The focal point of CONTACT 2007 is Photographic Culture, an exhibition produced in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art that showcases 10 artists from nine countries. The exhibition demonstrates how the constructed image has irrevocably transformed photography’s relationship to reality. Constructed modes of working are essential for these artists as they articulate concerns relating to contemporary global experiences.

The advent of photography in 1839 transformed the way we see, think about and experience the world. It introduced exciting new tools for expressing ideas and emotions, and profoundly shifted how we understand our-selves. The proliferation of digital technologies in recent decades has further altered this understanding and trans-formed the nature of visuality. The idea that photographs are constructed – that they represent versions of what we see, think about and experience – is no longer a contentious one, but rather a given.

The expanded technical possibilities of the the art making arsenal also parallel an expanded range of approaches to subject matter. Using these new tools, artists are actively mining the broader trove of images that now surround us– the casual snapshot; mass media images from the news, the Internet and fashion magazines; references to cinema, painting, performance, sculpture and photography itself– to create works that amalgamate old and new, familiar and fantastical. The wider artistic endeavour is driven, as it always has been, by a need to express complicated, and at times difficult, truths.

Many artists today harness the tension between believability and utter artifice not to engage the old debates about photography’s truth value but to prompt question-ing. The multiplicity of the technologies they use and the range of approaches, in fact, almost demand that we question the images that come before us. Why do we, as Simen Johan’s photographs of anthropomorphized wilderness suggest, expect animals to think and feel as we do? Under what conditions, Kim Joon’s larger-than-life tattooed figures point out, do our consumer impulses make sense? In this space of questioning, the artists encourage a deeper engagement with a range of vital issues.

For the exhibition The Constructed Image: Photographic Culture, curators David Liss and Bonnie Rubenstein have brought together 10 artists whose works showcase not only the evolving possibilities of photographic representation, but the ways in which these are particularly well-suited to addressing current issues of broad cultural importance. The artists examine the relationships of the individual to urban and natural environments, to global corporate culture, to history and world events, to story telling and to the art of making photographs itself. The works express degrees of anxiety and hope – some resolutely in one camp or the other, some encouraging a little of both– as they each construct some version of our world and the ways we live in it. From the strange, fragile brutality of Thomas Demand’s paper replica of the security gate Mohammed Atta walked through on the morning of September 11, 2001, to the saturated ecological euphoria of Scott McFarland’s digitally enhanced gardens, this exhibition reveals photography as a means of creating and engaging cultural space.

Of his series Museum of Nature (2004), Finnish artist Ilkka Halso writes: “I visualize shelters, massive buildings where big ecosystems could be stored as they are found today…. These massive buildings protect forests, lakes and rivers from pollution and, more importantly, they protect nature from the actions of man himself.”1 Halso’s digitally constructed scenes evince his pragmatic pessimism: we will never learn to be better stewards of the environment and we must take measures to protect and preserve some of it. But the soaring, vaulted architecture and the beauty of the landscape also give away his tentative optimism and his hopes that we may learn after all. This push-pull infuses each of Halso’s photographs. The architecture that he imagines protects and showcases nature, even as it also sequesters it and turns it into an artifact. He envisions these buildings functioning as actual museums, with the mission to give visitors access to these (we imagine increasingly) rare sights for educational and aesthetic contemplation. For instance, Theater I (2003) features auditorium seating arrayed around a waterfall. Should we lament that we must experience the waterfall in this circumscribed, impoverished form? Or would spending two hours listening to the waterfall “perform” improve our state of mind and spur on greater environmental mindfulness?

Mining a time-honoured subject in the history of photography, Vancouver-based artist Scott McFarland photographs gardens. As highly constructed environments, planned, executed and tended, McFarland draws a parallel between the activities for creating and maintain-ing gardens, the process of making art and their artificial end results. In these two large panoramas of an orchard–Orchard View with the Effects of the Seasons, Variation 1 (2003–2006) and Orchard View with the Effects of the Seasons, Variation 2 (2003–2006) – McFarland photo-graphed the same view repeatedly throughout the course of a year, as different plants came into bloom, and digitally combined elements of these various photographs. The final photographs condense all four seasons into a single image. McFarland uses the familiar conventions of 19th century picturesque compositions of landscape painting and photography as a way of asking us to accept these photographs at face value. The revelation of their digital construction, though, somehow doesn’t disturb our pleasure. Rather, it slows us down and further intensifies our looking, perhaps even extending time back to a more contemplative era before the instantaneous ruled.

Simen Johan, a Norwegian artist who lives and works in New York City, is most known for his fantastical tableaux of children. In his most recent series Until the Kingdom Comes (2005/6), he turns to animals and creates dramatic large-scale scenes of the creatures in their habitat. And yet, the idea of the natural here is completely suspect. A llama has a poodle cut; foxes cry; owls congregate at a picnic area and moose lock antlers in a fight to the death, as yellow parakeets wheel about. The animals are taxidermy forms inserted into picturesque landscapes, and Johan plays up the human tendency to invest animals with human attributes. The title is of course a reference to the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done….” It carries both an apocalyptic premonition but also some hope of salvation. Like Ilkka Halso, Johan is critical of humanity’s current relationship to the natural world and its creatures. He lets us glory in the gorgeous scenes but disturbs our contemplation with the animals’ at times subtle, at others overt, pain.

Canadian artist Karen Ostrom describes her work as a“kind of performance in photography.”2 In her Gun Series (ongoing), she re-stages photographs from the history of photography – for example Eddie Adams’ famous 1968photograph from Vietnam of the execution of a suspected Viet Cong spy – substituting hands or sticks for the guns. Gesture becomes crucial in communicating the narratives.She has recently begun creating site-specific cycloramic photographic installations. Smoking Gun (2007), created especially for MOCCA’s project room, is an outgrowth of the Gun Series and plays with the stereotypes of “cow-boy & Indian.” Ostrom creates a vast, dreamlike scene of horses stampeding through a forest, ostensibly to escape a fire burning in the distance. The horses, though, rather than being flesh and blood animals, are wooden saw-horses. A female figure – Ostrom herself astride one of the“horses” as the cowboy – appears to lead the stampede’s charge, her right arm raised as though brandishing a gun.A second figure – Ostrom again, as an Indian boy this time– crouches beneath a bridge, the “horse’s” reins in hand, a finger to the lips, urging quiet and stealth. The relation-ship between the figures is ambiguous. What set off the stampede? How did the fire begin? Ostrom asks us to suspend disbelief and enter this strange, entirely fabricated narrative space. The scene taps into a sense of childlike wonder but also irrational fears of entrapment.

For her series Self-Portrait Suspended (2004), British artist Sam Taylor-Wood hired a bondage expert to tie her up in various positions in the empty space of her new studio.She digitally erases the ropes so that her body appears to be levitating in the bright, open warehouse space. “Moving into my studio I felt a wonderful sense of release and relief at having a space of my own. It was as though I could think, breathe and work and not feel like I was escaping or performing, which is how I felt in previous studios,” Taylor-Wood explains.3 This autobiographical aspect of the work draws a clear link to Taylor-Wood’s compatriot Virginia Woolf and her manifesto about women’s need for a space in which to exercise a productive, creative side of the self. At the same time, in choosing to keep her face hidden, her identity subsumed by the implied movement of her body, Taylor-Wood downplays that these are self-portraits.Instead, that fact recedes and we become aware of what the gestures suggest: freedom, languor, repose, elation.The photographs then become an investigation, an exercise in possibilities, in what gesture can express. In these moments, suspended, Taylor-Wood invites us to recall that playful childhood yearning to fly.

The human figure is also the central subject in the work of Korean artist Kim Joon. With current debates about nationhood and identity as backdrop, Joon’s works point out the fallacy of national belonging. Instead, we are more loyal, more bound to personal tastes and commercial brands, with the acquisition of luxury goods as a far more powerful aspirational goal than abstract concepts like citizenship and the common good. For his series We (2005), Joon digitally creates human figures and tattoos them (Joon calls this “mouse painting” since the entire creative process is done digitally) with corporate logos: Starbucks, Gucci, BMW, Adidas. Clothed only in the logos, the anonymous figures, floating in empty space, face each other in groups of threes and adopt the gestures of models and mannequins: contrapposto stance, hips thrust out to emphasize curves, arms away from the body, vaguely encircling each other. Printed at a monumental scale, the figures become gods, the human body a billboard for corporate advertising. Kim takes the idea of branding to an exaggerated end. This annexing of individual identity, striking to North American eyes, takes on even greater transgressive qualities in the Korean context. In Korea, only criminals bear tattoos. Kim implies that consumerism and brand loyalty are crimes and, in the preposterousness of that idea, has us reconsider how we spend our time and our money, and at what cost.

Dutch artist Erwin Olaf exploits the visual languages of advertising and fashion in his ambiguous narrative tableaux. There is a Rockwellian quality to the glossy, static figures and their settings with the vague retro styling in Olaf’s series Hope (2005). The figures – there are usually two – seem poised either just before or just after some furtive, failed action or some line of dialogue, and an oppressive emptiness hangs in the air. The optimism of Rockwell’s paintings, that sense of all being right with the world, is glaringly absent. None of the figures make eye contact, with each other or with the camera; the set (an interior room transformed into a classroom, a hallway, a boxing ring) consistently recedes back to a dead-end corner; and from the small windows, the one possible escape hatch, we can only see the same stultifying, stormy sky. Olaf’s tight perfection turns sour and claustrophobic, and drives any inkling of hope from these scenes. We find instead alienated, defeated straw men who can take no solace from their impeccable clothing and surroundings.

Chinese artist Miao Xiaochun creates large-scale panoramas of cityscapes, bringing modern technology into dialogue with traditional forms of Chinese painting. Mirage (2004) is an eight-panel panorama, digitally knit together, of Miao’s hometown Wuxi, Jiangsu province. From the hilltop where Miao made his first watercolour as a child, the view takes in Wuxi’s urban sprawl, high-rises and highways. Vestiges of traditional Chinese life, like pagodas, for instance, appear only occasionally. A cable car traverses the foreground of the photograph, carrying two figures: an ancient Chinese gentleman, a life-sized mannequin bear-ing Miao’s own facial features, riding up the hill and Miao himself with his back to us riding down. The mannequin– Miao has dubbed him “He” – appears in several of Miao’s photographs, an avatar both of the present day and of cultural traditions. Significantly, the cable car crosses the scene, but we see neither its beginning nor its end. In this way, Miao holds the past and present in tension. The word “mirage” implies something impermanent, an optical illusion – the artist’s wish, perhaps, that this transformation of his city had never taken place. It also addresses the idea of representation as something provisional and fictive.“Any photograph,” Miao writes, “can only depict a certain section of the world, with a certain width and a certain length. This is not to be considered solely a limitation, for it can be used to emphasize the importance of a part of a scene and its implied meanings.”4

Dionisio González’s photographs, which centre on the favelas, or shantytowns, of the Cingapura district in São Paulo, Brazil, are alternate propositions to the government-instituted Proyecto Cingapura. The city of São Paulo initiated the project, the largest “verticalization” and re-urbanization project of its kind in Brazil, as a way to improve living conditions for and provide better social services to the favelas’ marginal inhabitants. Lauded as a success by UNESCO in 1996, the project has now drawn fire for not devoting resources to the upkeep of the buildings it built (more than 3,000 apartments in total) and the ways in which it did not involve the residents in the planning process. González proposes, through his digitally collaged photographs, a radical program for recycling, reconfiguring and reimagining the favelas. He embraces the improvisational nature of these settlements and the ways they are constantly changing as newcomers arrive and create their shelters. He proposes that any improvements take their cue from this movement, this impulse, rather than try to impose the logic of a strict, traditional urban plan. His photographs, like Heliópolis I (2006), critique Proyecto Cingapura but at the same time revel in and encourage the creativity and architectural free stylings of the favela residents.

Stubbornly faithful to analogue modes of working, German artist Thomas Demand eschews any digital technologies beyond culling images from mass media sources. “I like to imagine the sum of all the media representations of the event as a kind of landscape and the media industry as the tour bus company that takes us through these colourful surrounds.”5 Demand chooses images of architectural spaces in which events of historic or popular significance have taken place: Hitler’s bunker (Room, 1994), the hallway leading to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment (Corridor, 1995) and the kitchen in Saddam Hussein’s hideaway (Kitchen, 2004). Crucially, the images Demand chooses never carry any sign of the events that have transpired, and lack any human presence. He painstakingly recon-structs these images out of paper and cardboard as 3-D, life-sized constructions, and then photographs them precisely to mimic the source image. Demand is not, however, interested in a seamless recreation; he leaves small clues, such as pencil marks, wrinkles and edges, to highlight the flimsy constructedness of his scenes. He also plays the banality of these scenes off their sensational stories. With their simple descriptive titles –Room, Corridor, Kitchen, Gate– the spaces reveal nothing about the events or the people involved. The source image forGate(2004) is taken from the surveillance camera footage that captured Mohammed At ta passing through security at Boston’s Logan Airport on September 11, 2001. In its mute anonymity, we find no premonition of disaster, nor any inkling of its aftermath. “I am always trying to construct a concept of an image, sometimes in a more narrative way, sometimes with a more philosophical or associative syntax. An image is always only showing what’s necessary for a thought, not the thought itself.”6

In 1892, making a case for photography as a tool for art making, British photographer Henry Peach Robinson(1830–1901) declared:

It is clear, then, that a method that will not admit of the modifications of the artist cannot be an art, and therefore is photography in a perilous state if we cannot prove that it is endowed with possibilities of untruth. But they who, looking perhaps only at their own limited experiments, say photography cannot lie, take a very narrow view and greatly underrate the capabilities of the art. All arts have their limits, and I admit that the limits of photography are rather narrow, but in good hands it can be made to lie like a Trojan.7

Faced with the works produced in the last decades, this statement seems obvious enough. Robinson, known for constructing composite scenes from multiple negatives– most famously Fading Away (1858) – would likely be in his glory today. In his own time, though, he represented one side of a heated debate about what photography was best suited to, art or science, artifice or truth, literary imaginings or perceptual clarity. The debate was settled for a time in the 1920s, when American photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and his circle chose to side with Robinson’s opponent, Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936), an advocate of using photography to better see the world “as it is” and to bring art closer to nature. But the strictures they promoted as the means for producing artistic photography did not go unchallenged for long.

In his article “The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition” published in Artforum in 1976, American critic A.D.Coleman wondered what might have happened in the history of photography if photographers had “resisted the urge to acquire the credentials of aesthetic respectability for their medium, and instead simply pursued it as a way of producing evidence of intelligent life on earth.8 With the 10 artists in this exhibition, and their constructed works, we continue to reap fertile answers.

Essay by Sophie Hackett, Assistant Curator, Photography, Art Gallery of Ontario.

Curated by David Liss & Bonnie Rubenstein