This exhibition celebrates the career of Montreal-based artist Clara Gutsche, winner of the 2024 Scotiabank Photography Award. Since the early 1970s, Gutsche has steadily produced a remarkably varied body of work, comprising architectural interiors and urban landscapes as well as several portrait series exploring deep friendships and familial bonds.

Through a wide range of subjects captured across Canada, the United States, and Western Europe—from parkscapes to shop windows to industrial architecture—Gutsche has carefully documented traces of human activity in the urban environment. She has recorded the domestication of natural spaces (Jeanne-Mance Park, 1982–84); the exploitation and demise of factory complexes (Lachine Canal, 1985–86 and 1990); and thoughtful assemblages of commercial goods in storefront displays (Windows I, 1976–80, and Windows II, 2000–22). Gutsche’s images reveal the social and cultural characteristics of neighbourhoods and cities, evoking the presence of people through their constructions and artifacts.

Defying the conventions and traditional boundaries of documentary photography, the artist’s staged approach to portraiture examines the relationships between individuals and their surroundings. Framed within secluded spaces that include Quebec convents and high schools, Gutsche’s deliberately composed scenes record the daily routines and ritualized activities of different communities. Her intimate autobiographical projects on her daughter Sarah (photographed 1982–89) and granddaughter Hannah (2012–22) speak both to motherhood and the formation of one’s identity through the passing of time. Gutsche’s portraits reveal, Phyllis Lambert has observed, her “perceptive grasp of the personality of different ages—the inner lives of small children, the defiance and bravado of teenagers, and the self-consciousness of adults.” 

This retrospective positions the artist’s practice as a continuous photographic investigation, marked over the years by an exceptional diversity of genres, topics, formats, and photographic techniques. From large, full-colour vistas to delicately toned black-and-white prints, from landscapes to still lifes and environmental portraiture, Gutsche’s “photographs about photography” demonstrate her unwavering commitment to the exploration of the medium’s material, formal, and memorial qualities.

Organized by The Image Centre, in partnership with Scotiabank.

Curated by Gaëlle Morel

• Clara Gutsche, the Montreal-based artist and winner of the 2024 Scotiabank Photography Award, explores urban spaces and portraiture through documentary and staged photography. A co-founder of Powerhouse Gallery/La Centrale, she has also taught at Champlain College and Concordia University. Gutsche has completed major commissions for the Canadian Centre for Architecture and has exhibited internationally. Her work is held in collections including The Image Centre, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 1997, she received the Canada Council for the Arts Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography.

• Gaëlle Morel (French/Canadian, b. 1976), PhD, has been the Curator, Exhibitions and Public Engagement at The Image Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University, since 2010. Based on extensive archival research, her most recent exhibitions include Lee Miller, A Photographer at Work, 1932–1945 (2024); Stories from the Picture Press: Black Star Publishing Co. & The Canadian Press (2023); and Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81 (with accompanying catalogue, 2023). In 2009, Morel was the guest curator of the photography biennial Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal. She is currently an instructor in the Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management graduate program at Toronto Metropolitan University.