?
Or, did it all unfold simultaneously? Was photography’s shift from “low” mass-produced novelty to “high” art paralleled by enhanced technologies and expanded visions/subject matter?
You will not get easy answers from the tumbling time line loosely constructed in Becoming, but you will certainly develop your own, probably very conflicted, theories. Looking at this exhibition is a bit like staring at an array of Tarot cards – you know there are answers in the spread, but you have to divine them by building the connective lines, following the subtle under-narratives.
