© Jesse Louttit - Place to Call Home

I was recently in Portland, Oregon to attend the Photolucida Portfolio Reviews. Portland is an absolutely fantastic city that reminds me of my hometown, Montréal. Perfectly walkable, one can saunter around its European-feeling streets, which are full of life and culture and peppered with amazing and affordable restaurant options. Regardless of whether one would feel a kinship with this city, any photographer will feel at home there, especially during Portland’s Photo Month.

At these large international events, the first question one tends to ask another photographer upon meeting them is “where are you from?” I have always been interested in notions of locale, so for me this question is more than just small talk. I am really interested to know where people come from, and how that may play out in their work. It is also no coincidence that I tend to befriend other Canadians, as though we should be sticking together in solidarity. I suppose it is a way of feeling at home away from home.

© Jesse Louttit - Place to Call Home

I met photographer Jesse Louttit while passing through security during my airport connection in Toronto. On noticing my portfolio box going through the X-ray, Jesse engaged me in conversation and we bonded as we ran to catch our flight. The next day, I was introduced to Louttit’s work during the Portfolio Walk at the Portland Art Museum, and was immediately impressed by his new series Place to call home.

Place to call home is a series of large format landscape photographs taken on Toronto Island. Having moved to Toronto from Vancouver just over two years ago, Louttit began taking excursions from the city to the island as a way of re-connecting with a landscape that he had left behind. The water, lushness of greenery, and the subtle inhabitation of the environment figure throughout the series, however with this work Louttit shares not only the depiction of a site but also an experience of place.

I am reminded of Simon Schama’s seminal book Landscape and Memory in which Schama argues that landscape cannot be free of culture, and that as viewers we project our own mythologies onto perceptions of nature. Louttit may have fled from the concrete jungle of Toronto in search of a natural solace, yet he brought along his personal history and an idea of what one could call home.

My own experience of Toronto Island recalls images of yacht clubs and airports, so Louttit’s refreshing and delicate take on this built environment is very inviting. Place to call home is currently on exhibit at the Distillery Historic District for the Contact Photography Festival in Toronto until May 31st.

© Jesse Louttit - Place to Call Home

© Jesse Louttit - Place to Call Home

© Jessica Auer

Jessica Auer is a Montréal artist and Professor at Concordia University. Her photographic work explores the history, mythology, preservation and development of cultural landscapes.

View Jessica’s work on her website.

Public swimming pool, June 2003 ©David McMillan

In the book, The World Without Us, journalist Alan Weisman imagines a planet suddenly freed of all people.  He deftly navigates the hypothetical human-less landscape asking how Mother Nature might react to the burden suddenly lifted.  Left to her own natural devices of reclamation, how long would it take for the planet to reach its natural equilibrium again?  Among other things he asks what would become of our built environments- our cities- as time goes by.  In reading this book I am reminded of David McMillan’s work surrounding the Chernobyl exclusion zone.  His fascinating pictures begin to offer some graphic answers to Weisman’s queries.

On his website he writes:
“I soon realized that the city of Pripyat, where the employees of the nuclear power plant and their families once lived, was where my real interests lay. The Atomic City, as it was once known, was considered one of the finest places to live in the former  Soviet Union. The first apartments were built in the mid-seventies, when the power plant was under construction, and at the time of the accident, it was home to 45,000 people. There were all the amenities of a modern Soviet city, with many schools, stores, hospitals, and recreational and cultural facilities. It is now uninhabitable and will never be lived in again.”

Hotel room, October 2004 ©David McMillan

Since 1994 McMillan has made numerous trips, often revisiting the same scenes, but years apart.   In adding the dimension of time to the photographs, he effectively reveals the impressive resilience of nature and the surprising fleetingness of what was once “one of the finest places to live in the former Soviet Union.”

While many photographers have addressed the current human struggle of those living around Chernobyl and the reactor’s ongoing tragic legacy, McMillan’s work seems to make an equally thoughtful statement about our collective impermanence.

View of Pripyat, October1994 ©David McMillan

Public swimming pool, October 1996 ©David McMillan

©Andrew Querner

Andrew Querner is a documentary photographer currently residing in Canmore, Alberta. Andrew’s work can be viewed on his website. He also maintains a personal blog.

Untitled (from the series Cui Cui) ©Rinko Kawauchi

The work of Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi was introduced to me in the last year. Immediately, I was attracted to the delicacy of her colors, moods and choices of subject. In her ability to render poetically the simple moments of her daily experiences, I discovered an artist whose endeavor is to present life in its discreet spectacles; spectacles that we often forget to notice, and to photograph.

As photographers, one of the important steps we have to go through while we’re working on a project is editing. We cut through our contact sheets, leaving behind some of the pictures (often most of them) in order to privilege other stronger images. We often do it quite radically and select very few images for a series. Photographers like Kawauchi make us aware of this process and suggest quite rightly, I believe, that sometimes we could go differently.

Untitled (from the series Utatane) ©Rinko Kawauchi

By producing photographs we cut through the world, a portion worthy of attention, which becomes a frame on our film. Then, back in the studio, we cut through the contact sheets and keep only the images we believe are worthy of printing.  And once all printed, we often cut again to make our project more concise, more “to the point”. Photography seems very much about extracting and cutting. It is subtractive. Rinko Kawauchi, in her book Cui Cui, seems to work in a way that is inclusive, additive. Instead of editing out, she allows images in. Her projects consist of hundreds of images adding up to a point where the detail of an object is informed not only by the previous images you just saw, but also by the whole series and its esthetic. Her work is delicate and yet heavy with meanings. It speaks about life and death, about aging, intimacy, family and time. Her subjects vary from her family members to her surrounding objects, from the scenes of her daily experiences to an esthetical detail of a plant or of a plate of food, from animals to insects, from the monumental presence of light to the humble, out of focus, oddly framed (but still beautiful) shot of a passing mundane moment.

The books of Kawauchi are a bit difficult to find theses days, but if you have the chance to get a copy of Cui Cui, you may just encounter a body of work that will strike you as it did for me.

Untitled (from the series Utatane) ©Rinko Kawauchi

Untitled (from the series Utatane) ©Rinko Kawauchi

©Louis Perreault

Louis Perreault is living and working in Montréal. He holds a BFA, with a major in photography, from Concordia University.  His work deals mainly, but not exclusively, with notions of place, space and landscape.

Check out Louis’ work at his website.

Afghanistan 1996 - Mourning a brother killed by a Taliban rocket ©James Nachtwey

James Nachtwey and Simon Norfolk take their cameras to war, not exclusively, but a lot. Both have an “eye” (though I prefer the word “brain”) that can, and usually does, turn the horror they witness into beautiful photographs. Both turn these beautiful images into objects (prints) that are also beautiful. They both show their work in private and public galleries (as well as in the traditional press, on the internet and in books.)

Both have been criticized for this…..turning horror into beauty and hanging it on walls.

(Of course, these aren’t the only two photographers/artists whose war work is beautiful and exhibited. I use them here as a case in point.)

At last year’s New York Photo Festival, in answer to a question about how war and beauty go together, Norfolk used the phrase “beauty is a tactic”.

The idea of turning war photos (or any photos of human suffering) into beautiful commodities raises all kinds of issues.  But this one phrase, “beauty is a tactic”, neatly tips the discussion into more positive territory.

I believe that beauty reaches farther into the human psyche than almost anything else. I also believe that these photographers photographs have a certain quality that elevates them, that makes them worth, somehow, more than standard press photos of carnage, mayhem and horror; press photos that get consumed in one sitting and are thrown out with the garbage the next day.

In order to get people to look and to react to the state of the world these days new tactics must be employed. Beauty is one of them.

Kosovo 1999 - Imprint of a man killed by Serbs ©James Nachtwey

Afghanistan: Chronotopia ©Simon Norfolk

Israel/Palestine: Mnemosyne ©Simon Norfolk

About Tony Fouhse:

USER ©Tony Fouhse

Tony Fouhse is an Ottawa based photographer. USER, his series of portraits of crack addicts has been been criticized for being beautiful. He will be exhibiting the latest USER images in Ottawa, at Gallery La Petite Mort, in May, 2009  and at IPS Gallery in Montreal in June, 2009.

You can take a look at Tony’s work on his website and you can keep up todate with his news and views at his blog.

Recently I have become quite interested in artists who make changes to their environments and come away with photographs of these changes. Such interventions can be sculptural and time-consuming projects that require great mastery of the materials, or simple and playful uses of everyday objects. Either way they are most often fleeting since these artistic transformations of everyday landscapes occur outside the protected spaces of studios and galleries. Literally leaving their mark on our shared spaces these artists also need to have a sense of how their interventions will translate onto a two dimensional plane in the resulting photographs. Gabriel Orozco’s Island within an island is one of the best examples of how well this way of seeing can work (pictured below). Other favorites are Andy Goldsworthy (the movie Andy Goldsworthy’s Rivers and Tides is a must see) and more recent discoveries Alejandra Laviada and William Lamson. I am hoping to try some of this kind of work myself in the coming months.

©Gabriel Orozco

©Andy Goldsworthy

©Alejandra Laviada

©William Lamson

About Kate Hutchinson

©Kate Hutchinson

Kate was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1977, and has been a resident of Montreal, Canada for the majority of her years. She has studied photography at Mount Allison University and Dawson College and is currently pursuing her MFA at Concordia University. In October of 2008 Kate Hutchinson had her first solo show, “Why am I marrying him?” at the Visual Voice Gallery in Montreal.

You can find more of Kate’s work on her website and her photoblog.