It is clear from photography’s earliest days that the medium originally forged on the dynamic interaction between light, chemistry, and paper has long also held a particularly intimate relationship with the things of the world. When William Henry Fox Talbot first made his images on paper using silver chloride as a sensitizer and fixing them with chemical agents, he immediately shared his excitement by documenting objects both rarified and common. Anna Atkins, a botanist enamoured with the Cyanotype process, catalogued her vast plant collection, which she published in book-form as Photographs of British Algae, in 1843. Atkins’ “shadowgraphs,” as she called them, were based on a process in which objects were laid directly onto light-sensitive paper. Talbot also relied originally on “cameraless photography,” the photogram technique that would be picked up in earnest by artists in the early 20th century. Man Ray is perhaps the best-known proliferator of photograms—the title he gave his own were “Rayographs”—and the process offered great experimental possibility to a range of artists follow-ing World War I who sought both a new means of expression and, especially in Dadaist and later Surrealist circles, to redefine the “rational” nature of reality. Calls for forms of “New Objectivity” (Albert Renger-Patzsch) and “NewVision” (László Moholy-Nagy) were issued by an ilk of Modernists who avidly applied photo-based techniques to their pursuits.

Whether challenging the accepted order of things or elevating the everyday to something sublime as seen in Paul Outerbridge Jr.’s influential work from the 1920s—formal composition and the photographic arrangement, cropping, and/or abstraction of everyday objects were key for those artists who used the medium not so much as a means to represent the world, but rather, to transform it. Paul Strand’s framing of quotidian items, from clay bowls to the jagged surface of stone, was shaped by his encounters with the work of Braque, Picasso, and Brancusi.

Regardless of their own creative inspirations, the aesthetic and technical influence of the historical photographers whose works are on view in Past Picture cannot be understated. This is clear within the space of the exhibition itself where the photogram surfaces in more recent work by Gary Schneider, who implicitly references Adrien Majewski’s Mr. Majewski’s Right Hand, Posed for 20 minutes. Room Temperature (c. 1895–1900), or in the infectious object juxtapositions of Share Corsaut’s copper-toned prints that owe a notable debt to Man Ray and Franz Roh. Hiroshi Sugimoto, best known for his ethereal depictions of seascapes and serial studies of white cinema screens, is represented here by his. Lightning Fields (2009), silver gelatin prints inspired by the finicky and unpredictable nature of the chemically-charged “Spectres” inherent to the medium itself. Sugimoto speaks to photography’s earliest pioneers, such as Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. His series also draws a strong complement to Ralph-Eugene Meatyard’s intensely-charged Light on Water series produced in the late 1950s. These long exposure prints portray the undulation of the photographer’s hand-held camera and sun-light as it reflects off the water of a shallow stream; this record of time and movement stands in stark contrast to Anton Bruehl’s Crankshaft with Pistons (1929) from three decades prior that brings a rarified stillness to a machine otherwise exemplifying the kinetic tropes of modernity the Australian-born photographer encountered upon imi-grating to New York in 1919. In Canada, his contemporary John Vanderpant was looking to the industrialized city and its menacing concrete structures, while also branching into more enigmatic and abstracted framing motifs that took plants and common foodstuffs as their starting point. The tonal paper Vanderpant perennially used gave his prints unmistakable warmth, texture, and materiality.

This sense of materiality can be felt in all the photo-graphs on view in Past Picture: from Talbot’s earliest “photogenic drawings” and Charles Nègre’s translation of photographic images into a variety of mechanical processes, to the photogram that has continued to inspire for over a century. Perhaps the material nature of photography is most overtly expressed when displayed in the curious tradition of bullet frames produced by unknown soldiers in the two World Wars. Today, many artists work-ing in the medium are looking back to its earliest inventions and previous analogue traditions with intrigue. This exhibition is a reminder of the extraordinary aesthetic results achieved by artists who risked the spectres of photography’s past, and in doing so provide no shortage of influences and inspiration for those taking the lens-based image into the 21st century.

Past Picture draws from the extraordinary holdings of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada to present prints and images by some of photography’s most innovative and influential inventors and practitioners.  The photographs on view represent key aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities of some 150 years of photographic production.

Curated by Jonathan Shaughnessy and Ann Thomas