The quest for memory is the search for one’s history… Modern memory is, above all, archival.It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image.

— Pierre Nora

Photography and its culture – the way in which images are created and used – are subject, as many things are, to cyclical evolutions of birth, growth, entropy and renewal. Photography wields an enduring influence in our lives; it contributes to our understanding of the world around us, now more then ever before, and is implicit in preserving our individual and collective experiences. Through a selection of photographic images by ten Canadian and international artists, Between Memory and History: From the Epic to the Everyday probes relationships that exist between the intimate and the public, between moments of personal significance to events of global resonance that affect each one of us.

As the 21st century unfolds, one technology gives way to the next and radically alters how we encounter images. Photographic imagery continues to evolve as the transition from film and photochemical processes gives rise to digitization. Images now flow to a global audience over the world wide web, digital manipulation of pictures is commonplace and cell-phone cameras are ubiquitous. Photojournalism, social documentary and the snapshot aesthetic are re-emerging within an entirely new context. We are overwhelmed by photographic images daily, yet they remain a fundamental source of information and inspiration for all of us. The sheer preponderance of photography seems to have completely overtaken other forms of visual communication.To what extent does this phenomenology of representation contribute to a new contemporary reality, and at what point do individual and collective memories become history? Whether based on fact or molded through fiction, our relationship with photography is always challenged, yet we are still fundamentally seduced by its ability to “capture the moment”.

Documenting the transformation of Kodak, the foremost purveyor of “family memories”, Toronto photographer Robert Burley ignites the discourse surrounding photography and the demise of the photochemical process; the notion that the death of photography, as we have known it, is imminent. Burley’s ongoing project, Disappearance of Darkness (2005 – present), records a major shift in the history of representation that includes the downsizing, closing and demolition of factories that manufacture traditional photography products around the world, including one in Châlon-sur-Saône, France – the birthplace of the medium. This historic shift from analogue to digital technology has widespread implications for the entire industry – from the redundant workers and their dependent families, to individual photographers and the clients they serve – as well as for the wider culture, including those who have never owned a camera, if such a thing is now even possible.

Somewhat ironically, Burley uses a large format view camera, much like the original 19th century device, to deftly capture the architectural complexity of each site. He documents employees as they witness the downfall of their former workplace and record its implosion with their digital cameras. The widespread use of digital capture devices, whether cell phones, cameras or PDA’s, is also indicative of the Darwinian laws of consumer demand. Asa culture that voraciously consumes photographic imagery, the impending end of the photochemical era appears unstoppable and irreversible. While images are transmitted and received at an ever increasingly rapid rate, it is difficult to determine whether or not our ability to comprehend or digest the imagery has kept pace. The very meaning of photography is subject to flux – as much by these specific technological advancements, as by general social conditions. Burley’s dramatic images, hybrids of analogue and digital technology, metaphorically and literally capture the explosiveness of the current situation. Since its inception, photography has served in the aid of memory and in Burley’s work the memory is of the medium itself.

The delineation between the epic and the everyday is rapidly collapsing within our global culture of images. In renowned British photographer Martin Parr’s Small World, a book published in 1996 and updated in 2007, this body of work casts a satirical gaze at the tourist industry, where leisure and consumerism are fuelled by a desire to capture “the exotic” in an increasingly homogenous world. These images are composed of colourful scenes of tourists taking snapshots at various well-known sites around the globe. Regardless of site and context, the common thread linking the pictures selected for this exhibition is the presence of cameras being used to preserve a memory caught in a moment of time. Parr exploits some of the clichés associated with the vernacular genre of tourist photography to delightfully humourous and ironic effect. By depicting sites that are simulacra of actual places, such as the Venetian Hotel or the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, he complicates our relationship to places, images and our memories of them. It may not seem desirable to remember these fictitious sites and our less-than-authentic experiences of them, yet these stand-ins do suffice as our visual recognition of them – whether or not we have visited the actual sites – allows us to identify with them through the pictures we have seen of the “real” thing. Among the layers of intent and meaning in these photographs, Parr asserts the influential role that photography plays in the formation of our cognitive faculties and therefore in the construction of our remembrances, stories and histories. His images exist at the point of intersection between the local and the global, the spectacular and the mundane, between fact and fiction, the past and present-day.

Whereas Parr examines the relationship of images within a globalized culture, Bert Teunissen depicts places that have thus far defied the progress of urbanization. His quest is to capture the light and atmosphere of his childhood home in the Netherlands. Teunissen spent over ten years producing an archive of more than 300 photographs for his Domestic Landscape series (1996 – present), which were taken in homes throughout several countries including the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Italy, France, Great Britain, Spain and Portugal. His photographs document the interiors of homes built before the First and Second World Wars – some of them centuries ago – and each image captures an authentic way of life nearing obsolescence. The effects of globalization, changes brought about through the European Union and expanding urban development, threaten the existence of these homes that were erected before the use of electric light. Abandoned farms in a depopulated countryside have become commonplace throughout regions that once relied upon agriculture to support their distinctive traditions, languages, cuisine and customs.

Teunissen’s photographs convey an atmospheric intimacy within these well-worn rooms by using only the existing daylight, evoking an uncanny domestic familiarity that alludes to our timeless connection to history. As the only source of natural light, the windows – built in proportion to the size of each room– illuminate everyday scenes with a celestial glow. Teunissen’s careful rendering of natural light recalls the luminous paintings by great Dutch masters such as Vermeer and Rembrandt, scenes which were set in traditional homes similar to these. The past is inscribed into these worn walls, suggested by details in the furnishings; reminiscence is etched onto the expressive faces of these people who are distinguished by their weariness and wisdom. While history is always subjective, it is Teunissen’s intention to circumvent cultural amnesia, documenting a disappearing architecture and ways of life that are fading.

Similar to Teunissen’s pursuit of reminiscences from his childhood, Alessandra Sanguinetti explores the most intimate realms of childhood fantasy. The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams (1998 – present), a literary-inspired narrative, captures the poignant transition of two female cousins from childhood to puberty and into adulthood. Sanguinetti, who currently lives in New York, spent her own formative years in Argentina and in 1998 she initiated an ongoing collaboration with Guille and Belinda, who were then just nine and ten years old. Working closely with them to construct images based on their imaginings and anxieties, Sanguinetti’s photographs from 1998 through 2002 represent one of the most fragile stages of growth. Set in the girls’ rural homeland using simple props and costumes at hand, the various scenarios they enacted were sometimes theatrically staged and at other times spontaneous. The close cropping of her small-scale images suggests the mundane activities of everyday life, yet also catches intimate details such as the level of self-consciousness that underlies their “playing out” of roles. The girls seem to perform for the camera with equal measures of awkwardness and tenderness.They candidly experiment with a full repertoire of familiar roles: from the Madonna at the moment of the immaculate conception, to the tragic Shakespearian figure of Ophelia, through to gender-bending portrayals of a couple caught in a romantic embrace. Their varying costumes, at turns youthful or adult-like – underwear, street clothes, semi-formal wear, jewelry, a moustache, a short skirt and artificial fingernails – allude to the in-between state that is adolescence: a stage of life that is key to the formation of identity. Sanguinetti’s images, combining the everyday and the imaginary, transcend the medium’s ability to document reality; they capture the more ephemeral and intimate aspects of psychological recollection: our fantasies, dreams and desires.

In contrast to the highly personalized narratives of Sanguinetti, German artist Thomas Ruff derives source material in the form of compressed digital files – jpegs – “found” on our most public domain, the world wide web. Exponentially enhanced in scale, mass-distributed pictures are removed from their already altered context as accessible images floating in cyberspace and are elevated to the epic proportions of classical painting. The artist exaggerates the pixelation of digital images, drawing attention to their abstract quality and rendering them analogous to the sophisticated pointillist techniques of the Impressionists. While many of Ruff’s recent works represent current or historic events or familiar icons – images ingrained in our collective memory – other references are deliberately obscure. With only acronyms for titles, such as jpeg bd01 (2007) viewers are left to interpret reference points and meaning. Whereas large-scale paintings in churches and public buildings were once the primary source of public imagery, the internet is now a collective, infinite compendium of visual information. Technology allows Ruff to enlarge an image from a jpeg to the size of Titian’s most grand canvases. Previously crucial notions around origin and authorship are no longer a factor, as the ability to control images – their meanings and circulation –has been rendered nearly impossible to contain. As the invention of the printing press accelerated the circulation of imagery, so too has the evolution of photographic technology. The digitization of the photographic image has hastened the proliferation of imagery and the internet’s vast image bank has democratized access to information and visual culture. Images of architectural monuments, scenes of war and natural phenomena (such as the melting of polar icecaps) are familiar to millions of people who have never actually visited or experienced these places. Ruff’s work reflects the impact of a digital era where history, memory and image are heavily mediated and transformed through the evolving vocabulary of photography.

The grand panoramic images by French photographer Luc Delahaye utilize a scale and narrative structure also reminiscent of the grandeur of 18th and 19th-century history paintings. Like Ruff, Delahaye’s work asserts the notion that photography has supplanted painting’s longstanding role as the supreme authority in the recording and distribution of images. As an award-winning photojournalist and former member of Magnum Photos, in the 1990s Delahaye was distinguished for his coverage of the wars in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Chechnya and Bosnia. Since 2001, his distinctive method – a cinematic approach to reportage – has taken him behind the scenes, producing large-scale photographs that probe beyond the immediacy of mainstream headlines. He continues to travel the world documenting the human experience of global events and their long-term implications. Using a large format camera and his unique approach to documentary photography, he unflinchingly records each scene with great detail on a scale that engulfs the viewer as if they were actually present at the event.

Delahaye’s Recent History series (2001-2007) includes complex narrative depictions of global tragedies: the refugees and internally displaced people in eastern Chad; the recovery of remains and identification process at the mass graves of Snagovo, Bosnia and the aftermath of the tsunami in Meulaboh, Indonesia. Jenin Refugee Camp (2002) presents a highly-detailed panoramic view in a theatrical style that is filled with real-life drama. Delahaye avoids the typically sensationalist close-up approach favoured by the media and instead depicts epic scenes of great devastation. Following the battle between Palestinian militants and the Israeli Army, he records the littered personal possessions, widespread destruction and the desperate conditions caused by incendiary political events. For his monumental photographs, Delahaye employs a painterly aesthetic to document the non-fictional human dramas that inform history and collective memory.

History, time and circumstance are also compressed in Adi Nes’s Biblical Stories (2006) that are re-presented and transposed onto contemporary experience, suggesting a continuity between ancient times and the present-day. Working with acquaintances and neighbours hired to portray biblical characters, Nes creates images set within urban Israel, where he lives, that are meant to illustrate parables of compassion and acts of charity found in the Old Testament. Prior to the invention of photography, biblical imagery was almost exclusively represented by paintings rendered in ways relevant to their historic period. Photography’s relationship to painting has been contentious from the outset and has shifted the role of painting, forcing its expansion beyond the medium’s near exclusivity as a form of pictorial representation. Nes intends to comment upon this evolution, especially evident in Ruth and Naomi Gleaners (2006) where he makes clear reference to Jean-Francois Millet’s renowned painting The Gleaners (1857),which depicts lower class women stooped in the fields salvaging leftovers from harvest. Another of his pictures, Hagar (2006), pays homage to a striking and famous image of a desperate mother taken during the Great Depression by the influential American photojournalist Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965). By referring to iconic images, Nes positions his work within a pictorial tradition that portrays the difficult lives and humiliating circumstances of peasants, the downtrodden and society’s lower castes. Through the contemporary, cinematic staging of each photograph, Nes calls attention to what he feels is the disintegration of his own cultural identity and certain values associated with biblical sources. His photographs highlight the relationship that exists between the harsh social realities that impact homelessness everyday (in his native Israel and elsewhere) and the historic epic dramas that have formed humanistic values. Nes’s photography is laden with references to art and religion, extending heroic and historical narratives into the realm of everyday contemporary experience.

While biblical parables have served as a foundation of Western thought, ancient mythologies have contributed to the trajectory of Eastern thought. The young Chinese artist Chi Peng draws inspiration from the 16th-century classic Chinese novel Journey to the West–a mythological fantasy based on a monk’s travels to India from 629 to 646 A.D. during the Tang Dynasty. The tale has been told and reinterpreted many times over, including a popular television series that aired in China during the mid-1980s. In this classic pilgrimage story the monk is accompanied by the hero of the story, a shape-shifting monkey king imbued with magical powers, trained in sophisticated fighting techniques and capable of transforming into an array of eccentric forms and bizarre creatures. In Chi Peng’s series Journey to the West (2007) the thematic essence of the story, the notion of transformation, remains constant and especially pertinent to the myriad of radical changes taking place in China today. Similar to Nes, Peng adapts a classic tale to contemporary times. Inspired by the television version he watched as a child, Peng conjures his scenes through the “magic” of digital photography and image enhancement tools to form a first-person narrative using himself as a model. In the work True and False Monkey King (2007), the pictorial structure, costumes and rooftop location are unmistakably contemporary in their references to Japanese manga, anime and the currentAsian youth fad of cosplay. Peng has also incorporated a vivid childhood memory of an incident where his angry father threw his schoolbooks from the window; after flying like birds into the sky they landed on the snowy rooftop. Recollections of the original Journey to the West live on, resonating into the present through photographic imagery, a powerful pictorial means for re-interpreting the influences of our times.

Montreal photographer Raymonde April also positions herself within the narrative of her work with images that simultaneously evoke distance and familiarity. While her pictures are worlds apart, in technique and style, from the highly constructed scenes by Chi Peng, they share a similar interest in the preservation of memory; although in her case they are more intimately personal and associatively poetic. Well-known in Canada since the 1970s, April’s classic black and white photographs inspired by the day-to-day depict landscapes, objects and people familiar to her, as well as self-portraits. Quite devoid of nostalgia and artful staging, they allude to abstraction, cinema and documentary while utilizing a minimalist approach to each subject. Everyday objects are depicted with a spare theatricality and almost casual, contemplative ambience that resonates through an uncanny connection to our own histories.

For her recent series Gravitas (2007) April used a traditional 8×10 large format camera to document her careful restoration of the embossed walls in her Plateau Mont-Royal apartment. Obsessively peeling and scraping away layers of paint and wall coverings that had accumulated since the 1920s, the act and her photographic documentation of it, are a literal and metaphorical excavation revealing traces of previous tenants. April juxtaposes these abstracted images of embossed patterns with solemn landscapes and self-portraits from different periods of her life. Her photographs capture a moment in time, yet are redolent of past cultures, identities and layered memories of consciousness. The subtle interplay between the images and their mysteriously familiar essence are readily sorted in the imagination according to the subjective experience of each viewer. Like layers of wall coverings gradually stripped away, each photograph is an iconic signifier – “historical” evidence revealed that is activated and transformed by memory.

Nan Goldin is one of the foremost photographers of our era whose pictures share a first-person account of her life. Throughout the decades Goldin, an American artist living for many years in New York and Paris, has become best known for the portrayal of her extended family of friends. She faithfully records them during moments that are uninhibited, frank and sometimes even illicit. In many cases she has been photographing the same people over several years and followers of her work will recognize these aging subjects, some who have tragically died over the years. A pioneer of the snapshot aesthetic, her raw photographs bring a sense of poignancy to documenting everyday instances that comprise the bulk of our existence.

In Goldin’s no-holds-barred approach we have access to the most private of personal histories. Her multimedia installation, Heartbeat (2001), an intensely intimate sequence of 246 colour slides, depicts an array of couples caught in the throes of lovemaking and the joyous affection of a family. Images of sweaty, breathless passion and moments of quiet tenderness are set to John Taverner’s soundtrack of the Kyrie Eleison (Greek for Lord Have Mercy), part of the traditional Christian mass, performed by pop singer Björk. A remarkable depth of sensory and emotional experience is explored through this work that implicates the role of photography in the forming of corporal and cognitive memory. Since 1980, Goldin has created epic narratives using an abundance of everyday images that are exhibited through the near-obsolete technology of the slide projector. Kodak stopped manufacturing slide projectors in 2004, although they were for many years central to the sharing of “family memories”.

There is little distinction between life and work for Goldin and Self-portrait Inside/Outside (1986-2006) reminds us that these photographs are always saturated with the artist’s own sense of identity, as each picture functions as a memento mori preserving the deepest of personal and most elusive of narratives, the inner self. Through her work real-life drama is laid bare and vulnerable, complete with sadness and joy, exuberance and melancholy, laughter and contemplation, tenderness and pathos; the experiences that form our own private stories.

Always subjective, photographic images reflect our innate desire to remember; the only objective certainty about photography is that a truthful image does not exist. We have understood this since its invention yet we are still seduced by its gaze and increasingly obsessed by its ability to capture a moment in time that is always in flux. Technology has been a driving force in the constantly shifting paradigms that have been influential to the role and function of photography. Our burgeoning global culture has opened a vast frontier of possibilities for image-making yet the proliferation of images threatens the validity of the medium to be of any use to us at all. Will the overwhelming ubiquity of photographic images accommodate the complexity of our past experiences or will it obliterate them altogether?

As these ten artists demonstrate, photography is an essential means of negotiating a lineage of images that connects individual and collective experience to reflect the pertinent issues of our lives and our times. From explorations of photography as a surrogate for memory to reconstructions of history through photographic representation, these images are suspended between memory and history.

Curated by David Liss & Bonnie Rubenstein