Canadian Photographs: Geoffrey James

(Hardback)

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A subversive look at the liminal locations and transitional moments that make up the Canadian unconscious and the Not-So-True North.

In this unvarnished look at Canada, renowned photographer Geoffrey James directs his gaze to the in-between spaces and forgotten places that resist the idea of a cohesive national identity. With an equable eye, James documents the ephemeral and the monumental: a demolition derby in Quebec, how an inmate at Kingston Penitentiary has decorated his cell, the Dickensian side door of Massey Hall in Toronto. The photographs in this collection celebrate the everyday while meditating on the issues James's adopted home faces: the bifurcation of rural and urban, rapid growth and increasing inequality, and its journey toward truth and reconciliation. Linked by views taken from train windows from British Columbia to Nova Scotia, Jamess unofficial portrait of Canada brings into sharp relief the unfinished business of the nation as it lurches into the next century.

Canadian Photographs includes a conversation between the photographer and Peter Galassi, former Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art.

Author Bio

For the past 40 years, Welsh-born Geoffrey James has been photographing the built environment in a wide range of forms, from formal European gardens to the work of F.L. Olmsted, from the Mexican border to Kingston Penitentiary. Internationally exhibited and collected, his work has appeared in more than a dozen books and monographs. James is a Guggenheim fellow and recipient of the Governor-General's Medal for Visual and Media Arts. Named Toronto's first Photo-Laureate, he now lives and works in Montreal.