[Winter 2026]
Michel-Hardy Vallée, Focus on Quebec Photography
An interview by Charles Guilbert
[EXCERPT]
Who would have thought that one of the most stimulating – and one of the first – histories of Quebec photography would be the result of an educational project for college students, published and put online by the Centre collégial de développement de matériel didactique (CCDMD)? Mise au point sur la photographie québécoise, with its sixty-nine case studies and ten thematic essays, is essential reading for anyone interested in the medium and its fascinating evolution. During my interview with Michel Hardy-Vallée, who is the project leader for the CCDMD, as well as a historian, researcher, and critic of photography, I wanted to understand the orientations, criteria, and values that underlay this impressive collective work.
charles guilbert: When you came up with the idea for Mise au point sur la photographie québécoise, what was your top goal?
michel hardy-vallée: When Flavie Boucher, a professor in the photography program at the Cégep de Matane, submitted the project to the CCDMD, she pointed out that there’s no synthetic college-level reference book that approaches the history of photography on the basis of the Quebec corpus. There are excellent books on particular periods or movements, but none gives a grasp of the entire arc of Quebec photography. Flavie had put together a solid draft table of contents, which was complemented by the team of eleven writers, then by respondents from some thirty departments in the system (photography, visual arts, art history, film, and French) who lent their support to the project. What we wanted to do was present the sweep of history – from 1839, when the daguerreotype was first presented to the Académie des sciences in France, to the present – without leaving out any periods, so that we could give a good comprehension of the continual transformation of photography. We were trying to prove that, contrary to what critics were writing in the 1970s – Gilles Toupin, for example – Quebec photography wasn’t born during that decade.
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 131 – Collecting ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Focus on Quebec Photography]
Since 1987, Charles Guilbert’s writings on art have been published in newspapers, magazines, and exhibition catalogues. He is also a multidisciplinary artist (visual arts, music, video, literature) whose works have been presented in ten countries and are in museum collections. In 2023, he published Le bord coupant du jour (Herbes rouges).