Adrian Blackwell

Adrian Blackwell Evicted May 1, 2000 (9 Hanna Avenue) Gord Anderson's Studio 2000

In 2000, Adrian Blackwell documented a series of studios at 9 Hanna Avenue, just before everyone was evicted.  9 Hanna had once been a munitions factory: huge steel-mullioned industrial windows, inexpensive, voluminous.  As with all studio buildings, they happen only when there isn't a more lucrative use for the building, a day that inevitably comes along, in this case the first of May, 2000.  Blackwell's thirteen Cibachrome contacts (20" x 24") were printed from the film lining a pinhole camera which was fixed to the ceiling of each studio.  Each camera was scaled to the proportions of the room below, and lined with film on the four sides and back of the box, thus recording the entire space.  

They are up right now at EyeLevel, an exhibition at Pith Gallery in Calgary.  One sees a row of fat cruciforms, filled with such warm complexity that they glow like icons.  Because pinhole camera exposures can be long, people often appear to be drifting through the spaces photographed as if they were phantoms, which of course, shortly after the photo and then the eviction, they became.  

The pinhole camera is the lowest of photographic technology.  Once the image is captured, much can be done with it at increasingly sophisticated levels, but the original light on film is photography at its very essence.

When I registered with Corbis to use a photograph of the Ho Chi Minh Trail after a US bombing raid for the last issue of On Site, they sent a little gift: plans for a pinhole camera you download, cut out and fold together.  Now that everyone has a digital camera, there is a rise in the use of the pinhole camera.  Very curious.

Stephen Gill

Stephen Gill. A Street in Hackney. photograph.With the ubiquity of digital cameras that take fool-proof images, and lots of them, it is interesting to see how many photographers persist in using film, but are doing something else with it. 
Just as photography originally freed the making of images in paint from a kind of graphic fidelity, so too does the digital camera free photography from the faithful recording of what the eye supposedly sees. The speed and clarity of digital imagery allows film photography to become something other than its resolution and depth of field.
Stephen Gill puts things found on the street, where he took this photograph, into the camera as he loads his film.  Although he can control what is aligned in the viewfinder and what is sitting on the film, he has little control over how the image turns out.  It is something like catching things out of the corner of your eye as well as what the eye is taking in straight ahead. 
I suppose he also controls which images he chooses to show – this one is particularly beautiful: a boring terrace in Hackney made mysterious somewhere deep in the camera.

Jaclyn Shoub

Jaclyn Shoub. At This Point in Time. 2004Jaclyn Shoub works with large photographs, removing information in a process of distillation.  They are highly painterly as the removal of much of the photograph is done with a brush and solvent: one knows one is looking at a photograph, but so much content is leached from the surface that these landscapes become magical.  Shoub removes everything about the landscape except for the marks of human occupation which appear small and fragile.

For On Site 23: small things, we have been sent a narrative, a short story written in notes, as the beginning of an architectural process.  This narrative, which you will read when 23 is published in May, also has a delicacy – it describes the process of removing a building from public perception, so that the architecture is everything but the building. 

Both these two works are the opposite of abstraction, where one thinks of an essence and then displays that essence.  These start with the large and complex environment, urban or rural, and remove everything but a thin line of meaning.  What we are looking at is almost incidental to the fullness of life and world but, incidental or not, is extremely important to us.

National Air Photo Library

Spruce Cliff, Calgary 1951

Before Google's satellite, we had the National Air Photo Library.  It started after WWI with Royal Flying Corps pilots at loose ends in postwar society who were put to work photographing Canada from the air.  After WWII the program was boosted by returning RCAF pilots.  Photos were taken at a specific height at measured intervals with two cameras producing stereo images. 

The University of Calgary map library has a complete set – probably most university libraries do. There are volumes of maps with the flight paths charted on them, with thousands and thousands of photos in box files according to date and path.  You look at them through stereo lenses set on a little stand.  They are absolutely fascinating.  Sure, Google Earth can do it all, but these are a photographic record over a century, made every few years. There is of course, a website for the NAPL, but the paraphernalia is missing.

I've used these photos in research.  I love their glossy surface, I love the fact that it started as a make work project for young RCAF pilots, I love the stereoscope nature of the project: buildings leap up off the surface of the photo.  And you can take them out of the library and scan them yourself.  It's amazing.  They did the whole country. 

Spruce Cliff, Calgary 1953

The two photos here (click on them to enlarge) show the century-long process of Calgary moving into farmland, quarter-section by quarter-section.  The top left hand corner shows Spruce Cliff, an escarpment plateau over the Bow River, with the CPR main line at its foot.  It had been subdivided in the 1900s but almost all the lots reverted to the City during the depression through tax default.  A golf course had been made in the 1920s, but there hadn't been much development in Calgary from the 1920s to the late 1940s.  Then it exploded.  In 1951 you can see the edge of town, the golf course and a farm.  In 1953, the farm is a building site for Spruce Cliff Apartments, a Corbusian array of four-storey blocks that had roof nurseries and laundries and were, briefly, a very good place to live.  Spruce Cliff was a high-modern model that didn't take off here.  It still stands, but in a much altered state.  Which I won't show you. 

Nicole Dextras

Nicole Dextras. Yucca Prom Dress.

Nicole Dextras is a Vancouver artist who works with ephemeral materials: plants, water, ice, names, myths, clothing destined to last and yet never to be worn again.  It is her work, Toronto Island 2007, on the cover of On Site 20: museums and archives.  It shows a delicate organza skirt and a black velvet jacket caught, frozen in the ice, all the immanent life in clothing pinned the way that iridescent beetles are pinned in natural history museum specimen trays. 

Dextras has contributed several articles to On Site, beginning with 'Belonging.  Sous le pont', an extended series of installations under Burrard Bridge that crossed First Nations narratives with blackberry vines, willow branches, Mountain Ash berries woven and tied into fragile, but flexible structures (On Site 18: culture).

On Site 21: weather showed work she'd done in Dawson City in the Yukon, constructing moulds for large free-standing ice letters.  What does one write with 10'-high letters in ice?  Dextras wrote L E G A C Y .  She wrote names: Cléophase, Elphese, Gédéon – noms a coucher dehors.  The past  is the subject, the medium is the weather, the tools are un-constructed materials at hand.

If Dextras' winter material at hand is ice, her summer material is plants. Still ephemeral, still delineating the structures of other, past lives.  I just find this work so beautiful, the antithesis of the world of war On Site has been engaged with now for months and months.  War does grind one down.  Nicole Dextras's work does lift one up. 

Nicole Dextras. Sunday Bestwww.nicoledextras.com

Donald Weber

Donald Weber. WHITE NIGHTS. Russia After the Gulag

In October the Canada Council announced that Donald Weber had won the 2009 Duke and Duchess of York prize in photography.
In the late 1990s Donald Weber worked with Rem Koolhaas' OMA and with Kongats Architects, Toronto on a project that won a Governor-General's award, but clearly photography is his medium as he has a long list of awards, citations and exhibitions.  His first book, Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl came out in 2008 and he appears to live in Moscow, Kiev and Toronto.
With a recent Guggenheim Fellowship and the Canada Council grant he is writing a book about life in Russia, described on his website as 'the curse of power and the wounds it inflicts on those who don't have it.  It's the 18th Century with jets flying overhead'.

Weber's project is enormous: enormous iniquities in an enormous continent.  THE LAST THING THEY SAW. Soviet Execution Sites is a suite of photographs that documents 'the conversion of the idea of public space and private refuge into a charnel house, from which no escape is possible'.  From 1936 the NKVD project cleansed Georgians, Poles, Ukrainians and suspect intelligentsia deported to death camps.  The photographs of the sites - bits of forest, fields, skies through winter tree branches, houses which had been no refuge, windows that witnessed these terrible acts. 
BASTARD EDEN. Our Chernobyl series shows a territory - the Exclusion Zone, not abandoned but rather occupied by a society that has chosen this area because it has returned to pre-modern life, because modern life is afraid to live in the site of a nuclear accident.  These are landscapes and people that look uncannily like northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, without big shiny pick-ups able to drive to a Wal-Mart on the horizon.

Weber's photographs are seductive, especially WHITE NIGHTS. Russia after the Gulag: inky, velvety interiors, snow blown landscapes, wind blown trees, a litter of leaves.  What makes romance impossible are the titles and the opening texts that accompany each suite of photographs.  These are startling, setting up the photos but not actually preparing one for their impact. Beauty is not innocent here.  It is desperate, resigned beauty: mothers desperate, sons resigned.

His questions are simple: for Chernobyl, what is life in a post-nuclear world? In The Lost War. The Russian-Georgian Conflict in South Ossetia, something that for most of us was brief news headlines as the glamourous Beijing Olympics filled our television screens, Weber's eye is absolutely unflinching.  And it wasn't a small tempest; clearly it was war, as always.  It is always war.

Donald Weber. THE LOST WAR. The Russian-Georgian Conflict in South Ossetia

Tim Atherton

Prince Albert, SaskatchewanTim Atherton has contributed two photo-essays to On Site in the past: Edmonton's back lanes and fences in On Site 18: culture, and Prince Albert in On Site 19: streets.  He documents the small and insignificant which gain terrific power simply by being noticed and legitimised through collection.  The camera extricates its subject from the anonymity conferred on the ordinary.

The next issue of On Site will look at small things: micro-urbanism for example, rather than the 'master' plan, houses of less than 500 square feet. It has been a sobering year for hubris and grand designs; perhaps it is time to relearn how to cut our coat to fit the cloth.  Examples from the past abound: Prince Albert for example, overlooked because development pressure on it has been slight - new building happens on the highway leaving the downtown (above) intact.  This fine little building was, once, ordinary fabric with limited ambitions.  Did it ever need to be more? 

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Tim Atherton's blog is a lovely thing: photography and the things that influence it in the widest sense.  His entry on Sigfried Sasoon for Remembrance Day shows a fragment of Sasoon's Soldier's Declaration, his handwriting all defiant and firm.  Earlier on Atherton has a collection of photos taken at the Somme which as he points out would have been illegal if not suicidal.  A bomb explodes in front of the camera, razor wire photographed looks like some exotic cactus in sepia. 

Anyway, Tim Atherton doesn't send On Site anything anymore as his energy goes into this blog, which is actually a magazine in itself.  This raises a question: do we need magazines still? 

Hard Rain Project

Mark Edwards' Hard Rain project consists of drastic photos of environmental problems, each captioned with a line from Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's A'Gonna Fall.  The project is shown in outside displays, on temporary hoardings, pinned to railings – in the public domain.  The Hard Rain project has already been shown in 50 cities around the world, none in Canada however.  Dylan's Hard Rain is made, here, to anticipate today's accelerating disasters. For example, 'Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world' underlines a tsunami image.  This might seem obvious except that Dylan's 1962 lyrics were generally thought to refer to Cold War nuclear annihilation.  This reinscription of the lyrics by way of images, plus the tune itself making one inevitably sing the captions, prevents the passive gaze: the tune leaps into the brain, with a kind of synaesthesia the photos rewrite the lyric.  Each line links a contemporary fact – deforestation in Haiti perhaps, with the global inevitablility of disaster.  The line brings it home.