The Globe and Mail

"Shoes" by Stan Douglas — Stan Douglas

Douglas places Shoes, 1947 halfway through his fictional photographer’s career: “He’s done various genres by now. The artist’s method was influenced by old Life magazine commercial shoots, for which different lighting, models and backgrounds were tested with the same product.”

“The fists just happened,” says Douglas of the image’s focal point. “I saw what was going on with the model, her difficulty holding the pose, and thought it would be appropriate to include that, although of course, typically, that would have been cropped out.”

“These images aren’t to a large degree premeditated,” he adds, despite their gorgeous formal qualities. “I don’t have a composition or a shot that I’m trying to make reality conform to.” In this sense, Douglas celebrates the art and mystery of analog photography, with its lack of automatic settings and capacity for high detail.

At the same time, the frame limits the subjects of Midcentury Studio. “She’s decapitated,” notes Douglas of the headless model, “much in the way that we see figures in other photographs in the show. The body fragments imply an external space that’s not being revealed, giving an uncanny effect.”

"Hockey Fight" by Stan Douglas — Stan Douglas

“With all of these images I was interested in referencing one of my favourite works of art, the Scrovegni Chapel frescos by Giotto, where there’s an image of a hand appearing out of the sky,” says Douglas. In this work, disembodied hands intervene everywhere; one hand tries to stop the brawlers at the top of the frame; another, a child’s, reaches for a popcorn bag at the right.

Hockey Fight, 1951 is based on a shot by Raymond Roe, who snapped it in the same place, Vancouver’s Kerrisdale Arena. “In Roe’s photo, there’s a concentric circle of looks and pointing fingers but you can’t actually see the fight,” Douglas says. “In the end, I decided to depict looks between the characters – the man falling down, the concerned woman at the right.”

Another photo in Midcentury Studio – a corpse covered with newspapers in a stairwell – recalls the crime-scene work done by Weegee. In combination with the brawl in this work, it speaks to the violent incidents that would be part of this photographer’s broad repertoire. (The high-angle view of Hockey Fight, 1951 implies his positioning in the press box.) “The gaps [in genre] between these images suggest the kind of career he’s trying to negotiate,” says Douglas.

"Suspect" by Stan Douglas — Stan Douglas

The people in Midcentury Studio look remarkably period-appropriate, and Douglas attributes this to casting extras, not actors. “Actors often have a specific look and are afraid to look unusual and odd,” he says. “Getting people who reflected that 1940s diet, say, was difficult, but we were able to find them by going through a thousand or so headshots.”

Suspect, 1950 is based on a photograph from the Black Star collection depicting Latin American delegates at a conference in Georgia. Douglas saw “a vaguely sinister quality” in the image. “I really like the glasses,” he says, “which you can just barely see through: There’s a delicate, threatened look in the suspect’s eyes as he stares back at you.”

Would Douglas’s photographer have risked anything by taking such photos? “I guess he might have got punched in the face,” Douglas quips. “What I find genuinely interesting is that this is not a well-documented period. The kinds of images you see in this photography would never have made it into the mainstream press in the 1950s. After the war, people did desperate things in order to make a living.”