Documentary photography has neither physical frontiers nor subject limitations. Although it is vast and varied, however, all documentary photography shares one raw material: the encounter. Cameras in tow – no doubt much more than just one camera and its lens – documentary photographers go well beyond simple documentation. Their stories are the result of an iron will, great patience, and sensitivity to everything that lives and breathes.

To launch this series devoted to a (more) documentary approach to photography, Ciel variable had celebrated the strong work of six artists (three women and three men). In this first survey of an all-Canadian panorama of documentary photography, the themes of people in motion (in groups or one at a time) and the quest for identity recur.

Charles-Frédérick Ouellet seeks the coureur des bois in the collective memory and the landscape of Quebec, and Pat Kane roves through the Northwest Territories to discover the healthy relationship that Indigenous people have with their environment. Geneviève Thibault and Sandra Larochelle follow the last moments of two communities on the verge of dissolution – Thibault the Ursuline nuns of Quebec City, and Larochelle the artists in the building at 305 rue Bellechasse in Montreal. Valérian Mazataud and Vanessa Tignanelli turn their lenses upon people with established roots. Mazataud walks the hallways of Habitations Jeanne-Mance, a model of social housing in Montreal, while Tignanelli visits vagabonds, proud of their marginality, on the west coast.

We will regularly add portfolios to expand this panorama of contemporary documentary practices. To start 2021, we suggest Sébastien Michaud’s look at the lumber industry, for which he spent five years observing the forests of Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean and spending time with those who work there.