"While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph." Lewis Hine's comment from the depth of the film era seems quaint in the age of Photoshop, when photos can indeed be made to tell polished untruths. Hine's larger point, amplified later by Richard Avedon, was that the photographer's choice of what to show is not so much the truth as an opinion, or an attempt at persuasion.
Photography's relationship with the real is the overall theme of Montreal's Momenta: Biennale de l'Image, the latest edition of what used to be called Le Mois de la Photo. This expansive yet relatively compact festival features 38 artists from 17 countries in 20 venues, anchored at Galerie de l'UQAM and VOX, Centre de l'image contemporaine.
Photography in its projected form is a prime public art in Montreal, and often a monumental one. It is less clear how devoted the city is to photography as an interior gallery art.
Guest curator Ami Burak's inquisitive subtitle, What Does the Image Stand For?, suggests a photo's subject may not be contained within the frame. Many of the images in this year's festival are markers that point toward unseen realities.
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Mom Making an Image of Me, from The Notion of Family series, 2008.
Courtesy of Michel Rein and Gavin Brown’s enterprise
Documenting things is an old photographic function, but even those who performed it in Victorian times also taught their cameras to lie. Montreal photographer William Notman made his reputation with images of the Victoria Bridge's construction in 1860, but he also staged scenes in his studio of people pretending to skate or toboggan on make-believe ice and snow.
Momenta includes old-style documentary work such as J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere's photos of elaborate Nigerian hairstyles, at VOX. Ojeikere has made about 1,000 standardized coiffure images over the past four decades, which should make social archivists very happy.
Yto Barrada's Hand-Me-Downs, at Galérie de l'UQAM, also looks documentary, in its use of scenes from a Moroccan database of home movies from the 1950s and 60s. But Barrada's title is already an opinion, hinting that the prosperous Moroccans seen golfing and wearing European-style clothing were performing a hand-me-down colonial culture.
Barrada goes further by overlaying her hand-me-down footage with narrated family tales that are mostly dark and possibly unreliable. Where Ojeikere says, essentially, "this is what I saw," Barrada is saying, "this is what somebody saw, along with things I may have made up." The more you watch and listen, the greater the slippage between presentation and reality.
Sara Cwynar’s Display Stand, No. 66, 2014.
Courtesy of Cooper Cole
Terrance Houle, at VOX, points outside the frame by photographing himself shopping for supermarket produce in his ceremonial Kainai First Nation regalia. The image is a tragicomic confrontation between Indigenous identity and the industrialized agriculture that alienates us all from nature. In a similar vein, Nadia Myre's Scar shows a blown-up image of beadwork in which a black scar arches across a white ground. The link with the physical and emotional scarring of Indigenous women in colonial society makes itself felt in a single image.
Sometimes, however, the unseen subject remains hidden. A note attached to Risa Horowitz's photos of plants and the night sky associates the images with the ravages of colonialism on the land, but being told what the artist was thinking and feeling is not the same as being prompted by the work to have similar thoughts and feelings.
Pascal Grandmaison's projections of the guts of an Éclair NPR film camera could pass for mere machine-age nostalgia unless you know that the Éclair was a key tool in Quebec's development of cinéma vérité and feature film. With that in mind, Grandmaison's imagery takes on nationalist resonance, and perhaps alludes to the melding of fact and fiction in the work of Éclair devotees such as Michel Brault.
Portraiture at Momenta includes two sets of work in which self and simulation go together. Samuel Fosso's self-portraits show him in the guise of black heroes such as Martin Luther King and Angela Davis, while Luis Arturo Aguirre's photos of Mexican transvestites contrast the subjects' artfully feminized presentation above the neck with the lean masculinity of their nude torsos.
Seung Woo Back’s Utopia, from the Utopia series, 2008.
Courtesy of Gana Art Gallery
Momenta executive director Audrey Genois says the festival is a biennale with an international focus and strong local roots. That formula sounds rather like the one put forward by the Biennale de Montréal, the much larger art festival that flamed out last winter after its second edition. But the latter event intensified very fast and was by most accounts overcentralized and poorly run. Some participants, including guest curator Philippe Pirotte, are still awaiting payment.
Momenta has been alive in some form for nearly 30 years, and although this edition is bigger than the previous, it seems scaled to last. The Biennale de Montréal never did get its final catalogue together; Momenta's handsomely produced accompanying book was in hand before Thursday's first vernissages.
Momenta: Biennale de l'Image continues at various Montreal locations through Oct. 15.