Out of the shadows, into the light
200 images from the Archive of Modern Conflict’s massive collection arrive for Contact
The brand-new show at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art is called Collected Shadows, and wrapped inside it might be an unwitting pun.
Drawn from the collection of the Archive of Modern Conflict, the pet photographic project of Toronto art collector and billionaire David Thomson, chairman of the Thomson Reuters media empire, the 200 images presented here represent a hair’s breadth of the dizzying latitude that collection contains: 4 million individual pictures — and maybe a lot more, depending who you ask culled from flea markets and garage sales, auctions and even museums around the world.
That’s a whole lot of shadows, any way you measure it — enough, you might even think, to blot out the sun. Good thing for curator Tim Prus. Collected Shadows, part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, illuminates, not obscures — putting Thomson’s compelling, voluminous project in its best possible light.
Born of its owner’s fascination with unofficial photography from the First and Second World Wars — more unknown soldier than famous war photographer Robert Capa, say — it quickly swelled to a compendium of his burgeoning attraction to vernacular photography: Snapshots and throwaways, amateur and anonymous, across eras and ages, media and material.
A good many of them have found their way into smartly-arranged books through the AMC’s publishing arm, Chris Boot editions, but never before quite like this.
Simply put, Collected Shadows engulfs. Walking into MOCCA’s main exhibition space, the tone is set by deep aubergine walls that cast the usually-austere museum experience into an unfamiliar realm of warm, intimate contemplation. Pictures are grouped in tens, or dozens, or sometimes threes and fours, hung salon-style in loose, off-kilter grids that invite a spontaneous viewing, letting the eye travel until it sticks.
“Conflict,” by the by, is a loose term here at best. Prus has grouped offhand snapshots by a German soldier in the Second World War with an image made by the 19th century French astrophysicist Jules Janssen, of the surface of the sun. The sapphire blue of cyanotypes, one of the earliest forms of photographic printing, run through the show, most beguilingly, to my eye, in an array of early 20th century plant studies by Bertha Jaques.
Sprinkled throughout, and given no greater billing, are pictures by giants of the medium Edward Curtis, say, or Robert Frank. Photographers repeat in various groupings, persistently inserting themselves into the oblique narratives the various image clusters suggest: Jaques is one, adding colour and texture, a sort of staging effect; Jaroslav Rossler’s silvery abstract images from the 20s. Antony Cairns, with a suite of panoramic pictures of Kingsland Road in London made in 2011, slots
The beguiling beauty of Collected Shadows is that it can be viewed from a step back, or close-up, but is best seen from both points of view. It is both cosmic and grounded, humane and inhuman, precise in its information and, in its moodily emotional impacts, potently oblique.
into a group that includes a1966 picture of the moon’s surface, from the Soviet Space Agency, and pictures of Marrakech and Guantanomo Bay, from the ’60s.
The specifics, though, seem to fade in service of the broad strokes. The beguiling beauty of Collected Shadowsis that it can be viewed from a step back, or close-up, but is best seen from both points of view. It is both cosmic and grounded, humane and inhuman, precise in its information and, in its moodily emotional impacts, potently oblique. In so doing, it taps into a couple of elemental truths. Whatever else we are, we’re hardwired to narrative. Stories are what make us who we are, and Collected Shadows, like all the best art, quietly but insistently gives us the raw materials to craft our own.
Hovering somewhere just below that surface comes a truth we’ve all become more acquainted with in our digital everything world: The urge to document, to capture and keep moments — both significant and mundane — is as human as breathing. Collected Shadows reveals the apparatus, over the ages, to show us only the tools have changed.