Over the last several years, photobooks have seen a revival in terms of both their creation and their dissemination and marketing, and numerous commentators have debated the significance of this resurgence. Ciel variable wishes to contribute to these discussions by amplifying multiple voices sensitive to the creative richness and flourishing of this quickly developing sector.
The Photobook
Authors: Ewa Monika Zebrowski | Artists: Angela Boehm
An all-white horizon, evoking the idea of a harsh, majestic Canadian winter, has been captured from a thousand angles by Angela Boehm’s lens. Surprising and audacious, Minus 30 brings together a collection of images from her native Saskatchewan, a landscape she has traversed almost like a process of mourning. Ewa Monika Zebrowski reviews it here.
The Photobook
Authors: Fanny Bieth | Artists: Fatine-Violette Sabiri
Fatine-Violette Sabiri is constantly travelling back and forth between Casablanca and Montreal, and Kiss Landing reveals the ties that bind her to both cities. Her invariable soft landings give rise to a narrative with no breaks or dissonance. Our contributor Fanny Bieth reviews the book here.
The Photobook
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Louis Perreault
Louis Perreault’s ninth book, Vis-à-Vis, fits within the lineage of his practice as a photographer, evidencing a deep attachment to nature that he reveals here in a more direct way. Read Mona Hakim’s review here.
The Photobook
Authors: Marie Perrault | Artists: Mélissa Longpré
An accumulation of bird bodies, carcasses and feathers – victims of predators (or windows) – led Mélissa Longpré to develop a photographic project tinged with tenderness. Our contributor Marie Perrault discusses it here.
The Photobook
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Richard Baillargeon
[April 10, 2024] By Sylvain Campeau. Richard Baillargeon has come out with a new book. Voyagements, parcours, passages et dérives des images covers a creative period encompassing everything he has produced over a four-decade career. In these pages we find, in addition to Baillargeon’s writings produced for the occasion, essays by the thinkers and guides Chantal Boulanger and Guy Mercier and an introduction by Suzanne Paquet…
The Photobook
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Marisa Portolese
[March 13, 2024] By Michel Hardy-Vallée. When you land in a new city, or a new neighbourhood, asking for directions may sometimes garner pearls like this one: “Turn left after the old Perrette corner store, the one they tore down.” The memory of places is much more deeply grounded than are buildings, whose existence obeys the rationale of capitalism more than that of residents’ lives.
The Photobook
Authors: Laurie Milner | Artists: Moyra Davey, Peter Hujar
[February 20, 2024] By Laurie Milner. Moyra Davey’s book The Shabbiness of Beauty (2021) originates in and expands on an exhibition that she curated of her own work and the late Peter Hujar’s.1…
[November 29, 2023] Once again, we’re taking advantage of the year coming to a close to offer a flurry of reviews of photobooks published in Quebec that may not have received all the attention they deserve. The reviews are written by Louis Perreault, with whom we inaugurated this web section in 2021, with a similar project…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Sara A. Tremblay, Silvia Gérome
[December 20, 2023] By Louis Perreault. Books are finishing points. As a form, they seem to say, here is what has been achieved, all paths lead here, and all equivocations end here. Yet, how long they will last – their life expectancy – is impossible to predict…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Louis Perreault
[December 13, 2023] By Louis Perreault. “Nína, who was leaving the local grocery store at that moment, experienced the sound of the landslide as ‘visceral,’ like a primal moan emanating from the earth.” It was late December 2020 and raining prodigiously in Seyðisfjörður, a small port town perched near the lip of a fjord in eastern Iceland…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault
[December 13, 2023] By Louis Perreault. In 2019, the American artist and author Jenny Odell published the delectable book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Beyond its intriguing title, this dense essay deals with sociology, art, and ecology and contains fantastic opportunities to consider new ways of conceiving the world in which we live…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Ewa Monika Zebrowski
[December 5, 2023] By Louis Perreault. We can almost hear the murmur of the countryside filtering in through half-open windows. We imagine this soundtrack crescendoing by a few decibels within these walls, a gentle reverberation mixed with the sound of Alessandro Twombly’s footsteps as he guides the artist Ewa Monika Zebrowski through the house of his late father, the celebrated painter, sculptor, and photographer Cy Twombly…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Hors d’état, Peter Dubinski
[December 5, 2023] By Louis Perreault The history of the photobook has been built around the figures of the artist and the publisher, both essential to the medium. Such individuals sparkle with creativity, influence their peers, and make a river of critics’ ink flow. Artists, of course, are fundamental to photobooks. They provide them with […]
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Kate Hutchinson
[November 29, 2023] By Louis Perreault. Interior, day: an apartment with wide mouldings and timeworn hardwood floors. On the table in the dining room, diffuse light falls on all sorts of objects. A plant sits beside a child’s toy, a large vase filled with water, a bouquet of flowers, and an antique clock…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Hua Jin
[November 29, 2023] By Louis Perreault. The cover of Hua Jin’s book Dundee immediately reveals the ambiguity of what is contained within. A simple made-up definition of the title word, printed in white on the cream-coloured cloth, hints at the poetry infusing the book’s pages: “A place that could be in Scotland or here or elsewhere. The image that we make of where we come from and where we end up.”…
[November 9, 2023] In recent months, three important photobooks have landed in our inbox, and we have chosen to present them together as evidence of the richness and diversity of photographic publishing.
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Bertrand Carrière
[November 9, 2023] By Louis Perreault. Photographers extract from reality fragments of space-time that they see as meaningful. From these shots are then decanted the images with the greatest potential for building a series or sequence. Thus, photographers follow a principle of subtraction: from a larger grouping they patiently distill the essence of the artwork to come. As they conduct this pruning process, their artistic sensibilities are activated, their vision is clarified, their language is defined…
The Photobook
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Michael Flomen
[November 9, 2023] By Michel Hardy-Vallée. As a critic, you’re expected to impartially hand out scorecards with stars, thumbs, or tomatoes to prevent customers from wasting their hard-earned money on “bad” works…
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…
The Photobook
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: Boris Mikhailov
[August 30, 2023] By Érika Nimis. The tone of this book by the photographer Boris Mikhailov (born in Kharkiv in 1938) is established on the front cover, which looks like a page torn from a notebook, with scribbles, stains, and things crossed out…
The Photobook
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Richard Benson
[August 9, 2023] By Michel Hardy-Vallée. One reason we have so many interesting photobooks to review is because the printing industry produces them. Photographers used to be cast aside as mere operators until various changes in attitude by the press, the general public, the art world, education, and even the legal world reinforced and consolidated their role as agents endowed with volition and skill.
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Cristian Ordóñez
[June 22, 2023] By Louis Perreault. Frequency opens, paradoxically, on an image of a closed door, blocked with weathered plywood and fixed in an indefinable temporality. As it does in the photographs that will follow, the diffuse light drops a blanket of silence, pausing the tenacious urban soundtrack…
The Photobook
Authors: Sophie Bertrand | Artists: Normand Rajotte
[March 21, 2023] By Sophie Bertrand. A few weeks ago, during a Sunday stroll in a park in the Lanaudière region, my eye was drawn to a large lump lying not far from the path I was on. The animal’s corpse, just a few metres away, literally blended in with the winter landscape, like a rock, between the entangled trunks and trees humbly withstanding the passage of the seasons…
The Photobook
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Ansel Adams, Mike Mandel
[January 18, 2023] By Michel Hardy-Vallée. Fairy tales and novels of chivalry have the power to normalize royalty – a tenacious institution, despite revolutions and regicides. In photography, Ansel Adams is, in a way, royalty…
The Photobook
Authors: Cheryl Simon | Artists: Justine Kurland
[November 29, 2022] By Cheryl Simon. Justine Kurland’s recent collage-based project represents a new, distinctly material direction, as she is otherwise known for innovative and charged documentary photography: found and staged and stunning tableaux of girls and women, and American life on the edge…
The Photobook
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Justine Kurland
[November 29, 2022] By Michel Hardy-Vallée. So, let’s review: Valerie Solanas wrote the radical feminist SCUM Manifesto (SCUM stands for Society for Cutting Up Men) in 1967 to protest how men were leading the world (to failure) and then shot Andy Warhol in 1968 because he was controlling her life and had, in her view, plagiarized a play that she had written…
The Photobook
Authors: Luce Lebart | Artists: David Thomson
[November 2, 2022] By Luce Lebart Dry Hole is the new opus of archival photographs published by British Morel and AMC. The 464 pages of images with deep blacks and illuminated whites lead readers into the meanders of daily life in the countryside and small towns of North America in the early twentieth century. We […]
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Moe Suzuki
[August 30, 2022] By Louis Perreault. Opening the hard cover of Sokohi, which slides easily on the metal-ring binding, we discover the tight reframing of an archival photograph showing a boy’s eye.
The Photobook
Authors: Jérôme Delgado, Louis Perreault, Michel Hardy-Vallée, Zoë Tousignant
[August 27, 2022] Round table discussion presented by Ciel Variable at the 2022 Papier Art Fair. The discussion was held in French.
The Photobook
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Edward Hillel, Isaac Diggs
[June 20, 2022] By Michel Hardy-Vallée. Outside of Detroit, it’s most likely that the symbols of this post-industrial city are its ruins: of houses, large and small; of automobile plants; of grandiose theatres…
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Book Reviews
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Gregory Halpern
May 18, 2022 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — In the photography world, the book continues to play an essential role of dissemination. Yet, beyond simply being a tool for promotion of a photographer’s work, the book is seen by many as a creative space on its own…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Kikuji Kawada
[April 21, 2022] By Louis Perreault. Kikuji Kawada began to work on Chizu in 1958, when he went to Hiroshima for the magazine Shūkan Shinshō to photograph Ken Domon, who had just published a book titled after the ill-fated city…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Betty Bogaert
[December 16, 2021] By Louis Perreault. Over the Vercors massif and the Haute-Maurienne valley roll heavy clouds, saturated with what may be tomorrow’s weather. Night falls slowly. In a hut overlooking a grassy expanse, tea leaves are dropped into boiling water, and the creaking of old…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Josée Pedneault
[December 16, 2021] By Louis Perreault. Scientific accounts explaining the origin of the universe have always been confronted with beliefs arising from the times within which they were pronounced. Although the great laws of physics have probably elucidated the mystery of the creation of…
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Guillaume Tomasi
[December 15, 2021] By Louis Perreault. Certain events transform our lives, leaving indelible marks of their passage. The usual and the common are no longer what they used to be, and the people around us are suddenly thrown into a new light…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Sarah Boutin
[December 9, 2021] By Louis Perreault. Artist Sarah Boutin’s Prendre fin1 isn’t, properly speaking, a photobook; it’s more like a creative journal or an artist book…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Louis Perreault
[December 7, 2021] By Louis Perreault. “Human experience is a memory instantly archived and digitized.”1 This statement sets the table for an adventure in the world of artist Antoine Giroux. At first, we resist the statement…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Hubert Gaudreau
[November 30, 2021] By Louis Perreault. Two golden circles overlap, like a Venn diagram, on the front of Hubert Gaudreau’s softcover book Les autres imaginaires1. The theory of groups that Gaudreau proposes is indeed composed of interconnected elements. That is, as long as we are ready to enter these…
Authors: Louis Perreault
[November 30, 2021] By Louis Perreault. In Mosquitia, a coastal region in northeast Honduras, the “woman of the waters,” better known locally as liwa mairin, reigns. The daring men who dive into the depths of the Caribbean Sea to catch sea cucumbers and other fine edibles too often pay the price of her curse…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Simon Émond
[November 23, 2021] By Louis Perreault. On the cover of Rebâtir le ciel, the terms associated with different gender identities are intermingled with those of astronomy. Androgyny, near-Earth object, gender dysphoria, black galaxy, lesbophobia, telluric planet, biological sex, and other radio-astronomical bodies form a sort of long poem…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Jessica Auer
[November 23, 2021] By Louis Perreault. In Jessica Auer’s most recent film, Shore Power, one scene could act as prelude for Looking North. We see a large window, opening out to a calm body of water. After a moment, on the right, a huge ferry appears and then crosses the image very slowly…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Anne-Marie Proulx
[November 23, 2021] By Louis Perreault. Stretching out on the black asphalt are rays of hard light that have pierced through the foliage of a white ash tree. Farther on, cobblestones, aged by several hundred years of foot, car, and horse traffic, suggest an old American city, which is not named…