Photography used to be mostly about the photograph. Today, “thanks” to Conceptual aesthetics, the de-defining of art and, most importantly, the proliferation of digital technologies, photography spans a dizzying variety of processes and results, forms and sensations. The image world is now so ubiquitous, cluttered and close that, for some, it means nothing less than the greatest, most radically democratic photographic era ever. Others, by contrast, believe we’ve crossed into some murky realm called the “post-photographic,” where the virtual and the material, shadow and substance commingle and confuse.
One institution that, over the last eight years, has pretty consistently provided a valuable snapshot (to use a decidedly 20th-century term) of the diversity of contemporary photography is Canada’s AIMIA/AGO Photography Prize. Originally called the Grange Prize, the annual award has become famous for its international reach, the size of its purse (the winner gets $50,000, each of three runners-up $5,000, plus there are residency and scholarship programs) and its reliance on public vote to determine the winner (after, that is, panels of photography mavens have chosen a long list of 20-plus candidates, then, from that, four finalists). For a few months prior to the vote deadline, work by each finalist is exhibited “in the flesh” at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and online at AimiaAGOPhotographyPrize.com.
This year’s edition is pretty much true to the historic form of previous AIMIA/AGO outings. There’s a photographer very much in the humanistic documentary tradition of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange (Chicago’s Dave Jordano, 67). Another with an interest in serial imagery, captured on colour film via analog camera and precisely printed by hand in a dark room (Berlin’s Annette Kelm, 40). One who calls his output “durational photography” – short, non-narrative videos of quotidian objects (a garbage bag, a blob of black goo, the bloom of a flower) that flit on the liminal boundary between motion and stasis (Calgary-born, Los Angeles-based Owen Kydd, 40). And the fourth, Germany’s Hito Steyerl, 49, whose complicated contribution, 2013’s How Not to Be Seen, might best be described as a combination architectural environmental and video essay.
With a doctorate in philosophy from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, Steyerl has become something of an international art star in the past 10 years. That stature was affirmed again this spring at the Venice Biennale with the rapturous reception accorded Factory of the Sun, an immersive video/game installation in the basement of the German Pavilion. Not a few attendees, seated in beach chairs, described the experience as “great fun,” akin to “being inside the set of Tron.” How Not to Be Seen is unlikely to prompt such expressions of pleasure. Yes, its 14-minute, four-part digital video, narrated by a plummy English robo-voice, is both brainy parody of the instructional video and sinister meditation on erasure and visibility in our high-surveillance age. But finally, even with a “guest appearance” by The Three Degrees earworming the visitor with When Will I See You Again, it’s as arid as the southern California desert where Steyerl shot much of the work.
Far more accessible is the Jordano portion of the exhibition. It consists of 11 colour portraits, culled from a series the former commercial photographer has been working on for the past five years titled Detroit – Unbroken Down. The pictures, mostly of poor African-Americans and their milieux, are direct, sincere and respectful. Easy to admire, in other words, but 60 years after Edward Steichen’s famous Family of Man show, the familiarity of their rhetoric makes them hard to love or get excited about.
Annette Kelm’s 15 chromogenic prints are distinguished by their careful composition, clarity of presentation and intriguing juxtapositions. Four of the photos here, for instance, feature a handful of small, two-colour, arc-shaped magnets and a smattering of tulips positioned on a ground of black and white stripes in tight, vibrating proximity. The effect is a pleasant collision of the floral photography of Robert Mapplethorpe with a Bridget Riley Op-art canvas. Kelm also demonstrates a wry sense of humour: A photo of a humble acorn has all the dignity and elegance of an advertisement for a Prada handbag; Happy Chair/Van Gogh depicts a battered, unstable wicker chair, the kind Vincent painted in Arles in the late 1880s, three of its four legs mounted on blocks emblazoned with the smiley face.
Back in the old analog days, if you wanted to shoot a movie in your backyard, you had to use a home-movie camera; if you wanted to take a photograph, you used a still camera. Today digital cameras are capable of shooting both videos and stills. Owen Kydd has been messing around in this twilight zone of action and depiction for several years, most famously by creating square or rectangular display units, each featuring a commonplace object or objects framed in the unit but subjected to discreet movement for several minutes, and played as a looped video. In effect, it’s a subversion of two ideas – that of the photograph being a frozen, privileged slice of time and that of film (video) being inherently narrative or cinematic.
Several recently created installations in the photo-as-video/video-as-photo vein are currently hanging in the AIMIA/AGO space, each capable of putting the viewer in that zone of oceanic feeling. What’s perhaps more interesting is Jordy/Moth. It’s a hybrid, Jordy being a large black-and-white still photograph of a hooded, downcast male, the image stuck directly to the wall without benefit of glass, matting or frame, while Moth is just that – a looped image of a flapping blue moth in a video display unit, positioned on the left of Jordy.
If Jordy reminds you of something by the dean of the so-called Vancouver School of Photography, Jeff Wall, (albeit minus Wall’s signature light box and colour imagery), you’re not wrong. Kydd was Wall’s studio assistant for several years and he unabashedly acknowledges Jordy as an “homage” to his former employer. (The show includes two other large, loose salutes to Wall’s cinematographic tableaux, one titled The Boss, the other Destiny and Gabriel, both lensed earlier this year.) Kydd tells me the AIMIA/AGO exhibition represents a “break point” in his practice. He says he’s still planning to work in video, “but in a more installation or sculptural form.”
Works by the four 2015 AIMIA/AGO Photography Prize finalists are on view at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario through Jan. 3. The works can also be found online at AimiaAGOPhotographyPrize.com. Visitors can vote for the winner until Nov. 29, in person at the AGO or online. The winner will be named Dec. 1.