Photo Fest

Robert Burley, "Implosion of Buildings
#65 & #69, Kodak Park," 2007

Between Memory & History: From the Epic to the Everyday
Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) (Toronto) / CONTACT Festival
May 1- 31

Ridiculously, we drove 18 hours round-trip for a weekend in Toronto, mainly too see our friend's MFA thesis show. But of course there was the mandatory museum visit. The Art Gallery of Ontario is currently closed for its $250 million Frank Gehry makeover, so we were thinking of checking out the Darwin show at the Royal Ontario Museum (and its insane addition by Daniel Libeskind), but thought better of it when we learned that the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) was a only a block from where we were staying.

Now in its 12th year, Toronto's impressive CONTACT photo festival spans more than 200 venues and over 500 artists. They claim it is the biggest "photography event" in the world. By contrast, New York's first photo festival, which began yesterday, is confined to DUMBO and around a dozen venues and 50 artists.

The marquee exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), a modest exhibition space in Toronto's arts district, presents the works of ten international photographers, including some of the medium's leading lights.

From the outset, this outstanding show provokes us to ask what photography is today. As we walk in, we're presented with a melancholy series by Robert Burley depicting the abandonment and destruction of factories that manufactured film -- including Kodak buildings in Rochester, NY, and a factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, where the medium was born. Lovingly captured using a large-format film camera, they speak to the advent of the digital age and the decline of manufacturing in the U.S. and Europe.

Addressing the issue from a different angle are three large works by Thomas Ruff -- seeminly arbitrary images he downloaded from Web and greatly enlarged, revealing its distorted digital grain and making it difficult to discern what we're looking at (a construction site? an iceberg?). They're not pretty, but maybe that's part of his point.

British photographer and photojournalist Martin Parr contributes a grid of amusing images of tourists, such as one of man on the back of a donkey with a large camcorder held to his face like some kind of disease, or another of a family in Vegas having their photo taken by someone in a pirate costume. The series, called "Small World," reads like a sarcastic take on the diminished size of the tourist mind. It also reminds us of photography's close bonds with the alienating practice of tourism.

A series called "Recent History" by Frenchman Luc Delahaye, also photojournalist, comprises beautifully composed landscapes of war-torn areas -- such as scene of ruin and rubble in the West Bank resulting from conflict between Israel and Palestinians.

Going beyond documentary photography is "Biblical Stories," a series by Adi Nes, who poses friends and hired models to resemble Biblical figures as images from art history. For example, she poses a woman ("Hagar," 2006) to look like the iconic Depression image by Dorothea Lange. Another, resembling Jean-Francois Milet's "The Gleaners," shows contemporary women gathering discarded fruit.

Working in a similar vein is Alessandra Sanguinetti, who collaborated with two pre-teen girls from her native Argentina to create a tender series illustrating their friendship. The images include both candid shots and staged scenarios -- although both are truthful in their own way. In one photo, a girl plays at being pregnant. In another, her friend is the Madonna with a plastic doll baby Jesus.

Also depicting the sweetness of human bonds is Nan Goldin, who contributes one of her famous slide shows to the exhibit. "Heartbeat" (2001) shows several couples, straight and gay, embracing and having sex. Set to Björk's transcendent rendition of John Taverner's Kyrie Eleison, the works are loving and intimate -- the furthest thing from pornography, although much of it is quite graphic. (Ms. Museum Hours noted with frustration that the artist likes to use blurry images. For this series, I think it works very nicely to convey movement and time by way of image variety.)

My favorite photos of this excellent show are the family portraits of Bert Teunissen, another photojournalist. His "Domestic Landscape" series documents Europeans of the so-called old world -- families of farmers or craftsmen whose trade is handed down generation to generation. He captures individuals and families posed in their kitchens -- all built before the first World War and have lovely architectural touches such as fireplaces and wall tiling. The photos also reveal a sly nod to contemporary life such as a plastic bottle of Fanta or a Batman figure, without which the photo could be dated decades earlier.

While there are a couple of photographers whose work isn't very compelling, overall this is a very strong show that shows a very vital medium that stimulates the eye, the heart and the mind.