[May 10, 2023]

Special Friendships

By Marik Boudreau, in collaboration with Suzanne Girard

Camille Maheux loved movies. She wrote letters with self-portraits and fragments of pictures, and she cultivated special friendships. Faithfully, she photographed her close friends, idols, and people she met. These loving portraits form original testimonials to diversified communities, women’s struggles, lesbian love, friendship, and poverty.

An early-morning person, Camille photographed hundreds of people asleep in the streets of Montreal and of São Paulo, Brazil. Her approach bore a resemblance to film: not content with capturing the moment, she dealt with time and duration, capturing something eternal.

Camille Maheux was a pioneer in intimate documentary photography. She followed many artists, including Antonio Novaes, Dorothy Deschamps, Claire St-Aubin, Marie Trudeau, Diane Obomsawin, Gin Bergeron, Geneviève Letarte, Michèle Mercure, Pauline Harvey, Marco Meilland, Renata Falzoni, and Dacia Maraini. The list could go on.

As an active member of the documentary photographers’ collective Plessisgraphe, Camille took part in many of the group’s projects. Her work was exhibited across Canada, as well as in Brazil and Italy, and published in specialized magazines, including Dérives and Ovo-Photo. She was also an on-set photographer, video maker, camerawoman, film professor, and host of a Brazilian music program. She was known and recognized by her peers in all of these trades.

On March 26, 2023, a fire swept away our friend and much of her magnificent archives. What remains of her production are the letters and photographs that she shared, as well as her digital photographs. Translated by Käthe Roth

A photographer since childhood, Marik Boudreau works with silver halide film and uses her own darkroom. Transformations in the land and in social connections have shaped her career.