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A detail from Untitled (Malevich) 2011, by Lynne Cohen.

The celebrated work of Lynne Cohen, winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Photography Award, is, naturally enough, a highlight of, and a designated "primary exhibition" during, the 2012 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. Hard to argue with that logic.

The theme of this year's CONTACT fest is "Public" – as in public spaces, public versus private manifestations of self, public demonstrations (from political protests to fashion parades) and spectacles, small and large, viewed by that unwieldy, easy to label but impossible to define abstraction known as "the public."

CONTACT gives defining "the public" a fair go. The Arab Spring, that allegedly camera-phone-driven uprising, gets mentioned in the PR attached to this year's theme. Never mind that people tend, righteously, to get upset after suffering decades of tyranny, or that reading their struggles through our cute new Western toys like Twitter or Google is offensively colonial of us – topicality sells.

Furthermore, it is arguable that photography itself, the act of capturing and retaining fleeting moments and turning them into permanently viewable objects, has always has been deeply intertwined with, if not actively in opposition to, the very notion of privacy.

Photography defeats secrecy. Are not, then, all acts of photo-making public acts? But CONTACT would hardly be the first festival to adopt a broad theme that's obviously or possibly contradictory. Festivals need themes like parades need floats, so we'll leave these questions aside.

The first question that will pop into most viewers' minds upon entering Cohen's exhibition, a micro-survey of her vast output, is a far simpler one: If the CONTACT 2012 theme is "Public" … why aren't there any people in Cohen's photographs?

Cohen's long practice has been focused on her discoveries of somewhat desolate-looking and always, at least at the time the camera clicked, uninhabited spaces. She offers us everything from sitting rooms in private clubs to overdecorated office lobbies to stilled swimming pools to empty classrooms to shooting ranges. Her especial talent is finding spaces that appear both perfectly normal, even banal, and yet deeply strange – spaces that obviously have some function, a function regularly performed (Cohen is not a photographer of abandoned spaces), but which remains mysterious to us because we are not shown the function in action, performed by people.

A Cohen photograph thus asks us to create our own narratives, to project our own anxieties, memories, dreams and fears of emptiness and/or being alone onto whatever is actually meant to go on in the spaces she finds (and Cohen offers almost no clues, so the projecting quickly becomes free-range and pleasurably indulgent). A Cohen photograph invites the viewer to go ghost hunting.

How, then, do all these echoing chambers fit with the festival's more boisterous theme? Sideways.

The "public" element in a Cohen photograph stems first from the obvious realization that however bereft or downright ugly a particular space may appear, it is still a considered space, a designed-for-use space, and therefore driven by human needs – often, especially in the spaces that appear to be open or at least accessible to the public, a wide variety of needful humans (people learning, people swimming). The bald fact that many of the spaces Cohen photographs are distinctly unlovely can be read as an unsubtle commentary on how interiors meant to meet the needs of groups of people usually fail to meet any generally understood ideas of good taste – people ("the public") muck things up.

Finally, Cohen's photographs engage in the eternal public/private dialogue by showing us how much, to an at times aching degree, people need to make (and mark) spaces, how we need to imprint our personalities on the spaces we occupy, even if those spaces will be seen by few of our fellow humans. Cohen's photographs teem with evidence of human intervention – from amateurishly painted murals, meant to liven up dull storage areas, to graffiti and, of course, bumped, chipped or, conversely, cleaned surfaces.

The evidence for a "public" embedded in Cohen's imagery is not obvious, but it is undeniable. Through these unspeaking spaces, rooms that others have manufactured, maintained and continue to engage with, we learn about more people in a Cohen photograph than are front and centre in most images of crowd scenes.

The people are here; they've just stepped out for a breather, out into the busy streets where everyone has a camera.



For more information on CONTACT 2012, see scotiabankcontactphoto.com.

MORE CONTACT PICKS

Berenice Abbott

Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St. W., Toronto; May 23-Aug. 19

The legendary chronicler of New York in the 1930s gets a swellegant, whopping 120-photograph survey that includes many works far less familiar than her NYC skyscraper photos – including her spooky photographs of scientific experiments and her decidedly un-Cecil Beaton-like portraits. Abbott's enormous influence should, by now, have made her a one-name-only artist, like Cartier-Bresson or Karsh. This will help.

Lise Beaudry: Sur La Glace/Standing on Ice

Art Gallery of Mississauga, 300 City Centre Dr., Mississauga; May 10-July 8

Beaudry's quiet, murky video (taken underneath a frozen lake – watch for the fish!) and her nearly erased images of ice-covered lakes, so white on white they'd make Halston cry, are stunning, but require enormous patience. Beaudry takes the long, slow, overexposed view – one that defeats quick readings and any standard idea of nature photography.

Gender and Exposure in Contemporary Iranian Photography

Gallery 44, 401 Richmond St. W., Toronto; May 4 to June 16

An eye-opening survey of the multiplicities of gender expression in modern Iran (and the diasporic Iranian community). Few countries are as obsessed with gender roles as the Islamic Republic, but this group show offers an Iran we rarely see in the West; an Iran where men and women covertly flirt, where body builders flex and strut, and, in a thousand little ways, all the rules are disobeyed.

Oliver Pauk & Zack Slootsky: Motels of Niagara Falls

The Drake Lab, 1140 Queen St. W., Toronto; May 3-31

Poor old Niagara Falls. What happened? The water still crashes down, but the grand tradition of love nests and honeymoon suites has gone to seed. In an exhibition that will grow in size throughout the month, Pauk & Slootsky will do some photo-spelunking, capturing the town's fading hospitality glamour (and outright ruin) while searching for signs of new life. Here's hoping they find a heart-shaped bathtub.

Drasko Bogdanovic: Submission

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander St., Toronto; May 14 to 27

It wouldn't be CONTACT without one "dirty show." Bogdanovic's male nudes, however, only fit that dismissive description if you ignore his obvious steeping in the history of erotic photography and his subsequent discovery that nudes are never about sex; they are about power: the power to make you look or look away. Adding to this gaze-owning game, Bogdanovic has set the photos in a pitch-black room, and asks the viewers to see them via flashlights – thus making us, the viewers, the only ones who can decide what we see, or don't. Sexy and smart.

R.M. Vaughan

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