A hunger for images.

LE MOIS DE LA PHOTO A MONTREAL

MONTREAL, CANADA

SEPTEMBER 8-OCTOBER 10, 2005

For one month this past fall the grand city of Montreal was saturated with photography as it celebrated the ninth edition of Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal (MPM) under the theme of "Image & Imagination." The event was initially conceptualized in 1987 by the Montreal photography center Vox to celebrate the one hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the invention of photography, with the first festival held in 1989. The only biennale devoted to contemporary photography in Canada, and an independent, nonprofit entity since 2002, the event now presents a thematic focus for each edition and engages a curator to serve as Artistic Director, overseeing all exhibitions, events, and publications. This year's Artistic Director was Martha Langford, an assistant professor of art history at Concordia University in Montreal and founding director and chief curator (1984-94) of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa. Langford chose the theme of "Image and Imagination" for this year's event, in an effort to explore in depth the "life of the photograph as it is interpreted by viewers' minds."

Twenty-nine exhibitions running throughout the duration of the formal event (and several extending beyond) featured the work of sixty contemporary artists from seven countries (Australia, Canada, France, Haiti, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom). In accordance with the festival's intent to integrate elements of photographic education into its programming, special programs for school children and the public include guided tours of the exhibitions as well as panels, curator talks by Langford, and numerous gallery talks by visiting artists including Martin Parr and Shana and Robert ParkeHarrison. The highlight of the third week was a one-day conference.

The exhibitions took place in major museums and university galleries, artists' spaces, and four state-run cultural centers (Maisons de la culture), as well as an art therapy center. While perhaps focusing on Canadian work as a reflection of its roots and geography, the exhibitions of MPM 2005 provided an overview of contemporary photographic practice across the globe, even if the categories in which certain artists or works were grouped at times seemed a bit forced.

The first section of exhibitions, "Sightlines into the Imagination," focused on the relationship between the senses and included six solo shows. Carolee Schneemann's solo exhibition of new and recent work, "Disembodied," (2001-05) demonstrates the artist's continuing attention to individual and global social concerns, anchored in the inevitable physical nature of the world. In the multi-channel video installation Devour (2003), viewers are offered a range of imagery addressing the concept of greedy consumption ranging from a reverse image of a woman eating noodles to a couple having intercourse to a baby suckling to the body of a woman lying in the street of an urban war zone--her head apparently shot off. The exhibit also included the equally shocking Terminal Velocity (2001), a composite digital image of people jumping from the towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The grainy images scanned from television and amateur photographs and video sources become increasingly anonymous as they are enlarged. However, viewers are drawn in by the human elements that materialize from each body: a flapping tie, the seemingly choreographed arc of a leg, a pair of arms held aloft like goalposts, the fetal position of a body as it is silhouetted against the stripes of the towers, which themselves begin to take on the shape of a vertically hanging American flag.

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In Lynne Marsh's installation "Crater" (2005) viewers entered into the middle of a 360-degree panoramic video projection (based on a three-dimensional simulation) of the crater of Mount St. Helens. As the image pulsed with accompanying sound and light effects, the crater began to spin and participants in this vividly colored games-cape were transported upward into the sky above the active volcano, simulating the effect of being the victim of an explosion while simultaneously remaining in control and ultimately returning gently to earth. This imaginary is both reminiscent of pre-photographic image machines such as the magic lantern and the diorama and a direct connection to our technological present and future.

A retrospective of the work of Michael Snow found loosely connected elements of Snow's canon grouped under the exhibition theme of "Windows." Snow's work over the past five decades has varied in form, theme, and content but has remained steadfastly engaging as it demands patience and a form of agreement from its viewers. The exhibition contained multimedia work spanning nearly fifty years (1955-2004), including two videos and nine other works. In the sixty-two-minute video Solar Breath (2002), two windows, one screened and one closed, overlook a garden and the setting sun beyond. The camera is fixed on the two curtains, which behave differently depending on the strength and pattern of the wind, alternately inhaling and exhaling rhythmically or sucking in violently and letting go slowly. The light changes over the course of an hour and while we are only able to intermittently see out through one of the windows to the outside, we hear the ambient sounds in the room: the artist clearing his throat, crumpling paper, preparing and eating a meal. The duality of the curtains acting both predictably and out of character with the personalities they seem to have established as they dialogue with one another and directly with the viewer is mesmerizing. In Snow Storm, February 7, 1967 (1967), four masonite panels of approximately three feet by three feet with five four-inch by two-inch images on each provide an identical view of a brick building seen through vertical window bars, with the contrast and level of abstraction changing as the intensity of the falling snow increases or dissipates. Powers of Two (2003) is a nearly life-size, transparent, suspended photograph of a nude couple embracing on a bed--the man's face is hidden as he lies on top of the woman, she smiling directly into the camera, reveling in the exhibitionism of the act as we cannot help but be amused by the surprising humor of the intimacy we are witnessing in this experience that is both entirely voyeuristic and wholly imaginary. In the fifteen-minute experimental film WVLNT: Wavelength for Those Who Don't Have the Time (2003) (originally created in 1967 as a forty-five-minute film sans subtitle), three layers of images and audio create a complicated interior into which the exterior intermittently intrudes. As light and scenes change, different elements are highlighted--a hard yellow school chair, ephemera tacked to a wall, cars passing outside. Tension is induced through the increasing volume of high-pitched sound, bursts of light, and the compression of the complex layers until one final image, of short waves, comes to the fore, eventually subsuming all else.

The seven thematic group exhibitions and six solo exhibitions in the second section, "Mirroring Ourselves, Recasting Otherness," challenged social and spatial boundaries as they addressed questions of individual and collective identity. In the two-person show "After Alice," photographer Polixeni Papapetrou and multimedia artist Angela Grossman explore cultural constructions of girlhood. Papapetrou's series "Wonderland" (2003-04) places a living "Alice" (the artist's young daughter) in a series of painted tableaux depicting scenes (alternating between threatening and calming) from Lewis Carroll's work. In the series "Alpha Girl" (2004-05) and "Psychological Alice" (2003-04), Gross-man created mixed-media collages on paper using found portraits, oil, and sparse photographs that peek through like spotlights to shine on modern-day girls caught in the jarring transformation from innocence to maturity.

In "Trading Places," four artists examine identity and perception in differing ways that appear at first as playful but result in a moving reflection on one's own preconceptions of others. Rafael Gold-chain, in his series "Familial Ground" (1999-2001), embodied a group of his ancestors, donning costumes and makeup and creating a stunning collection of self-portraits representing others. In recreating a visual family history Goldchain reimagines both a familial memory and a cultural heritage. Michael Ensminger impersonated a homeless man and had himself photographed on the streets of Denver, Colorado, carrying various signs with unexpected texts such as "I lost 35 lbs/Ask me how" in the series "What's Your Sign?" (2000-1). Ensminger's performative acts question social constructs and the role of the activist artist. In Noritoshi Hirawaka's series "I Am the Mother and I Am the Daughter" (2002) two generations of women exchange clothing and pose for dual portraits, simultaneously examining personal and cultural identities. Annu Palakunnathu Matthew recreates stereotyped, historical (and now iconic) photographs of Native Americans, using herself and other Asian Indians as models, pairing them with the original images, in the series "An Indian from India" (2001-03). The result of Matthew's exploration of identity is both a humorous play on the artists' own "otherness" and a biting commentary on the troubling legacies of racism and stereotyping and their modern applications in such practices as racial profiling.

The group exhibition "Neverlands" opened up the space between human contacts. Parr's talent for taking the banal and offering deeper meaning shines here in the highlight of the exhibition, his series "Parking Spaces" (2002-05). Parr photographed what he refers to as "the last parking space," in locales ranging from Calcutta to Moscow, revealing both the ironic commonalities and vast differences between cultures. In an image from Calcutta, a small child stands on the sidewalk, in front of a tent city. In Moscow, the grand spire of St. Basil's Cathedral is visible beyond the confines of a humble open parking space.

For "Les Impatients: Take 2" (2005), clients of a Montreal art therapy center were posed in front of a camera by a photographer but allowed to click the shutter themselves. These self-portraits are a mix of busts and full body shots, and the sitters alternately revel in the attention or look uncomfortable in their bodies, and while one doesn't question the impetus for the project, the resulting images are unsettling.

"Digs in the Zone" included the documentary work of Phil Bergerson, Michael Campeau, and Glenn Slogget. Bergerson shoots urban landscapes focusing on advertising in numerous forms. Campeau wanders through industrial wrecking yards. Sloggett is fascinated by derelict and abandoned buildings near his home in Australia. From Sloggett's disused filing cabinets and shipping carts to Bergerson's faded signs and window displays to Campeau's abandoned machine parts, all hauntingly reveal the detritus modernity leaves behind.

"Primal Images: Transmutations of a National Icon," curated by Vincent Lavoie, celebrates the original 1920 photograph of the "last spike" being driven into the Canadian railroad, an iconic image for Canadians that has been used over the last century in artwork, political cartoons, and community-building campaigns to both foster collective identity and symbolize partisanship. As explored in the exhibition, the action depicted in the photograph provided a narrative framework for a common history, signaling both modernity and the ability to capture images in an immediate and naturalistic manner.

Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie's series "Portraits Against Amnesia" (2003) included ten vintage studio portrait postcards of Native Americans that the artist procured from family archives as well as on the Internet. She altered the backgrounds with the addition of components such as the moon and anachronistic props. These digital collages bring the sitters out of a forgotten history and into both the present and an eternal connection to the future of all peoples. In the video An Aboriginal World View with Aboriginal Dreams (2002) a woman walks through a Navajo reservation with her hands bound and draped in a chador made of American flags, highlighting the parallels between the historical and contemporary colonization practices of the United States government. This work is a continuing effort to enact what Tsinhnahjinnie calls "photographic sovereignty," as a reclamation of "historical indigenous images in an act to resist amnesia."

Karen Brett, a former nurse, photographed aging couples (found through newspaper ads) posing as if engaged in sexual activity. In her series "The Myth of Sexual Loss" (2002), Brett, working with both tight framing and the obvious trust of her subjects, soulfully captures both the sensuality of intimate smiles and the physical evidence of aging.

In David Hlynsky's "Wilderness Camp" (1992-2002), a series of sixteen sepia-toned photographic collages, nature interacts with humanity in both absurd and startlingly moving ways. In Turkey at the Wilderness Camp (1995) a (stuffed) turkey stands on a rock at the side of a lake at sunset, amid discarded camouflage and carefully arranged fake plastic flies, a rope around its neck leading up and out of the frame. In the background a boy falls back into the water with a splash, legs akimbo, holding a large fish aloft in either glee in its catching or vexation at the resulting tumble. In Temptation to Fly (1994), a young girl holds a model plane on strings while a male hand enters the frame from the left, offering a small bird. The girl's curiosity about the bird is evident in her serious countenance and intense gaze but although she may desire to forsake the mechanics of the plane for the natural abilities of the bird, a branch has fallen over her feet, binding her to where she stands. Hlynsky's work speaks to the inevitability of modernity, hinting at a culture yearning for a reconnection with the natural world but ultimately destined to move away from it.

For the multimedia installation Glooscap (1985-present) Alain Bublex painstakingly created a history for the first European settlement in North America, the fictional New Brunswick town of Glooscap. From original town plans to fictional surveyors to contemporary documentary street scenes, Bublex's work awes through the sheer magnitude of his efforts, both in terms of research and creation, and ultimately results in a rethinking of the intentional construction of community.

Donigan Cumming's large-scale photograph and encaustic collages Prologue (2005) and Epilogue (2005) are modern, raw, grotesque. Cumming does not employ digital manipulation, instead meticulously creating three-dimensional pieces that force viewers to interact at close range with the pieces, carefully examining the individual components of the work. The piecework Cumming engages in becomes metaphoric for the pain and mortality his work addresses. Also on exhibition were numerous examples of Cumming's engaging and unique documentary video work, inevitably exploring the darker and wholly real recesses of human existence.

The third section, "Pictures as a Way of Shutting Our Eyes," included four thematic exhibitions in which the participation of the spectator was necessary to see what might otherwise be invisible. In the group exhibition "Les Revenants," Barbara Astman's series "dancing with Che" (2002-03) displayed a sequence of images of the face of iconic revolutionary Che Guevera, as printed on a t-shirt. Manipulated by the dancing wearer--stretched, contorted, and blurred by movement--Che's visage becomes as etheric as his legacy already suggests. Martyn Jolly's "Faces of the Living Dead" is comprised of the historical photographs of the early twentieth-century medium Ada Deane, revealing hopeful loved ones and plentiful ectoplasm, and requiring the suspension of our contemporary knowledge of scientific principles in order to accept the Spiritualist images in evidence. Ted Hiebert's "Chimeras" explores the effects of media technology on the body, leading to a potential loss of self.

"Emanations" included Arthur Renwick's "Delegates: Chiefs of the Earth and Sky" (2004), a series of eleven stark and moving vertical diptychs of black-and-white photographs of iconic images of the West paired with graphic punctuation marks cut from aluminum and copper to comment on the American tradition of breaking oral and written treaties with Native Americans and the resulting displacement of First Nations people.

"Irradiations II," is part of Denis Farley's ongoing series of self-portraits in which the artist wears a red-and-white checkerboard suit to provide contrast against the bleak landscapes he runs through and past. The black-and-white photographs and projected video images depict his travels through the dark spaces of a former nuclear shelter in Ottawa constructed for Canadian political leaders that now houses Canada's Cold War Museum. As Farley runs down dank corridors away from the camera, his bright suit is reflected on the walls, creating a fleeting, ethereal remnant of both his passing, and that of an era.

A survey of work by Ian Baxter & included examples of the extensive ephemera produced as part of the N.E. Thing, Co. project, which, among other artworks, entailed creating and running a fictional company. The centerpiece of the show was the Saab in which Baxter and his wife drove the Transcontinental highway from Newfoundland to British Columbia. One Canada Video (1992) stemmed from the desire of Baxter's wife, Louise Chance Baxter, a native of Trinidad, to see her new homeland. The one hundred-hour video projection, with audio, is projected onto the windows of the car. Viewers, who are encouraged to sit inside, experience the wrap-around visuals and surround sound, allowing them entree into the unique public/private space inhabited by people on the road.

In the collaboration "Jim [right arrow]," (the title a reference to the graffiti in Paris's Pere Lachaise cemetery pointing the way to Jim Morrison's tomb) photograpghers John Armstrong in Toronto and Paul Collins in Paris worked separately from a list of forty-nine subjects. They dialogued in words and images to create a series of diptychs examining the difference between cultural symbols; ranging from such direct comparisons as chair/chaise and hand/main to more obscure interpretations between their individual visions of painters George Seurat and Lucy Hogg. Viewers are left guessing from which side of the ocean each image emanates, as they are constantly surprised by the subtle connections and natural interplay as the artists explore the "blurred edges of North American and European culture."

"Little Histories of Modern Art" was the largest thematic exhibition in the festival, including the work of eight artists working from or playing against an art historical perspective. In his life-size photographs, Jakub Dolejs inserts live costumed models into painted backdrops depicting historical events. Holly King's painterly photographs hearkening back to the Romantics come to life as water swirls into the sky and rocks burst forth into islands of color. These stunning giclee prints on watercolor paper are reminiscent of both Romanticism and Technicolor but are already leaping into the future. Colwyn Griffith, in his series "Eye Candy 3" (2002-04), recreated famous Canadian landmarks using candy and other colorful foodstuffs including pretzels, French fries, and processed cheese, then carefully lit and photographed the scenes at a low and close angle to comment on the forced nature of the Romantic landscape.

During the third week of the event, a one-day conference entitled "Image & Imagination" brought together historians, academics, and writers for a day of papers, panel presentations, and discussions at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. A series of presentations under the heading of "Recovered Imaginations" began with a presentation by Geoffrey Batchen of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York entitled "Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visites and the Bourgeois Imagination" in which he characterized carte-de-visites as being representative of a sublimation of the individual to the masses and of the fallacy that class can be imitated. While carte-de-visites confirmed the existing political order, they simultaneously undermined the ideological illusions of this same order. While Batchen noted that carte-de-visites tend to inspire "fear and loathing" in photo historians, he claimed that the more banal the photograph the greater its capacity to induce viewers to use their imaginations. The history of photography will have to be re-imagined, he argued, in order to include cartes-de-visites as the "capitalism incarnate" he believes them to be.

Vincent Lavoie of the University of Quebec at Montreal discussed the exhibition he curated, "Primal Images," claiming the photograph's place as "a nomadic monument." In "Fantasizing Perfection: The Pure-Blooded Body in the Marcian Imagination," Faye Brauer of the New South Wales College of Fine Arts in Sydney linked nineteenth-century images celebrating physical culture to the eugenics movement. Using specific examples of the photographic depictions of French Canadian strongman Louis Cyr and Australian swimmer Annette Kellermann, whose bodies were particularly praised by followers of Lamarckism (the pre-Darwinian biological theory developed by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck that acquired characteristics could be passed to offspring), Bauer demonstrated how physical culture was designed to play into imagination and ultimate led to the theory and practice of eugenics.

Comprising the second session was a panel discussion entitled "Image and Imaginative Impulse" during which artists Michel Campeau, King, and Snow addressed such topics as their individual working processes, how artists manipulate and interpret images, and the privilege of being an artist, of being "mandated to be imaginative."

In the third session, "Projected Imaginations," Jolly, of the Australian National University School of Art, presented "Spectres from the Archives," going well beyond his exhibition of historical photographs to explore the work of contemporary artists from around the world who use images to represent the spirit world. Like the Spiritualist photographers of the past, who, said Jolly, "reconceptualized the idea of photography as a membrane between the sitters trying to make a connection and the dead," these modern artists often use transparent technological means to help them achieve the same results. As Jolly contended, these acts of performance are, like all photographs, acts of ritual and imagination. Francine Dagenais of McGill University in Montreal proposed the prosthetic (in terms of bodily addition) as a means of communication as it becomes a neologism for artists.

For the fourth session, "Imagination and Agency," Kirsty Robertson, a PhD candidate at Queen's University, moderated a discussion with Batchen, Dagenais, Louise Dery of the University of Montreal Gallery, Jolly, Langford, and Schneeman intended to "consider the persistence of imaginative subjecthood and spectatorship." Although Langford posed the question: is the hunger for images ever appeased?, there were, not surprisingly, no clear answers. In closing the conference, Peggy Gale, a critic and independent curator from Toronto, summarized the day's discussions, connecting the day's academic tenor with the spiritual: "Artists work with intuition, imagination, the spirit of the past, from within themselves, of the future. What that spirit portends is the big question." While the papers and presentations offered during the conference did enhance and inform the exhibition series, the attendance of just a few dozen mostly academically connected audience members limits the extent to which these unique perspectives can be shared. Fortunately, a number of the papers that were presented are included in the publication Image & Imagination, edited by Langford [see sidebar].

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MPM 2005 was a heady brew of contemporary photographic practice and Langford deftly augmented this year's event with a strong scholarly component and the enduring benefits of a high quality and far-reaching print publication. The festival is a showcase example of the possibilities of biennial photography events, and one would hope that the guest curator for 2007 will be able to envision and facilitate a tenth edition that will fulfill this insatiable hunger for images.

info

For more information about Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal see www.lemoisdelaphoto.com.

RELATED ARTICLE: IMAGE & IMAGINATION

EDITED BY MARTHA LANGFORD

MONTREAL: MCGILL-QUEENS UNIVERSITY

PRESS, 2005

336 PP./$39.95 CAN (SB)

The official textual accompaniment to Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal 2005 (MPM), Image & Imagination, like the month of exhibitions and presentations, focuses on the role of the imagination in photography. Edited by Artistic Director Martha Langford, the book offers a comprehensive document of the biennale as well as providing an authoritative anthology of current scholarship. The book is organized under the three official parts of Le Mois dela Photo a Montreal 2005: "Sightlines into the Imagination," "Mirroring Ourselves, Recasting Otherness," and "Pictures as a Way of Shutting Our Eyes." Each section includes brief essays introducing each photographer or group exhibition, most written by Langford. Langford's considerable editorial efforts have resulted in an array of diverse texts that range from a discussion of the lingering import of historical work in the form of cartes-de-visite to the creative imaginary as witnessed in spirit photography and early twentieth-century eugenics to the possibilities of new technologies.

Ian Walker sets the tone for an extensive discussion of looking and the process of physical and imaginary embodiment in his engaging essay, "Through the Picture Plane: On Looking into Photographs," in which he discusses, initially through his experience of viewing Walker Evans's photograph Billboards and Frame Houses, Atlanta, Georgia, March 1936 (1936), the process of entering and re-entering a photograph. He asks whether viewers look at photographs or through them, and whether the photograph serves as an object or a window. Walker concludes that "the process of imaginative engagement which we undertake when we look at [a photograph] is integral to its meaning" (25). Also included are Langford's "Lost Horizons, or The Gates Close at Sunset: Doubtful Realisms and Paradisiacal Gains"; "Webs of Resistance: Photography, the Internet, and the Global Justice Movement" by Kirsty Robertson; "Seeing between the Lines: Imagination, Nothing but "This," in Max Dean and Michael Snow" by Catherine Bedard; and "Gottfried Hlenwein's American Prayer: A Fable in Pixels and Paint" by Petra Halkes.

Most of the papers and essays (or versions thereof) presented at the one-day conference held as part of MPM are included here: Geoffrey Batchen's "Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination"; Martyn Jolly's "Spectres from the Archive"; Fae Brauer's "Dangerous Doubles: Degenerate and Regenerate Photography in the Eugenic Imagination"; and Francine Dagenais's "Eyes and Skin/Gaze and Touch: Productive Imagination and the Bodily Suffix."

Image & Imagination also includes details on all of the individual works included in the exhibitions of Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal 2005 as well as an extensive bibliography of nearly three hundred related books and articles. The book (available in English and French) includes 125 gorgeously reproduced color photographs. One only wishes for more visuals from the exhibitions to match the extensive considerations of the work on view and textual analysis of the imagination at play in the medium.

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