The Hospital for Wounded Angels

Virgil Hammock is head of the Canadian section of the International
Association of Art Critics and chair of the Department of Fine Arts at
Mount Allison University.

Jennifer Dickson, South Africa-born Canadian artist, has created a beautiful little book that is a journal of a spiritual, as well as physical, journey of discovery. Dickson was at one time one of Canada’s best-known printmakers, but a serious illness brought on by years of contact with the dangerous materials that are very much a part of that medium forced her to stop and came close to killing her. The result was that Dickson has become one of the strongest advocates for safety in the studio and has turned her formidable talents to photography. The photographs in the book cover the period from 1981 to 1986 and are of formal gardens and villas in Europe. Dickson’s continuing quest, of which this book is a part, revolves around a theme she calls “The Earthly Paradise.”

There is a certain sadness in her photographs in this book that brings to mind imagery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century French photographer Eugene Atget. This might be because, in the images of both Dickson and Atget, the only human presence is the viewer. Both use reflections, and what is most important is the sense of stillness in their work that, while beautiful, is also unsettling. The Hospital for Wounded Angels refers to the Chapter House of Santa Maria de Alcobaca Abbey in Portugal. It is an eleventh-century Cistercian abbey and the angels were seventeenth-century additions that have now, like the rest of the abbey, fallen on hard times. These broken, and hence wounded, angels lend mute evidence to a tragic love story that is linked to the abbey and is of interest to Dickson. Interest is perhaps too weak a word; she identifies with the story of the abbey and with other stories that relate to subjects in her book. She takes us through Renaissance Italian formal gardens and villas in the person of her alter ego Bianca Cappello, the doomed lover of Francesco dei Medici, as well as through wonderful gardens of England and France.

Dickson practices what is called straight photography. Its magic comes from her artistic vision rather than from any tricks in the dark-room. The camera becomes her eyes. Through it she allows us to share with her a private mystical world that would be remote without her efforts. A book like this proves, as if it needed proving, that photography is an art. Anybody with a camera could have taken these pictures, but anybody didn’t: Jennifer Dickson did, and Jennifer Dickson is an artist.