An Interview by James D. Campbell

Robert Walker was born in Montreal in 1945. He graduated in visual arts from Sir George Williams University in the late 1960s. In 1975, he attended a workshop given by American photographer Lee Friedlander that would be transformative, and he embraced colour street photography as an aesthetic that he is exploring to this day.

In 1978, he moved to New York City, where he made Times Square a worthy thematic subject of his lens. His first book, New York Inside Out, was published in 1984 with an introduction by William S. Burroughs. He has exhibited widely in the United States, Canada, and Europe. His images have appeared in a variety of publications, including Color is Power (Thames & Hud­son, 2000), which included a wide array of street photographs taken over three decades in Mont­real, New York, Warsaw, Paris, Rome, Toronto, and else­where.

Walker’s exhibition Griffintown is nothing short of a revelation: a living portrait of seismic shifts in one of Montreal’s oldest neighbourhoods, poised between dilapidation and squalor, on the one hand, and bright, shiny, new utopian architecture, on the other. The tension (often chromatic) between past and present is felt in twenty large-format photographs (supplemented by a projection of a hundred others), with documentary photographs culled from the Museum’s collection.

Griffintown is the first in a new program of photographic commissions at the McCord called Evolving Montreal that aims to document Montreal’s continuing urban makeover.

JDC: You were born in Montreal and it is probably no exaggeration to suggest that you know the city inside out. Here you dilate on its Griffintown neighbourhood. Why Griffintown? Was it the wealth of historic buildings or its seductive palette?

RW: Suzanne Sauvage, director of the McCord Museum, and curator of photography Hélène Samson first approached me with the concept of initiating a series of exhibitions called Montreal in Mutation, a photographic portrait of neighbourhoods in Montreal that were undergoing dramatic transformation. Being the first photographer selected, I had the luxury of choosing any area that appealed to me photographically, but I felt a little ambivalence and trepidation, not really knowing what to expect.

JDC: You have the enviable reputation of being our most important colour photographer. Could you talk about colour and what Griffintown brought to the table?

RW: After I took a workshop with Lee Friedlander in 1975, I intuited that the creative possibilities of black-and-white photography were becoming exhausted or quickly used up. So, I immediately switched to colour. Very little colour photography was published in books or magazine at that time, so you were on your own. There was no one to emulate, so my work isn’t derivative of anyone else. At the time the McCord Museum approached me, my only relationship with Griffintown was driving down Mountain Street to get to Costco or a rare visit to see my friends John Heward and Sylvia Safdie at their loft on Murray Street. After my first foray into the area I was completely converted and enthusiastically embraced the project. I had expected to see a lot of run-down row houses and dilapidated warehouses, but to my great surprise I found a beehive of colourful construction activity, with all the pictorial elements that I crave to compose my pictures. Cranes, bulldozers, scaffolding, bright-yellow insulation material, con­­struction workers running around in fluorescent orange outfits – what more could I ask for? Con­trasting with all this were the nineteenth-century structures associated with the long-gone industrial activity along the Lachine Canal. I felt like I was back in the Garden of Eden!

JDC: Your recent book, Color is Power, reads like an endlessly celebratory manifesto. How does the work included there relate to the Griffintown project?

RW: Whether I photograph in Times Square or in Warsaw or flowers in the botanical gardens, I bring the same compositional strategies to bear. First, I ignore the literal subject matter; then, I break the subject down into its abstract components in terms of line, shape, and colour. I am primarily interested in making colour photographs – documenting visual facts is a secondary consideration.

JDC: Griffintown has undergone major changes in recent years. Indeed, your photographs summon up a sense of change and flux. What has its evolution meant to you?

RW: I photographed the surface of Griffintown – how it looks to me here and now. I tried to do it accu­rately and honestly. While working on it, I realized there were all kinds of urban planning issues involving historical conservation, public transportation, urban green spaces, and so on, but all these problems were outside my mandate. Others with more expertise in those areas would be more qualified to take them on.

JDC: The images can be surreal. Take this image, Rue Wellington, Griffintown, 2018, with the white cars in foreground, pool and spire seemingly receding.

RW: Visual ambiguity is always an interesting device for creating an engaging image. In this case, the advertising backdrop provides a trompe-l’oeil illusion of the glamour of condo life, while the two white cars remind one of the gritty reality.

JDC: This other image, Rue Ottawa, Griffintown, 2018, is an interesting juxtaposition of a massive construction machine in relation to the office tower at the left.

RW: I usually try to photograph on bright sunny days when the colours seem to pop. Here we have a flat blue “silkscreened” sky with primary colour highlights of red, green, and yellow. I impose a grid-like structure, similar to a Mondrian painting.

JDC: Rue de la montagne, Griffintown, 2018 is a quintessential “building” image.

RW: This image describes the activities occurring in Griffintown symbolically rather than descriptively. The junk in the dumpster is ironically contrasted with the photo on the side of the renovation truck. “Out with the old, into the new” might be a fitting caption.

JDC: In a sense, your Griffintown work as a whole reads as a sort of critique.

RW: If it reads as a critique, I think it’s because the photographs speak for themselves. I approached the project without any hidden political agenda.

JDC: As you noted, our mutual friend the jazzman and abstractionist John Heward lived on Murray Street, not far from the Darling Foundry, where we both served. The works from the McCord certainly summon up some ghosts for me.

RW: Yes, John and I went back to the days of the Véhicule Art gallery in the early 1970s. It’s funny you should mention ghosts, because the ghost of Mary Gallagher has been roaming around the corner of William and Murray Streets looking for her head for the last hundred years – but that’s another story.

JDC: Evolving Montreal is unrelenting in its examination of how the neighbourhood has changed and is changing still. The images in the exhibition suggest that you are trying to find the lost matrix of Griffintown, and you’re not immune to some high emotions as you do so. Am I right?

RW: I was born in the working-class neighbourhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, which has also experienced dramatic change since the time when it was designated the “Pittsburgh of the North,” so any sentimentality I have to expend is directed there. I superficially got to know the calèche drivers and stable workers over the time of the project and became quite sympathetic to their plight. Here is an industry that has thrived for hundreds of years and they are abruptly being legislated out of business without compensation. There seems to be something unfair about it.

JDC: You said you were lukewarm about the project going in. Coming out, how do you feel now?

RW: Yes, I was lukewarm at the beginning but it turned out to be a dream project.

JDC: With Griffintown behind you now, what’s next?

RW: I’ve turned my gaze to the Gay Village. That stretch of St. Catherine Street between St. Denis and Papineau seems to be a place where the pulse of the city beats faster. It attracts a wide variety of characters, many of them desperate, others theatrically flamboyant – a fertile ground for good pictures.