Sherbrooke photographer explores the daily grind

merchants and townspeople, often while shopping for food or other necessities. If the opportunity presented itself, the light was good and the moment felt right, Gardner would take a picture.

“Many of them were just one take,” he said, explaining that working with film is very different than the infinite opportunities presented with digital photography. Every additional try is wasted film, he explained.

“I took 600 pictures and brought home the negatives, and then didn’t look at them for 10 years,” Gardner said.

When he finally decided to revisit them, Gardner had a photo collection, mostly black and white, giving a fly-on-the-wall perspective of people going about their daily business, unique landscapes and seemingly simple photos with intense stories to tell.

His exhibition at Célestine café ( 868, rue King Ouest, Sherbrooke), is a look at the printing house below the Derge Monastery in Sichuan province, China.

According to Gardner, in January 2009, Chinese police broke up a demonstration by Tibetan monks from the printing house, which uses traditional methods to print Buddhist works. Roughly 30 of the monks were arrested during the protest.

Gardner arrived there in June of that year. Impressed by the perseverance of the Tibetans, Gardner tried, with his photographs, to describe the printing process of 217,000 Buddhist Kanjur and Tanjur texts.

The Café Kaapeh exhibition is a grouping of portraits and landscapes, and The Singing Goat show is entitled Monde du Travail, focusing on the challenging workload of women.