Toronto's Contact Photography Festival

A DIY study visit: visiting Toronto’s Contact Photography Festival by OCA student Alan Bulley.

As a very new OCA student in Canada, I sometimes find myself a little envious of the reports I read of study tours that take place regularly in the UK. I chose to study with OCA because of the flexibility that online courses give me, but the distance in “distance education” can have its downside, too. Rather than burn energy on what I don’t have, though, I’ve decided to take better advantage of my location in North America. I live in Canada’s National Capital Region within driving distance of several major population centres, each with a rich offering of galleries and museums: Ottawa (30 minutes), Montreal (2 hours), Toronto (4 hours) and New York (8 hours or 75 minutes by air).
With that perspective I decided that it was time for a family weekend in Toronto that would let me visit the Contact Photography Festival. Running for the full month of May for the last 20 years, the festival is a vast mix of indoor and outdoor exhibits showing work by the famous and the not-so-famous. Extensive corporate funding has its perks—most of the exhibits are free, as is the hefty festival catalogue—but visitors will want to invest in a day pass from the Toronto Transit Commission to reach the far-flung venues: visiting exhibits in Arles is considerably easier!
Knowing that I couldn’t possibly cover everything in one day (or even in a week), I opted to see a selection of the Primary Exhibitions…

Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s
Of all the exhibits I visited, this was the one I most wanted to see. With images from Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Danny Lyon, Nan Goldin, Gordon Parks and Robert Frank, the Art Gallery of Ontario offered a chance to see quality prints by leading American documentary photographers of a previous generation. It didn’t disappoint and it helped put the lie to the stereotypical view of the 1950s as a decade blissfully asleep in post-war ease. The undercurrents of social questioning and unrest that flowered in the late 1960s and early 1970s clearly had earlier roots, if we had eyes to see what “outsiders” were describing.
Thomas Ruff: Object Relations
I was not at all familiar with Ruff’s work, so this was an excellent opportunity to see examples drawn from five of the German photographer’s series. While he may be well known for his portraiture, most of the items on display were manipulations of found images: pictures of industrial machinery (Maschinen), magazines (Zeitungsfotos) and press photos (press++). Each of the manipulations spoke of a deep love for photographic media and I thought his large-format images of stars (Sterne) and blue-toned recreated negatives (Negative) were particularly beautiful.


Public Exposures: the Art-Activism of Condé + Beveridge (1976–2016)
The artistic partnership of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge has produced a significant body of work over the years, constructing complex photographic images that advocate on behalf of collectives against private and corporate interests. There is no dispassionate observation here—the two fly their commitments proudly and without subtlety.
Rodney Graham: Jack of All Trades
In this series, Canadian artist Graham builds detailed installations as backdrops for fanciful self-portraits. One moment he is a 1930s-era shopkeeper, the next he is a cameraman shooting a movie in period costume at Versailles. Later, he is in a studio sculpting abstract figures with pipe cleaners. The images show a man at work in a setting he has created for himself and hint at artifice and an underlying unreality. I found the images cleverly done but not very compelling: once seen, I couldn’t imagine wanting to return to them.
Counterparts: Photography through the Lens of Toronto Collections
A benefit of this eclectic exhibit at the University of Toronto’s Art Museum, featuring more than 100 images from a score of collections, was to show how complex the work of mounting an exhibition can be. I was fortunate enough to be present for a tour guided by curator Jessica Bradley who explained her selections that had one thing in common: all images were held by individuals and galleries in the Toronto area. An exhibit with such a wide sweep compels the viewer to identify points of commonality and difference, and to see the impact of time on technique, subject matter and approach.

Cutline: the Photography Archives of The Globe and Mail
It may have been easy to overlook the artistry involved in creating images for the newspaper world when pictures were printed one day and discarded the next. The move to online journalism has turned that scenario on its head—we are now inundated with images that may never disappear. The exhibit on the old press floor of the newspaper demonstrated clearly that taking a shot was just the beginning of a process of editing, titling (the “cutline”), printing, cropping and hand-outlining news images for reproduction. It is welcome news that this large Canadian daily is digitizing and transferring the best of its photographic archive to the Canadian Photography Institute at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.