[Fall 2026]
NEXTDOOR
By Louie Villanueva-Eyre
Contemporary Calgary
05.02.2026 — 05.03.2026
[EXCERPT]
During a forum at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2011, the photographer John Pilson remarked, “Anybody listening to this conversation would come away from it thinking that photography is in kind of a crisis.” He was referring to anxieties around the loss of materiality of and social trust in photography, along with a shifting definition of the medium. At the time of that conversation, Calgary had no dedicated contemporary art or photography museum, and critical debates concerning photography were still anchored to institutional centres elsewhere.
Sixteen years later, photography still appears to be in crisis. Neural-network image generation and increasingly accessible computer-generated imagery further destabilize its relationship with indexicality and truth. Outside the medium, global crises intensify the sense of instability: Donald Trump’s trade wars and threats to annex Canada into a U.S. empire underscore how fragile borders, agreements, and shared assumptions can be. The crisis that Pilson identified has not abated; it has migrated and multiplied.
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 133 – INTIMACIES ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here : NEXTDOOR ]
Nominated for the 2022 Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award, Louie Villanueva-Eyre is a photographer and writer based in Calgary. Working slowly, he approaches photography as a kind of ritual: deliberate and attuned to the emotional texture of the spaces and people he photographs.