“I am I because my little dog knows me.” The words are Gertrude Stein’s; the dog in this picture knew my parents and lived with them before I was born, and they celebrated its existence in a pair of studio portraits. The other shows the dog looking straight at the lens with its paws on the back of a bentwood chair. I prefer the more formal one, with the lady’s wrist watch raffishly slung around the dog’s neck.
We were trying to find a cover image among a stack of Tom Abrahamson's photographs, which we were passing around the editorial table. A lot of intense looking went on, and very little talk, until Eve said: you know, if we want a strong cover, there's really only one choice.
Brian Howell’s first glimpse into the impersonating world came at a lively Sunday gospel meeting in southern British Columbia, led by an Elvis impersonator who said that his Elvis costume had given new meaning to his life. The impersonating world is a hall of mirrors through which Brian Howell has sought out myriad reflections of celebrity at every level, from the neighbourhood gospel show, to community centres catered by Lions Clubs, and finally to big conventions in Las Vegas and Orlando, Florida.
These photographs depict a performance by William Davison and Sherri Lyn Higgins outside the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in September 2002. The tableau vivant consisted of three ten-minute poses loosely based on the 1928 René Magritte painting entitled The Lovers.
Lennah Nanke Mothimit, age thirty-eight, visits with her sister Anna in the resettlement camp at D’Kar, Botswana. Nanke contracted aids in 1999 when she was raped. She is one of the few women in D’Kar who is open about her HIV status.
In 2005, James Long discovered an abandoned suitcase filled with photo albums in the alley behind his house. The photographs in the albums and the process of tracing them—and even finding members of the family who “appear” in them—form the basis of Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut, a play produced by Theatre Replacement and Rumble Productions, which opens at the PuSh Festival in Vancouver on January 29, 2008 and at the Theatre Centre in Toronto on March 6, 2008.
One of the first pleasures of taking pictures is finding out what something looks like when it gets into a photograph. This is often what motivates young photographers, who are always surprised (sometimes delighted and sometimes horrified) by what they discover when their film is developed.
In those days, when you saw a Woolworth’s store you thought of the photo booth, and if you had nothing else to do, you went in and invested a quarter in the history of photography.
In Winnipeg in 1993, Micah Lexier put an ad in the local newspaper looking for males named David. Hundreds of people responded, and he asked the first David of each age, from age one to seventy-five, to be photographed at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
