North of Ob River, Sebastiao Salgado
CONTACT 2013
Last week photo club members Dave Haggarty, Jacques Mailloux and I spent 4 days in Toronto looking at 50 or so of the 170 exhibitions in this year’s Contact Photography Festival. It runs through May but many shows continue into June and some last longer.
For the complete lineup of shows, visit: scotiabankcontactphoto.com. Almost all the venues are free entry (if you can find parking!) and most have paper copies of the map and the complete catalogue available free of charge. There are also lots of opening receptions, free lectures, workshops and other special events.
Contact is huge, with venues all over the city, with a broad theme (“Field of Vision”) and with over 100 “open” exhibitions — so, naturally, quality of work and styles vary greatly. We have been visiting for over a decade now and this year, as usual, we found some shows totally absorbing, some a total waste of time, and most somewhere in between but with at least one or two stimulating images. I’m sure we missed some good shows, but that’s inevitable.
The marquee exhibition by Sebastiao Salgado at the ROM was spectacular and massive – 240 large prints. This one isn’t free, but definitely worth the Museum’s price of admission. If you have limited time, you can see a good selection of his prints free of charge at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery on King St. W. – and you’ll get an idea of his prices!
Queen Street West is always worth a visit. Some highlights for me this year were Danny Lyon’s biker B&W prints at the Stephen Bulger Gallery, large format Toronto historic buildings at the Twist Gallery, and two shows at the Gladstone Hotel: “In the Playroom” series by Ottawa’s Jonathan Hobin, and portraits of Canadians from the archives of Macleans Magazine.
The Distillery District usually has 5-10 shows and is home to Picto as well as Jane Corkin, Canada’s premiere photography gallery. My personal favourite is Proof Studio Gallery, a small one run by a couple – John Drajewicz and Sheila Jonah – who make beautiful landscape colour prints.
Scattered across the rest of the city we also found the following of interest:
Filmmaker Jerry Schatzberg’s large B&W portraits of 60’s era media stars at the Nikola Rukaj Gallery up on Eglinton West (Dylan, the Rolling Stones in Drag, Jane Fonda)
In centretown the new Ryerson Image Centre is worth a look, as is Chris Marker’s “Memory of a Certain Time” exhibition at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Another area generally worth visiting is the Junction – no parking problems here, and about 15 shows in a 3 block stretch of Dundas West.
Bill Woodley, 21 May 2013
Jerry Schatzberg Photography from the 1950’s – 60’s
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