During a forum at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2011, the photographer John Pilson remarked, “Anybody listening to this conversation would come away from it thinking that photography is in kind of a crisis.” He was referring to anxieties around the loss of materiality of and social trust in photography, along with a shifting defi­nition of the medium. At the time of that conversation, Calgary had no dedicated contemporary art or photography museum, and critical debates concerning photography were still anchored to institutional centres elsewhere.