Four Decades of Photography at the National Gallery

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So, where is Stan Douglas?

And where, for that matter, is the Vancouver School of photoconceptualism?

Those questions hang over a new exhibition, Photography in Canada: 1960-2000, at the National Gallery of Canada. It’s the first in a series of shows that examine both historical and contemporary Canadian art in this, the 150th anniversary of Confederation. This initial photography offering, limited to works held by the National Gallery, is a comforting family album, with brilliant innovators like Michael Snow, Lynne Cohen and Edward Burtynsky now seen, decades later, as more establishment than daring.

Although Vancouver’s Stan Douglas is one of the most celebrated photo-artists in the post-Centennial period, not one of the 100 works in this exhibition of 71 artists is his, although the gallery owns several. As well, there is no mention of the so-called Vancouver School of photoconceptualism, to which Douglas is deemed to belong, although works from such other West Coast photoconceptualists as Ken Lum, Rodney Graham, N.E. Thing Co. and Jeff Wall pepper the show.

Superstar Wall quite rightly gets his own room, at the end of the exhibition for his gaudy, messy lightbox image, The Destroyed Room, a 1978 image inspired by the Eugène Delacroix painting, The Death of Sardanapalus. Thus, the otherwise staid exhibition ends with a bang, Wall’s image as startling as a freeway car crash.

Lum, Graham and the rest, are not grouped together in one cozy Vancouver-centric area. Instead, they are scattered around the five-room, summer-long exhibition like a bunch of irate relatives who have stopped talking to one another. And yet, they are among the best-known and most celebrated Canadian artists of the late 20th century. New York and Berlin love them. They have made Canada cool. Don’t they deserve a collective pat on the back in an exhibition covering their heyday?

Exhibition curator Andrea Kunard explains.

“I don’t like the term Vancouver School of photography and I don’t think they do either,” she says. “They’ve said they don’t like being lumped together that way, that they have very different practices. Yes, conceptualism in Vancouver has been very strong and that is why we have Ian Wallace, Ken Lum and Jeff Wall in the work. But to say the Vancouver School of photography, to me, excludes all the other people who have been working in photography in Vancouver.”

She mentions Jim Breukelman, who is represented by images of two kitschy Vancouver bungalows from his 1987 series, Hot Properties; one of the precious-looking houses was awarded the catalogue cover. She also mentions Fred Herzog; we see his 1960 image, Flaneur, Granville, which shows a rather creepy man in downtown Vancouver.

The exhibition is grouped thematically. The first room is titled Humanist Photography, but mainly deals with celebrity. So, of course, there is a Yousuf Karsh portrait, this one, little known from 1976, of Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak. There’s also a postcard-sized portrait from 1973 of a wacky-looking former B.C. premier W.A.C. Bennett by Nina Raginsky. This room also includes a splendid, action-packed photo by Saskatchewan commercial photographer George Hunter showing a wild horse race at the Calgary Stampede. Yes, every genre from news to art photography is included in the exhibition.

The second room is reserved for photographs as documents. David McMillan, best known for images of the post-nuclear Ukrainian city of Chernobyl, is instead represented by an earlier photograph showing a 1979 Winnipeg street. Kunard says she deliberately tried to offer not just iconic images, but lesser known ones. And, besides, Kunard says, she wanted to honour her Winnipeg roots.

Half the third room is titled The City and offers street scenes by Breukelman and Herzog. The other half of the room is for “conceptualists,” including some of the Vancouver gang but others, such as Montreal artists Bill Vazan and Serge Tousignant.

The fourth room explores “identity.” This is where Lum has landed, with one of his trademark text-based images resembling a commercial advertisement. Half the image contains the text “Alex Gonzalez Loves His Mother and Father.” The other half shows a young, shirtless Hispanic man. What’s going on? It’s a puzzle for the viewer to decipher. Others in this room include sexual provocateur Evergon and Mohawk artist Shelley Niro.

And now, back to Stan Douglas. Sounding apologetic, Kunard says most of the Douglas photographs the gallery owns need to be paired with associated videos. Thus, his work simply did not fit the exhibition format. To be 100 per cent accurate, we can say Douglas made it into the exhibition another way. His face – well, most of it – can be seen in one of four Roy Arden photos on the wall. And a Douglas still from the 2013 high-definition video Luanda-Kinshasa that shows a singing woman has already become the signature image for the gallery’s fall biennial of Canadian contemporary art. The National Gallery has not forgotten Douglas, even if the Vancouver School of photoconceptualism is considered a mere fiction.

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