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Detail from working map of Every Foot Of The Sidewalk: boulevard Saint-Laurent, 2010-2012
About Philippe Guillaume deals with the intersections between photography, walking, and city space in his exhibition, Every Foot of the Sidewalk: boulevard Saint-Laurent (2010-2012). Photography and ambulating have a conspicuous relationship to urban space –while one fixes a horizon line, where (for an instant) the present past and present future meet, the other sets a rhythm that counters the frenzy of the contemporary metropolis. Walking with a camera results in a view of the city where the sidewalk is an ever-changing and recurrent space. As an artist Guillaume is interested in investigating new ways of looking at urban sidewalks and streets with the creation of multi-media, multi-image photographic arrangements that disrupt a single point of view of city space. These photographic cityscapes allow Guillaume to express his critical thinking about perambulatory space, while also considering the social aspects of time in an increasingly standardized world. His installation will present photography, video and reference materials in an expanded exhibition of his SIP thesis, accepted last year.
Project What would the sidewalks of my street reveal if photographically described as pure presence, devoid of human beings? Boulevard Saint-Laurent is a major corridor in Montreal, charged with history, culture, and the aura of generations of people for whom it represented a destination, where many have also walked. It is a space made from profuse places, an imaginary line that for some divides and for others unites. I want to see what photography and walking reveal when this iconic space no longer has its primary component: People. Walking throughout the city the pedestrian comes upon public spaces that have ceased to perform their primary function because they are empty. Empty public places become spaces of dystopia and the sidewalk a kind of void stage, while “a post pedestrian city not only has fallen silent but risks becoming a dead language,” writes Rebecca Solnit. My project shows the sidewalk spaces along St. Laurent Boulevard, a popular street in Montreal nicknamed La Main where I live empty of human presence. This research and creation work involves photography, walking, time, and space.
During the two years I photographed this work people often stopped me to ask what I was photographing. Some came out of their homes wondering why I was taking a picture of their house from across the street. Most were genuinely interested to hear about my artwork, and many were perplexed when I explained that it was not their house but the empty sidewalk that passed in front of their home that was the real space I was snapping with my camera. In this sense, this project resulted in a form of spontaneous social activity where strangers interacted and thought about art because of this project. As I began to see the results of this visual experiment, I was struck by something of a categorical shift. The absence of people in the picture frame denotes a distinctive component in the history of Canadian art that goes back to landscape painting. The series bridges representations of the city and the wilderness. Indeed, without any visible human presence along the street, boulevard Saint-Laurent appears in its own state of wilderness. Now that the work is complete, this exploration of photography and walking has also become a paradox relating to emptiness in photographic representation. While it was never imagined as a signifier for the pathos of absence, Every Foot of the Sidewalk does reveal the power of spaces in which we stage our daily lives.
When a photographer steps out the door with a camera to go off and photograph, [he or she] has a particular goal or destination [in mind]. You can imagine the destination, but you never really reach it. Tom Gibson, False Evidence Appearing Real 1. 1. Tom Gibson, “A Conversation with Tom Gibson, Annotated by Martha Langford,” in False Evidence Appearing Real (Ottawa: CMCP, 1993), 97.
Event Photography, Walking, and a conversation about research/creation on the boulevard Wednesday, January 16th, 6 – 7 pm
Biography Philippe Guillaume is based in Montreal where he completed an interdisciplinary MA engaged with photography and art history at Concordia University in 2012. His current art work deals with the combination of photography and walking in Canadian art; this connection was also the theme for his thesis. Before deciding to concentrate on research and creation he worked as an independent fashion photographer, and his work was published nationally and internationally. He has been the recipient of two Lux Professional Photography and Illustration in Quebec Grand Prizes for photography, and his artwork is part of the Collection Patrimoniale Bibliothèque National du Québec, as well as the National Gallery of Canada. Since 2009, he has written photographic reviews for CV magazine and in Montréal as Palimpsest: The Dialectics of Montréal's Public Spaces, published by the Gail and Stephen Jarislowsky Institute for the Study of Canadian Art.
Martha Langford is the Director and Chair of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Canadian Art History / Annales d¹histoire de l'art canadien, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Concordia University. As a Concordia University Research Chair in Art History, she has focused much of her research, teaching, and service on photographic history and theory, and especially the study of photographic experience, which takes all aspects of photographic encounter into account, including the materiality/multi-sensoriality of the image-object. Her work on photography and memory has been published in numerous articles and developed in depth in two monographs: Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (2001) and Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (2007). Both studies contextualize photographic apprehension in other sensorial experience, the first focusing on orality in the development of an oral-photographic framework, the second taking spectatorial movement and imagined palpations of the image into account. Martha is also active as an independent curator, for example as artistic director of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal in 2005. Among her ongoing projects is an intellectual biography of Canadian artist Michael Snow whose works in almost all contemporary media draw imaginative and performative responses from the spectator. In contributing to the research unit, Martha Langford is particularly interested in encounters with senior artists and theorists whose works have explored the mid-twentieth-century explosion of communication technologies their openings to experience, their psycho-social dynamics.
Links Philippe Guillaume's website
Reviews
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