Before Digital

×

Expand

Colin Smith, “Cameron Lookout S.E. (Abandoned Series),” 2010

camera obscura landscape photograph, light-jet print, 48" x 60" (courtesy of the artist)

Colin Smith's camera obscura light-jet print, Cameron Lookout S.E., is one of many intriguing images on view until March 16 as part of Before Digital: Post-1970 Photography in Alberta at Calgary’s Illingworth Kerr Gallery.

Names and initials are scratched in the walls of this abandoned fire lookout west of Calgary and the view of the wilderness beyond enraptures. The image recalls the experiences of lookout staff and adventure-seekers, as well as Smith’s own visit, foreshortening the viewer’s sense of time.

Photographs, whether made by a camera and lens, a pinhole box or an ultra-large-format field camera like the one built by Shane Arsenault and Natalia Barbaris, documented here in The Mobile Darkroom, are known for their real-world veracity. Yet, photographs do more than simply record. They evoke a sense of time and place in ways that words cannot.

×

Expand

Shane Arsenault and Natalia Barbaris, “The Mobile Darkroom,” 2016

portable darkroom on trailer bed, 5’ x 4’ (courtesy of the artists)

The patina of both adventure and nostalgia are palpable throughout the gallery, located at the Alberta University of the Arts, formerly the Alberta College of Art and Design. Guest curator Mary-Beth Laviolette, working in partnership with Contemporary Calgary, has organized 82 works made between 1974 and 2018 into five sections focused on things like memory, play and the Rockies.

Themes of simultaneity and remembrance emerge throughout the show, which features 27 artists, including well-known names like Dianne Bos, Craig Richards, George Webber, Diane Colwell, Dan Hudson, M.N. Hutchinson and Arthur Nishimura. Of course, this is only a fraction of the photographers of the period – projects like these are understandably restrained by practical concerns.

It’s interesting to think about Beyond Digital in relation to French historian Pierre Nora’s les lieux de mémoire, or places of memory. These are constructed and incomplete sites, according to Nora, that take the place of lived memory.

History is a representation of the past, he writes in Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire, while memory is a bond that ties us to an eternal present. When we stake out particular works as representative in some way, essentially as history, we also can unknowingly (or knowingly) forget others.

×

Expand

Douglas Clark, “Untitled (from the “Articles of Faith" series),” 1987

Ektacolour print, 65" x 20" (Art Gallery of Alberta Collection, purchased in 1989 with funds from the Henry Singer Memorial Fund for Photography)

Just as Cameron Lookout S.E. invites viewers to see time compressed, one of the final images in the exhibition – and the catalogue – Douglas Clark's Untitled (from the “Articles of Faith" series) fills multiple duties. It underlines the physicality of the printed photograph, symbolizes the passage of time, and reminds us of the power of photographic practices to both capture and erase.

Analogue processes are celebrated and remembered in this exhibition. But Before Digital stays any proclamation of their demise, insisting upon just how varied and long-lived they continue to be. ■

Before Digital: Post-1970 Photography in Alberta is on view at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary from Jan. 15 to March 16, 2019.