Camera Lucida

Steven Behal is a Toronto-based photographer.

This work is a catalogue of photographic representations that toured in
1989 from the Walter Phillips Gallery (in Banff, Alberta) to the
Presentation House Gallery (North Vancouver, B.C.) and then to the Art
Gallery of Windsor (Ontario).

The exhibition assumes that photographs are associated with a sense of
loss and a recognition of what has been. Using existing photography
taken from magazines, newspapers, trade journals, encyclopedias, and
school annuals, these works are treated as cultural artifacts of the
prosaic world. The attempt is made to provoke a second sight, to take
the familiar and defamiliarize, so that what is already known may become
compelling again.

The five artists in this exhibition have arrived at a consideration of
the photographic from diverse artistic backgrounds outside the tradition
of photography. Although their sensibilities are informed by
involvements with performance, architecture, sculpture, and
installation, as well as by their particular cultural milieus, they
share a conceptualist concern for the process of looking and making
meaning. For example, the prominence of framing devices in this
exhibition—Christian Boltanski’s tin frames, Leonel Moura’s metal
encasements, Liz Magor’s glass display case, Alfredo Jaar’s
commercial light boxes, and Connie Hatch’s Plexiglas picture
holders—draw attention to the presentation and reception of images. It
is suggested that the camera is a tool of social domination that
captures the world. The photographs deployed in the works trade on the
distinction between the photograph as exhibit and the art work as
tableau. Used not as documents per se, but as storia, the images pursue
a distance from their source. The attempt is made to deliver the viewer
into a new time, where things secured in the past are shown as being
threatened.

This is not really a book of photography, but rather one that makes a
fetish of manipulation and control. An evolutionary process study may
well be the next generation in photographic thought, but the process by
which this book came to be does not translate into a cohesive product.
The stimulating intellect isolates, not connecting with the images.
Borrowed from the past, yet obsessed with holding on to the past, this
irreverent work self-destructs. Disembodied, it offends the
sensibilities by its self-indulgence.

Perhaps the images are too small to deliver their message. Perhaps the
text is too pompous to explain its meaning. Either way, this provocative
little book didn’t really impress me.