[Summer 2026]
A Vivid Framing of Exchanges
by Mona Hakim
[EXCERPT]
With his enigmatic and disturbing mises en scène, his stark truthfulness, and his inventive strategies that blur the borders between reality and fiction, Donigan Cumming shakes the very foundations of documentary photography. Captured in the raw settings of daily life, his quirkily posed characters draw viewers into a state of ambivalence that intermixes curiosity, discomfort, and affection. His tragicomic black-and-white shots testify to his pointed observation of human behaviour. In Primer, his seventeenth publication, he forsakes the disconcerted and disconcerting world to which he has accustomed us and takes a different path – one that is just as destabilizing. Among the departures from his norm are colour, cunning, the unusual subject, and the book’s layout and format.
Presented for the first time in the exhibition Le livre photographique au Québec: perspectives actuelles, Primer stood out among the sixty books on display. It was difficult not to be attracted to the form and content of this unusual object, which opened vertically onto pictures of full-length figures printed across stiffened double-page spreads. There was a mischievous pleasure in handling the book’s large, stiff pages featuring a gallery of individuals with almost identical gestures, all taken in the same place. Of note is that the shots were made over a two-month period in fall 1980. By revisiting his negatives after more than four decades, taking a rather playful approach to bringing them to light, and choosing such a surprising title, Cumming certainly highlights the eccentricity of the work and piques readers’ curiosity. The book’s opening pages leave us wondering about the exact identity of these people pulling cash from a pocket, wallet, or handbag in a setting that’s not yet specified. Later on, hand-to-hand exchanges of keychains, tickets, and money clearly indicate transactions. Cumming had set himself up in a parking-lot attendant’s cramped cabin, camera on his knees, to capture the moment when car owners approached the clerk on duty. He and the employee are crammed together in this small space, and their fields of vision overlap. Using a wide-angle lens, Cumming introduces us, in our turn, to this confined area, our eyes dazzled by our close proximity to the figures before us.
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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 132 – TABLEAUX ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: TITRE ARTICLE]
Donigan Cumming was born in 1947 in Virginia and has lived in Montreal since 1970. He began to make his mark soon after graduating from Concordia University with his first series of works, Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography (1986), which was exhibited in New York and Paris. Since then, he has employed a variety of media to address taboos in representation and photographic truth. His provocative works have been the subject of theoretical and analytical essays in exhibition catalogues and many other publications.
www.donigancumming.com/
Mona Hakim is a curator and art historian and critic. The author of essays and reviews, she has contributed to Ciel variable for many years. She is interested in various issues related to contemporary photography, with a focus on the Quebec scene. As a curator, she has organized more than twenty-five exhibitions.