SHE NEVER PICTURED THIS
A dream job at photography institute
When Luce Lebart was very young she had a favourite pastime.
It involved an old trunk full of family photographs. Inside, she found inspiration in the images and the memories they prompted.
“We had a family house near the Atlantic Ocean in France.
“We had a big trunk and in this trunk there were family photos. I made that an activity, to go into the trunk, and this was my favourite thing.
“I would have never imagined that that passion could become a career, and yet this is what happened.
“I’m still fascinated by those moments stopped. … You can discover things that you don’t imagine about the past. You can look and discover how people used to live. You can hold the (photographs) and see something that appears to be real, but isn’t necessarily.”
Today, Lebart’s life revolves around photography in her job as the new director of the Canadian Photography Institute at the National Gallery of Canada.
The institute was created in 2015. It administers a collection of more than 50,000 photographs and 146,000 negatives, along with other materials used in the photographic arts. The photographers represented in the collection include Diane Arbus, Frederick H. Evans, Robert Frank, Arnaud Maggs and Lynne Cohen. There are rare daguerreotypes, 19th-century war photographs and a major collection of Canadian photographs dating from 1964 to 2008, which have come from the former Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography.
The collection is also built upon the National Gallery’s own large collection and is being enhanced by a massive donation by the Canadian philanthropist David Thomson, which will enter the institute’s collection over a 10-year period.
The CPI, as it is also known, is a much bigger trunk for Lebart who comes to Ottawa from Paris where she was the director of collections and curator of the French Society of Photography, another huge historical collection.
She can’t wait to fully get her hands on the CPI collection and begin the process of making it available to the world.
“What happens here (CPI) is something quite extraordinary,” Lebart said in an interview.
“My role is to supervise and manage these collections.”
But, “one of the main things of the CPI is to promote photography and to promote the collection and ... to share the collection. It is really about sharing and collaborating.”
Sharing, for Lebart, means exhibiting and loaning the images. It also means displaying the collection on the Internet.
But it also involves building relationships with researchers, photographers, writers and musicians, even through fellowships and grants. These individuals will be able to work on the collection.
She says she will also be carrying on the National Gallery’s traditional role in preparing exhibitions that will be seen worldwide. That includes a show of 19th-century photographs that will travel to Paris and Los Angeles in a couple of years. “We need to open CPI up,” she says. That means annual conferences on research topics that will bring together people from all disciplines to the institute.
And that opening will also include an outreach to students in high school and university, who will be invited to see the exhibitions and who will also be taken “backstage” to see how the CPI works, she says.
Those exhibitions will include a major show devoted to Canadian photography (1960-2000) in 2017, as part of the sesquicentennial celebration. That show, along with all other CPI exhibitions, will be displayed in a new space inside the National Gallery devoted to photography. The space is located on the second floor.
The space has three large rooms plus a “photo lab,” where the curators will experiment with ways to display the work.
Lebart does take her own photographs. She has a Rolloflex camera, but admits that most of the images she takes today are taken by her smartphone’s camera. “I take a lot of pictures. I document where I am.”
Her own photography led to an interesting project that resulted in a small book called Mold Is Beautiful. The book combines her two passions, that of a curator and that of a photographer.
Inside the collection in Paris, Lebart found a small wooden box buried deep in the archives. Inside the book were glass plates with images on them. There were landscapes, pictures of fireworks and of people in daily life. But they had been adulterated by one of the great enemies of any archive: mould.
As Lebart says, most archivists, once mould is discovered, toss the images on the trash heap without any examination.
Lebart, however, took a look. And the result are photographs of surprising beauty.
The patterns left by the mould spores resemble clouds or star systems or even a flock of birds.
“My idea was to say mould is beautiful. It usually is the No. 1 enemy of archivists. But if there is something that I love, it is the idea that creativity can come from anywhere. We always have to remember that.”
She was struck right away by the unexpected beauty of the plates. “I’m fascinated with alterations. This is how photography changes with time. This is something that is exciting.
“The idea was not to talk about mould as the enemy of conservation, but rather as art.”
As an interesting aside, it turns out some of the moulds attached to the plates were unknown to science.
“That’s why we always need to be exploring and exchanging ideas,” she says. “You never know where the art is.”
Lebart believes that CPI’s collection will be able to rethink photography by bringing new material to the table.
“I want CPI to engage the community, both photographic community and the general public and to experiment. I think of CPI as a laboratory of experimentation.”
When you have thousands of images and materials, with more arriving every day, you need a place to put the hoard. Lebart says the CPI will have an external storage space outside the National Gallery complex.
“I am very enthusiastic, excited and very curious as well about Canada and Canadian photography.
“I didn’t know much about it before coming here.”
What she has found, she says, is a “paradise.”
“I’m fascinated and moved by how the social mix is not a problem here. Where you come from is a question, not a problem.”
She is not so naive as to believe there are no problems in Canada. “But it is peaceful and it gives hope for the future. This is very linked to the idea of this collection for me.
CPI mixes different collections. “It doesn’t happen elsewhere. For me it’s very linked to Canada and its respect for diversity.”
A year from now, Lebart says she hopes CPI will be an open place where people want to be. She wants the institute to be seen as a place of possibility. In five years, she sees a very interactive place that reaches from the grassroots to the rest of the world.
This is how photography changes with time. This is something that is exciting. The idea was not to talk about mold as the enemy of conservation, but rather as art.