‘ANY IMAGE CAN BE BEAUTIFUL IF IT’S TRUE’
Sweeping MMFA photography exhibition fruit of personal pursuit for collector
“It’s about the image, about an immediate emotional response.” Jack Lazare was trying to describe what makes him want to buy a work of photography, and to share it with as many people as possible. If he was having a bit of trouble articulating the criteria, perhaps it’s because it’s not an intellectual thing. “I’ve realized lately that I’m guided subconsciously by the Keats poem (Ode on a Grecian Urn) that says, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ ” said the Montreal collector. “Any image can be beautiful if it’s true.” Lazare, 83, was bitten by the photography bug relatively recently. Having done well in the travel business, and before that as a key player in the nascent Canadian music industry (in the 1970s he co-founded Aquarius Records, home to April Wine and Corey Hart), his eye was caught about 20 years ago when his daughter bought a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron. “That’s what set me off,” Lazare recalled. “I’ve been gradually accumulating work since then.” The results of Lazare’s obsession are on full display in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ remarkable new exhibition Of Individuals and Places: Photographs From the Lazare Collection. Close to 100 photographs — from the dawn of the form in the 19th century to the present day, in sizes ranging from the minuscule to the monumental and in every imaginable representational style — are united not by any forced thematic remit, but by one person’s vision. Visitors are encouraged to budget more of their day than they might expect: you can find yourself forgetting about time as you stand in front of these images and ponder their truth. “Some people say they see a sense of melancholy, of loneliness,” Lazare said when asked if there’s an esthetic through line in what is, on the surface, a wide-ranging collection both historically and stylistically. And while Lazare only came to see the thread in retrospect, there’s something to it: human subjects here are typically seen alone, often with their back to the camera, looking at odds with their environments. Occasionally, as in Willie Doherty’s Non-Specific Threat VI (Unforgiving Ruthlessness), showing a subject who looks like a cross between Joaquin Phoenix and John Malkovich having a bad day, a palpable sense of unease emanates from the image. Roads, horizon lines and transit also figure frequently. Twentieth-century images don’t get more iconic than the black-and-white work of Dorothea Lange, whose Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, included in the show along with six other works of hers, has come to stand in the collective mind’s eye as an encapsulation of the Great Depression. Also represented are modern giants Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Gordon Parks and Robert Frank. (The last named, best known for his candid studies of the American underclass, is counterintuitively represented here by a photograph taken in Venice.) Montreal’s thriving scene is spotlit with works by Pascal Grandmaison, Nicolas Baier, Angela Grauerholz and others. The star of the show by photo count, with 14 pieces, is the aforementioned Cameron. A contemporary of Lewis Carroll (they both took pictures of the famous Alice) and a next-door neighbour of Tennyson, she was at the centre of a historically fecund scene. The Guardian recently referred to her as the greatest artist of the Victorian age. “She got her first camera around 1850, a time when photography was exploding, and she was tremendously aggressive with it,” Lazare said. “Anyone anywhere near her was asked to sit (for a portrait), which in those days was no small matter, requiring a long time. She invented techniques such as the close-up, and employed a kind of blurred effect which was criticized at the time for not being precise, but which was quite deliberate.” Beyond the current show, Lazare’s enthusiasm shows no sign of flagging. He’s in a position where he can plan his travels around his passion: in addition to frequent photo-hunting visits to London and New York, he has been a regular for the past decade at Paris Photo, the massive annual fair where nearly 200 galleries specializing exclusively in photography display their wares. “The crowds in the Grand Palais are huge, but you adjust to that,” he said. “You meet dealers, they show you things, you learn from them. I enjoy it all tremendously.” A portion of the new show is taken from a group of 33 photographs that were not loaned for the exhibit, but donated outright to the museum last year — an act that has brought the MMFA’s long-held wish to have a wing devoted entirely to photography measurably closer to reality. “We’ve been growing our focus on photography considerably since about 2010,” said curator Diane Charbonneau, who worked closely with Lazare in setting up Of Individuals and Places. “Our (2016-17) Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition was a big part of that, and this one is a continuation.” As for Lazare, he’ll make a point of attending the show himself during regular hours to get a sense of how people are responding. It’s all part of his conviction that photographs, by their very nature, are for being seen — and not just by their owners. In the same spirit, he resisted specifying any individual favourites. “They’re all my children,” he said. “It has given me great pleasure to live with these images, and I’m delighted to be able to share them.”
They’re all my children ... It has given me great pleasure to live with these images, and I’m delighted to be able to share them.