Tag: David Campany

Visit—A Handful of Dust

On a visit to Toronto, I had the opportunity yesterday to visit an interesting exhibit at the Ryerson Image Centre. Curated by David Campany, A Handful of Dust: From the Cosmic to the Domestic brings together work from a broad range of artists (Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Jeff Wall, Walker Evans, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Mona Kuhn and others), all connected thematically with dust. Campany has also published a book of the same name as a catalogue and further exploration of the theme.

The pieces, mostly photographs but with one or two paintings and a couple of video installations, seem to have been selected by Campany as conceptual responses to a photograph by Man Ray (Dust Breeding, 1920) of a piece by Marcel Duchamp. The monochrome photograph looks like it may be an aerial shot of a wasted landscape, but it is hard to get a sense of scale because of the lack of reference points and the uniformity of tone and colour. All the viewer has to go by is line, form and texture. In fact, the photograph depicts a glass plate that had collected a thick layer of dust while lying on the floor of Duchamp’s studio. Viewers are informed that the two artists may not have agreed who was ultimately responsible for the work and later agreed to share credit.

Robert Burley – Implosions of Buildings 65 and 69, Kodak Park, Rochester, NY [#1], October 6, 2007

The selected images are set in two rooms and, apart from a few dust-related quotations painted on the gallery walls, visitors are largely left to derive their own meanings from the display (which I welcomed). The sources of the dust vary—sand, destroyed buildings, human beings—but the overall message is one of human impermanence and mortality: sand covers everything in its path, the built environment doesn’t last forever, humans shed skin and eventually shed their lives.

At the same time, the dust that gathers can both conceal and reveal. It can cover tracks but it can also heighten our ability to see texture and form.

Nick Waplington – from the series Patriarch’s Wardrobe, 2010

I went to the exhibit because I have often appreciated the shows that the Ryerson Image Centre hosts, although I have to admit that I was a bit doubtful because of the subject matter. In the end, I was won over and came away thinking that it amounted to an excellent meditation on aspects of the human condition. The images on display also served to show the power of abstraction and the role of imagination in interpreting  what appears in front of us. In short, the show works.

A side benefit of the visit to the Ryerson Image Centre was a chance to see Extending the Frame: 40 Years of Gallery TPW. The show is a history of the founding and evolution of the Toronto Photographers Workshop (TPW), a group which has worked diligently to advance photography as an art form and has involved such people as Edward Burtynsky, Robert Burley, and the duo of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge. It was fascinating to see how the dedication of a relatively small number of people has had such an impact on the direction of photography and art more generally in Canada.

A1—Two Sides of the Story

Most people who give the issue more than a moment’s thought realize that a two-dimensional image does not give us direct access to three-dimensional “reality.” But since a camera contains a light-sensitive surface that is exposed for a specified period, the artifice of an image extends to include a fourth dimension: an often unquestioned perception of time. A camera is a time machine, after all.

A photographer may just have two fundamental controls: “where I stand and when I press the button” (Hurn and Jay, 1997: 25). But although David Hurn is probably being facetious about how simple image-making is, he might have usefully added that another part of the subjectivity the photographer brings to the image is how long to press the button.

We have become very used to photographs freezing time faster than sight allows, but the camera is just as capable of creating exposures that are much longer than what the eye can register. Japanese photographer Hirhoshi Sugimoto has explored this with his series of long-exposures in movie theatres to the point of information overload: his photographic record shows screens that are grossly over-exposed and therefore blank. And Alexey Titarenko’s City of Shadows series on St. Petersburg uses long exposures to capture the blurred movement of people in a dreary black-and-white cityscape (Titarenko and Tchmyreva, 2001). While Titarenko’s shutter is open, crowds leave vapour trails and begin to fade.

David Campany suggests that still images not only prompt our memories but shape how we understand the phenomenon of memory itself: “In popular consciousness (as opposed to popular unconsciousness) the still image continues to be thought of as being more memorable than those that move” (Campany, 2003).

None of the images I have prepared for this assignment is any less “true” than the photographs of frozen motion that we have become used to. In fact, both pictures in each set are artificial and neither reproduces what our eyes see. Both are ‘still’ images, but one is less still and hints at how quickly perception and memory fade.

We have simply become used to the photographic convention of stillness. But it is just one side of the story.

References

Campany, D. “Safety in Numbness: Some remarks on the problems of ‘Late Photography’’’ (2003) At: https://davidcampany.com/safety-in-numbness/ (Accessed on 14 July 2019)

Hurn, D. and Jay, B. (1997) On being a photographer: a practical guide. Portland, Oregon: Lenswork Publishing.

Theaters — Hiroshi Sugimoto (s.d.) At: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-7 (Accessed on 14 July 2019)

Titarenko, A. and Tchmyreva, I. (2001) City of shadows. St. Petersburg, Russia: APT Tema.