This section enables you to view documents recently put online: articles and essays written specifically for the Web or reposted from recent issues, reactions to articles that have appeared on the website or in the magazine, new reviews, and more.
The section is still in development. Keep visiting!
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…
Documentary photography
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Tim Franco
[October 19, 2021] By Johanna Mizgala Tim Franco derived the title for his photographic project, presented as a book, from a term in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen-Eighty-Four. In Newspeak, the officially sanctioned language of Orwell’s oppressive super-state Oceania, an “unperson” is an individual who has been not only executed but also erased from all […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Denis Farley
[September 7, 2021] A period of staying home, barely leaving the cocoon, can be a fertile time. At least, experienced photographer Denis Farley seems to have taken full advantage. He talks about it in an interview on the platform Ffoto, after more than a year of COVID-19 restrictions. “I hadn’t much choice but to concentrate […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable
[September 2, 2021] It takes courage and solidarity, along with resourcefulness and a measure of composure, to cope with the terrible events that have battered Haiti, and these qualities shine through the pictures taken after the mid-August earthquake. AyiboPost – “more than an online media outlet, a platform for intellectual self-defence” – published a photo […]
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 […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Jeff Bierk
[May 6, 2021] A twenty-fifth edition shouldn’t be just one more event. The twenty-fifth edition of CONTACT, the Toronto photography festival born in 1996, had an air of renewal, due to the public health context. Without an opening date – “dates pending,” we read – most of the exhibitions will end up stretching beyond the […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Alfredo Bosco
[April 28, 2021] For ten years, the Humanitarian Visa d’or Award has been highlighting photography in the context of armed conflict. To underline this first decade of the competition, which it runs with the Visa Pour l’Image photojournalism festival, the International Committee of the Red Cross has put online a “retrospective” featuring photographs and statements […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Michel Huneault
[April 20, 2021] The dozen images don’t cover a year of the pandemic, but they convey its tone amply: beyond the tragedies and the fears, life finds a way to continue. Upon invitation from the McCord Museum, photographer Michel Huneault threw himself into the fray, as they say. Yes, he had access to intensive care […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Mads Nissen
[April 15, 2021] The photograph of the year chosen by World Press Photo, a huge competition that honours what has been published in preceding months, featured, for the 2021 edition, the pandemic. No surprise there. And yet, the winning image, unveiled on April 15, is a digest of all the pain in the world, sufferings […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable
[April 14, 2021] “Certain images still have the ability to feed our imagination with something other than consumerist desires!” proclaims Valérie Jouve, previous recipient of the Prix Niépce. Charlotte Abramow, whose Instagram account boasts 200,000 followers, declares, “Images are an inventive torchlight that is shone on a subject.” Yael Burstein says that she’s “enchanted by […]
Artists' Projects
Artists: Ewa Monika Zebrowski
[April 7, 2021] Mourning the untimely loss of a dear friend and art writer, James D. Campbell, photographer Ewa Monika Zebrowski has created a narrative that considers the impermanence of life, as reflected in images of a Mediterranean island.
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable
[February 23, 2021] Facing the closure of exhibition spaces and the uncertainty regarding their reopening or the health restrictions that will have to be adopted, dissemination on virtual platforms has grown more important, even though it has involved simply putting works online. New York artist and author Magali Duzant takes the pulse of the issues […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur
[January 21, 2021] As reclusive as most of us, yet prolific, Isabelle Hayeur began 2021 by producing video after video, available for view on the Vimeo platform. The context of the pandemic and the accompanying health measures first inspired her to make the foggy Hygieia, named after the goddess of health and cleanliness, then the […]
Documentary photography
Authors: Emmanuel Simard | Artists: Sébastien Michaud
[January 14, 2020] By Emmanuel Simard For five years, impelled by his exploration of “issues related to nordicity [and to] the transformation of the land by human activity,”[1] photographer Sébastien Michaud travelled through the dense forests covering the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region and became involved in the lives of dozens of lumber industry workers. He took […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Tony Fouhse
[January 13, 2021] Tony Fouhse, an Ottawa-based photographer known for the projects he produces in his own city, including portraits of drug addicts – (re)read the Ciel variable article published in 2011 – could be a model of creativity during these lockdown times. Three quarters of the images in his recent book After the Fact […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Jonk
[December 8, 2020] The monumental ceiling, full of detail and appearing circular (is this a photographic effect?), overwhelms its glassed-in – and, it should be mentioned empty – space. It towers, barely held up by its single base: two walls and a column. This is the architectural work. The title labels it a “coffee shop” […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Edward Burtynsky
[November 24, 2020] After forty years recording the twisted relationships between humans and nature, Edward Burtynsky is thinking about his posterity. The former student at Ryerson University, in Toronto, is promising a huge donation to the university’s museum. The Ryerson Image Centre will therefore house the largest Burtynsky collection. The donation will be made as […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Joshua Bonnetta
[November 12, 2020] The Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal is kicking off, and, thanks to the pandemic, everything will take place online for three weeks – rather than the usual ten days. Ciel variable wanted to make its presence known, and our suggestion for you is Joshua Bonnetta’s very photogenic The Two Sights. Bonnetta, […]
Documentary photography
Authors: Reilley Bishop-Stall | Artists: Pat Kane
[October 27, 2020] By Reilley Bishop-Stall In the spring of 2019, Canada’s Changing Climate Report confirmed that the country’s northern regions are warming at three times the global average.[1] With permafrost thawing, ice caps melting, and rising ocean temperatures threatening plant, marine, and animal life, the Canadian North is easily and often invoked as […]
Documentary photography
Authors: Gentiane La France | Artists: Geneviève Thibault
[October 27, 2020] Par Gentiane La France Photographer Geneviève Thibault is developing an ethnology-oriented documentary approach that takes her into the daily life of others. Focusing on domestic objects, which she highlights with a soft, diffuse flash, she uncovers the organized disorder in the privacy of the abodes that she visits. Thibault immerses herself […]
Documentary photography
Authors: Sophie Bertrand
[October 27, 2020] By Sophie Bertrand One summer, photojournalist Valérian Mazataud was invited to photograph the tenants of the Corporation d’habitation Jeanne-Mance, situated in downtown Montreal. Mazataud saw this as more than a commission; it was a photographic mission that would enable him to encounter the different Montreal communities residing in what was dubbed […]
Documentary photography
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Charles-Frédérick Ouellet
[October 27, 2020] By Sylvain Campeau The title of a photographic series is the first contact that we have with it. It therefore, inevitably, determines what we will think of the photographs, and what we will find in them. This relationship, though primordial, often goes unnoticed. Paradoxically, that means that the title has played its […]
Documentary photography
Authors: Samuel Larochelle | Artists: Sandra Larochelle
[October 27, 2020] By Samuel Larochelle When the grinding gears of gentrification sounded the knell for the artists’ studios at 305, rue Bellechasse, photographer Sandra Larochelle quickly went to meet with the artists in order to immortalize their experience in the building. It was a way for her to pay tribute to the location […]
Documentary photography
Authors: Emily Bremner | Artists: Vanessa Tignanelli
[October 27, 2020] By Emily Bremner The dimly lit room, resembling something of a tavern, serves as an entrance into Vanessa Tignanelli’s Wilds of the West series. The young man in the photograph – RJ – is seen wearing suspenders. His black-rimmed hat, tilted to rest on the back of his head, reveals both […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Alec Soth
[October 20, 2020] “We all confront the parameters of our cage eventually. What we do when we reach those bars helps define us.” This excerpt from The Parameters of Our Cage, published in 2020 by British publisher MACK, is an apt summary of a project that developed as COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: Amélie Laurence Fortin
[September 16, 2020] Canadian Artist Amélie Laurence Fortin was supposed to spend all twelve months of 2020 outside home, having a sojourn at Quebec’s studio in Berlin and making her way through Europe from east to west. But she didn’t foresee the springtime lockdown. Stuck in Warsaw, her bad luck turned to good: she had […]
Posts
Authors: Ciel variable | Artists: doublespace photography
[September 8, 2020] In August, works by the Toronto architectural photography collective doublespace (Amanda Large and Younes Bounhar) received worldwide recognition. The collective’s images of the Horizon residential complex in the Utah mountains earned it two photography awards – jury and public – at the ArchitizerA+Awardscompetititon. Designed by the Halifax firm MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, the […]