Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Essays, Focus
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
[Fall 2025] Luminous Imprints by Pierre Dessureault [EXCERPT] Since 1994, Marie-Jeanne Musiol has been engaged in a unique exploration of the porous borders between how science and art represent nature. Most of the images in the exhibition I See Stars in the Deep Dark were from the series Bodies of Light and were made between […]
Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Marlene Creates
In this text dedicated to Marlene Creates, Pierre Dessureault explores forty years of image-making in which territory, memory and language intertwine. The Newfoundland artist, whose early work is rooted in the tradition of land art, has never ceased to draw inspiration from her experiences of nature.
Ciel variable 126 – TRAJECTORIES | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Justin Wonnacott
[Summer 2024] Observing the Theatre of the Streets by Pierre Dessureault [EXCERPT] Following in the street-photography tradition, Ontario photographer Justin Wonnacott has been scrutinizing life in cities in Canada and elsewhere for more than three decades. The images that he has brought together in Figureground highlight the uniqueness of his approach, which has evolved over […]
The Photobook
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Jacques Payette
[November 9, 2023] By Pierre Dessureault. Although Jacques Payette’s paintings are well known, his photographs were relatively under wraps until the Musée d’art de Joliette, with the support of the Fondation Pierre Lassonde, published an impressive four-book set by John R. Porter…
Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Raymonde April
[Summer 2023] Snapshots of Memory By Pierre Dessureault [Excerpt] “During the spring and summer, I make a lot of photographs. My contact sheets are filled with outdoor scenes, with landscapes and, most of all, with people in landscapes. . . . Then, before fall sets in, I go back home. I pore over my contact […]
Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
[Fall 2022] A Look Back at the Disraeli Adventure By Pierre Dessureault [Extract] 1972–2022. A half-century has passed since an adventure called Disraeli – une expérience humaine en photographie (Disraeli – A Human Experiment in Photography) took place.1 By no means is it my intention here to commemorate or eulogize this pivotal moment in the […]
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
[Summer 2022] By Pierre Dessureault [Excerpt] In the 1960s and 1970s, Quebec was experiencing a radical revision of all kinds of models that had previously been seen as immutable. This major transformation swept away obsolete institutions and fossilized ways of thinking inherited from the Great Darkness of the Duplessis period and laid claim to a […]
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Renaud Philippe
[Winter 2022] By Pierre Dessureault [Excerpt] “We are not in front of the images; we are in the middle of them. Like they are in the middle of us. The question is how we circulate among them, how we make them circulate.”1 The life of images, constantly relaunched in various presentation contexts, is core to […]
Documentary photography
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Yoanis Menge
[June 2, 2021] Pierre Dessureault Presented during the 11th edition of Les Rencontres internationales de la photographie in Carleton-sur-Mer, Gaspé, Unuua (Nuit), a photo-documentary on hunting and the arctic night, was shot by Yoanis Menge in Iqaluit and Pond Inlet, Nunavut, and in Salluit, Nunavik. “In the course of a number of journeys in polar […]
Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Book Reviews, Readings
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: David McMillan
[Summer 2020] This article was originally published in French only. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Croissance et Dégradation Pripiat et la zone d’exclusion de Tchernobyl David McMillan essai de Claude Baillargeon Göttingen, Steidl, 2019, 262 p., 200 photographies Par Pierre Dessureault (In French only) Buy the […]
Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
February 13, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Pierre Dessureault. In a body of work accumulated over more than sixty years, Dave Heath (1931–2016), a Canadian photographer born in the United States, challenged the qualities of the photographic medium and its techniques. He constantly probed, through images, Montaigne’s dictum that “every man carries the entire form of the human condition.”1…
Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Milo Rau
22 mars, 2023 [originally published in CV112 in Summer 2019] — By Pierre Dessureault. The International Institute of Political Murder was created in 2007 by Swiss director, artist, and filmmaker Milo Rau. Since then, Rau has produced more than fifty plays, films, performances, and video installations on social and political realities, most of them complex and controversial…
Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Charles Gagnon
September 7, 2022 [originally published in CV111 in Winter 2019] — The exhibition Camerart, produced by Galerie Optica and presented in Montreal from December 16, 1974, to January 14, 1975, was a pivotal event in the photography/art debate in Quebec…
Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Michel Campeau
February 22, 2022 [originally published in CV110 in Fall 2018 ] — The exhibition Michel Campeau – Life before Digital, a retrospective of Michel Campeau’s approach in the early 1970s, offers a wellrounded view of his ideas on photography, on the figure of the photographer, and on that of the collector who finally took over from the producer of images…
Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Charles Gagnon, Emmanuelle Léonard
November 17, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 ] — At Expo 67, a huge celebration of human progress and great festival of the image in all of its technological and expressive possibilities, the Christian Pavilion designed by Charles Gagnon offered a counterpoint to the event’s sea of triumphant optimism….
Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Angela Grauerholz, David McMillan, Gabor Szilasi, George Hunter, Jeff Wall, Jim Breukelman, Jin-Me Yoon, John Massey, Ken Lum, Lynne Cohen, Nina Raginsky, Robert Burley
June 22, 2021 [originally published in French only in CV108 in Winter 2018] — It seems less and less possible to analyze photography and photographic history without talking about production protocols, dissemination strategies, and contexts for conservation and display in public collections. Andrea Kunard situates her undertaking in regard to this position from the start…
Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
December 8, 2020 [originally published in CV107 in Fall 2017] — The NFB’s Still Photography Division was created in 1941, as a Canadian government information agency under the direction of John Grierson. By 1985, when the small unit’s production, now a collection of photographs, became the core of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Division had produced some 250,000 images.
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Josef Sudek
August 18, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — In the early 1920s, when Josef Sudek was becoming established as a photographer, Prague had emerged as a point of convergence for avant-garde movements from France, Germany, and Russia. After the dismantlement of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following the Great War, members of these movements were interested in rethinking art – both how it was practised and its relationship with life…
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
April 2, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Clara Gutsche, David Miller, Gabor Szilasi, Michel Campeau, Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne, Roger Charbonneau
May 12, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — Over the years, Montreal has been the subject of a number of major documentary projects. We might think of Gabor Szilasi’s prolific production – in particular, as he recorded development in the city, his photographs of St. Catherine Street (1977–79) in which he immortalized the configuration of the stores along the street…
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Robert Walker
February 5, 2020 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — For ten years, Robert Walker has been working on a project called Hochelaga-Maisonneuve: Observations and Recollections. The subtitle conveys the two aspects of his approach…
Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Bryan Adams, Geneviève Cadieux, Lida Moser
May 13, 2019 [originally published in CV100 in Spring 2015] — “The nineteenth-century dispute over the relative artistic merits of painting and photography seems misguided and confused today”. Does Walter Benjamin’s statement, dating from the 1930s, put a final stop to the debate over whether photography naturally belongs in museums?
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Claire Beaugrand-Champagne
September 14, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 95 – CYBER / ESPACE / PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Bertrand Carrière, Donald McCullin, Helen Doyle, Michael Mitchell
May 14, 2018 [originally published in CV95 in Fall 2013] — By a strange coincidence, two exhibitions – a Donald McCullin retrospective and Collision: Conflict and Its Consequences – at the National Gallery of Canada, as well as a film, Dans un océan d’images, featured at the recent International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) in Montreal, have presented a wide range of practices related to how photographs portray war and social conflict…
Ciel variable 94 – PUBLIC ART | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Richard Baillargeon
March 19, 2018 [originally published in CV94 in Spring 2013] — Richard Baillargeon’s Anticoste is presented as a complex composition of heterogeneous materials organized in groups to create vast networks of significances, echoes, and resonances and to constitute a reflection both on the history of Anticosti and on the narrative processes implemented in knowledge and the relationship with the past.
Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Thomas Kneubühler
October 30, 2017 [originally published in French in CV92 in Fall 2012] — Thomas Kneubühler’s Under Currents takes us through the hydroelectric installations at James Bay and the complex network of exchanges between North and South that their construction has established. What is initially striking in this coherent whole is the rigorous organization of various elements in a series of groupings to form a well-marked path that is constructed bit by bit, in successive layers, with each of the carefully defined and delimited components opening new perspectives and adding a stratum of meaning to the plural discourse that has been set in motion.
Ciel variable 88 - FACES | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Pierre Gaudard
December 20, 2016 [originally published in CV88, Spring 2011] — Pierre Gaudard is one of the rare photographers whose photographs are not on the Web. Absent from the photography scene since the mid-1980s because he returned to France and because of the gradual disappearance of the documentary genre from institutions devoted to photography, his name was suddenly resurrected in a press release announcing his death…
Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Gary Michael Dault, Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Susan Dobson
September 22, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — All of the large-scale colour photographs making up Susan Dobson’s recent Toronto exhibition “Dislocations” contribute in varying ways to her notion of dislocation as a modification – as she puts it on her Web site – of “time, space and geography, where surroundings can seem both familiar and foreign.” She notes, as well, that “a pervasive and persistent form of déjà vu dominates the work, derived in part through the combination of digitally manipulated images with photographs shot in the documentary mode.”
Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
September 27, 2016 [originally published in French only in Winter 2011] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 79 - COLOURS OF THE CITY | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Robert Walker
[Summer 2008] In today’s world, the blurring between the urban landscape and the mediascape increasingly typifies our experience of our environment. Robert Walker’s body of work illustrates this blurring in a remarkable manner. The images presented in this portfolio span multiple continents and decades. Over the years, illusionary compositions and vibrant colours have become trademarks […]
Ciel variable 32 - UNTITLED + SUPPLEMENT | Essays
Authors: Pierre Dessureault
[Fall 1995] by Pierre Dessureault A museum is not only the sum of the objects in its collections but the history of an institution and a perspective on a particular area of creative expression. The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, formerly the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada, was established in […]
Ciel variable 32 - UNTITLED + SUPPLEMENT | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Clara Gutsche, David Miller
[Fall 1995] by Pierre Dessureault Associated curator, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa Since settling in Montreal on their arrival in Canada, Clara Gutsche and David Miller have worked together on many projects, producing a remarkable body of photographic work that portrays the city and its residents. There are few examples of couples in photography […]
Ciel variable 24 - Untitled | Portfolios
Authors: Pierre Dessureault | Artists: Benoit Aquin
[Fall 1993] This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available. Abstract Benoît Aquin’s images are difficult to classify. They assume all the appearances of documentary photography. Like many photographers born during the sixties, he chose to follow this tradition that characterizes the production of an entire decade. These photographers have refused […]