“If photography was invented in 1839, it was only discovered in the 1960s and 1970s,” American art critic and scholar Douglas Crimp wrote in On the Museum’s Ruins, a collection of his essays published more than two decades ago.
It’s certainly how the history of photography unfolded in Canada. Before that rush of appreciation that established the medium as an art form, there were famous photographers – Yousuf Karsh, who opened his Ottawa studio in 1931, and, even long before that, William Notman, who opened his gallery in Montreal in 1856. Both were international successes, but it was as if their popularity subtracted from their achievements as artists.
Now, in this digital age, taking pictures has become as common as talk. On their phones people speak in images. And there’s nothing like a selfie to capture the banal. At the same time, not since the 1960s and 1970s has photography enjoyed such serious attention.
In Toronto, the Ryerson Image Centre, dedicated to the exhibition and study of photography, opened in 2012 and has been steadily proving its importance. On view from May 4 to August 21 at the RIC is an exhibition of work by celebrated Canadian artist Angela Grauerholz, winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Photography Award. In Ottawa, at the end of last year, the National Gallery of Canada announced the establishment of the Canadian Photography Institute (CPI), a world-class, multi-disciplinary research centre.
Exhibitions organized by the CPI include a retrospective of Czech photographer Josef Sudek that will open at the Jeu de Paume in Paris this June and that will be installed at the NGC from Oct. 28 to March 19 of next year. Another exhibition is Cutline: The Photography Archives of The Globe and Mail, at the newspaper’s Old Press Hall (Apr. 30 to June 26), also presented as part of the 2016 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, which is in itself a milestone, having been established as a festival dedicated to art photography 20 years ago.
Barbara Mason, Group Head and Chief Human Resources Officer at Scotiabank, the co-founder of both the CPI and the Scotiabank Photography Award, describes public engagement with photography as “accelerating at a rapid rate.” She attributes this to the rise of social media, which has made photographers of us all. Whether you’re good at it or not is another question, but, as Ms. Mason points out, “photography is a highly inclusive art form.”
The award, co-founded in 2010 by Scotiabank and Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky, is the country’s largest annual peer-nominated and peer-reviewed photography award.
Toronto gallerist Jane Corkin played an important role in fostering photography in Canada. She opened her own gallery in 1979 and before that was a curator at the David Mirvish Gallery, which in 1975 presented a photography exhibition covered in the Globe and Mail under the headline “Photography at Last Becomes an Art Form.”
Asked about what she considers to be milestones in the history of photography in Canada, Ms. Corkin cites the appointment of Paul Roth, former photography curator for the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, and director of Toronto’s Ryerson Image Centre, as well as the pioneering work of photography curator James Borcoman, who joined the National Gallery in the 1960s, and the exhibition Photographs from the Collection of Samuel J. Wagstaff, which originated in Washington, D.C., and made a stop in Toronto in 1981 at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
In her master’s thesis in 2014 at Ryerson University, Anne Kavanagh quotes from an interview with Maia-Mari Sutnik, the Curator Emeritus at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) who was responsible for bringing the Wagstaff show to Toronto. In it, Ms. Sutnik acknowledges that she shared with Wagstaff, the late legendary collector, a belief in photography’s broad embrace as an inclusive form of expression that rests “in the hands of many.”
Since last July, the AGO, one of the hubs of this year’s Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, has been providing a further example of what seems to be a revitalized appreciation for the art of photography by mounting what it has referred to as a Year of Photography, six exhibitions including the current Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s to 1980s. The show includes images by celebrated photographers such as Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin, as well as snapshots taken in the 1960s at a transvestite getaway in the Catskills and discovered decades later in a box at a Manhattan flea market.
And what about milestones in photography yet to be reached? In the thick of this digital age it’s impossible not to think that technology will play a part. But, as William Notman cautioned a long time ago, “To consider photography a mere mechanical art, is a great mistake.”
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