2024 Scotiabank Photography Award shortlist highlights Canada’s best lens-based artists

It's always strange to enter a visual arts competition, and even stranger to win a prize. 

In my profession, there's nothing that predisposes me to any kind of competition. For me, my artistic practice is above all an exchange with people, an opening onto the real world that surrounds and constitutes us. 

Art is like choreography, a subtle dance between particles, atoms that reflect themselves, rearrange and juxtapose. Each work is a star in a constellation, a unique configuration that tells a story, evokes links and provokes questions. My path is a never-ending journey, an inexorable quest. 

Since my first steps in the art world, I've always wanted to share with others. My parents, both art teachers, let me explore this path, without ever pushing me. Nothing seemed more natural than to continue clearing this path, digging, experimenting and creating. 

This invitation to reflect on my journey has allowed me to look back, to remember, and to remind myself of the work I've accomplished. I still have so much to do... 

We're artists to the end, and I hope I won't run out of time. Every canvas, every sculpture, every moment of creation is a promise, an invitation to explore further, to touch, to brush against something greater than oneself. 

Photography is my first love. 

I believe that everything I produce, whether through sculpture, painting or drawing, is a form of photography, in varying degrees. Every attempt is a snapshot, a snapshot of the state of reality, and our relationship with technology. After all, what I do day after day is to point and frame... to show. 

Everything seems to have been made by and for its environment, and technology is no exception. 

Technology, in my opinion, is an intrinsic part of nature (like everything else). 

I don't see a contradiction, rather a continuity. 

I'm not talking about design, I'm talking about implacable reality. I sometimes ask myself these questions: at the very beginning, in the first millisecond of the big bang, were the concepts of life and intelligence already inscribed in the premises of the first molecules? Was technology already included? 

The complexity of a server farm, with its CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, hard disks, the cables that connect them, the software that inhabits them, the electricity that feeds them, is no match for trees / branches / roots / mushrooms / blobs / fauna / water / air / light / photons / earth / worms / insects / microbes / forest. 

I've always found the use of the term "dehumanized" to describe technology astounding. All machines, every computer, drones, server farms, particle colliders, are in fact everything that is human. 

Nothing could be more so. 

It's also because this is now the way we see. We now only look at a landscape through the screen of our phone. Even when it is right in front of us, especially when it is right in front of us. 

The contemporary way of looking at reality is through the cathode-ray. Everything is filtered and reworked. 

I prefer not to pass judgment. 

My artistic heritage is a thread woven through time. Each work is a link in this chain. I hope my work will inspire, question and perhaps even amaze a few future generations, at least one or two. Art is a universal language, and I'm honoured to be able to contribute to it, to be able to practice it every day of my life. 

Our thoughts, our discoveries, our works of art, are the links we weave between reality and the human community, between what exists and ourselves. 

I believe that our thoughts, our quest for knowledge, our intrinsic curiosity, bring us closer to the world and the universe. We have to stop extracting ourselves from the rest and thinking of ourselves as being on top, in a category of our own. 

It is from this awakened interweaving that we can become aware of our place, of where we are, and of what is. 

Everything, living and non-living, every detail, every object or entity, is similar to us; everything was made by and for the cosmos, and nature. Everything is adapted to it, in its own way, with its own particularities. 

To be interested in the world, in things, animate or not, is to take news of our fellow human beings, of our family. 

So, thanks to this candidacy, I feel lucky, and will continue to dance with particles, weave constellations, reflect on the beauty of the world and share it with those who cross my path.

Over the 54-year span of my art practice, I have explored multiple modes of documentary photography in the context of contemporary art. I continue to question the theoretical and material understanding of the category through my critical writing and my subjectivity-inflected documentary projects. 

Interior architecture functions in my photographs as the material expression of conscious and unconscious human intent and was the starting point for the Milton-Park series (1970-1973), the Convents series (1990-1998), and High School series (1993-1998). The photographs of rooms are centered in interior light and space and by extension interiority. In the Canadian Centre for Architecture series (1986-1987), the shape of space and light create the image structure and expressive force of the photographs. Paradoxically, human absence suggests presence. Past and future use by individuals is palpable. 

The documentary mode of “direct response to subject”, which highlights the indexical nature of photography, characterizes the b&w Windows I series (1976-1980), the CCA series, and the colour Windows II series (2000-2022). These are my most “realist" photographs, with the almost imperceptible alteration of reality by the photographer’s imagination, an abstraction that the passage of time makes more evident. Walker Evans’ phrase “documentary style” describes photographs which are highly constructed to have the “look” of neutrality, everydayness, and “stylelessness”. 

Lightly-staged documentary is the approach found in the Convents series, the High Schools series, and the Milton-Park environmental portraits. Sometimes I photographed individuals in relation to a culturally identifiable context; sometimes I framed an interior as a rectilinear stage set against which I posed figures in an arrested choreography. These series show my fascination with discovering private mysteries which are hidden behind the public exterior of buildings. 

Childhood is the theme I initiated with my early-career Cencic Sisters series (1974-1976), and continued with my recent late-career Siblings and Singles series (2008-2022). These posed outdoor portraits layer the on-location documentary and the staged approaches. Backgrounds show the exterior domestic setting of each child, while the exchange between subject and photographer involves conversation. The children collaborate in the challenge of holding still within the frame of my arranged camera-on-tripod compositions and for the long duration of my film exposures. I place the camera at eye level of the children to give them equal footing within the space of the photograph. They gaze directly at you, the viewer. 

My practice has been engaged with feminism from 1970-1973 when I photographed the Ste-Famille Women’s Centre and the Ste-Famille Women’s Coop with activist political intent. I was a founding member of Powerhouse/La Centrale Gallery in 1973. Through all my following photographic projects I attempt to place my female perception of lived experience in a wider social and cultural context, finding inspiration from everyday domestic situations. Communities of girls and women have inspired two projects: the family of six Cencic Sisters, my next door neighbours; and Quebec religious orders in the Convents series.

When I arrived in Sackville, New Brunswick in 1977, I arrived at a place that would sustain my artistic voice for over four decades. I find inspiration in the natural history, the landscape, and the architecture of the Maritimes. The local, the mundane, and the uncelebrated. I am also interested in permanence and change. The effects of human activity and time on and in the natural world. The celebration of beauty. Largely my technique has been devoted to a variety of large format cameras. Ranging from 7x17” to 10x12” – early on I settled into 7x17” as a format that suited my vision in interpreting the landscape working in both black and white and colour. Making prints the same size as the image viewed on a ground glass (contact printing) serves to preserve that ‘inner eye’ conceptualization of the image.

It is only since the turn of the century that digital technology permitted affordable quality enlargements of selected images— when scale is integral to the artistic intent. Parallel to my photographic pursuits, I maintain a letter-press shop as part of my studio practice. I have published a number of collaborative books with writers who share a love for a chosen subject under my imprint the Anchorage Press. These books— Arborealis and Ironworks with Peter Sanger, Silver Ghost; Icarus, Falling of Birds, Ova Aves, & From Rural Roots with Harry Thurston, honour integral design with the contents and the highest quality reproduction of my photographs. They serve as a democratic way of dissemination of creative ideas.

New work includes exploring a collection of hand tools left behind after a major fire in a local 1900’s sand-casting foundry and the architectural conundrum of Saint John, New Brunswick. In press currently is of a feather, a new book collaboration with poet Harry Thurston, that celebrates through photography and poetry the work of my late partner, ornithologist Gay Hansen and the beauty found in the plumage of birds