Ciel variable

In Goose Village, Marisa Portolese unearths a Montreal neighbourhood that no longer exists, reconstructing a family story in images, based on exploration of archives and oral histories. Read Michel Hardy-Vallée’s thoughts about her work here.

Moyra Davey and the canons of photography – it’s a long story, which continues with The Shabbiness of Beauty. Here, Davey combines her vision with Peter Hujar’s. Laurie Milner discovers what is distinct about each of their worlds. Read her review here.

Mines – their depth and operations – are at the heart of Louie Palu’s emblematic series Cage Call, created between 1991 and 2003. The Image Centre recovered Palu’s photographs from oblivion for an exhibition, reviewed here by Siobhan Angus.


This issue’s dossier features portfolios by Éric Tabuchi/Nelly Monnier, Suzanne Lafont and Bertrand Carrière. Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS is also available on our online store.

To wrap up the year, we offer a look back at the Rencontres de la photogrpahie d’Arles. Read about what caught contributor Alain Depocas’s eye.

… of reviews highlighting photobooks from Quebec artists that may not have received all the attention they deserve. We entrusted these critical examinations to Louis Perreault, who has the eye of a passionate reader. Find out which books he picked out.

Ruth Kaplan focused her interest on the last kilometres leading to the border crossing at Roxham, where a nexus of ephemeral interactions emerge between migrants, volunteers, taxi drivers and police officers to prepare the last passage. Sophie Mangano introduces us to this work.

Discover recent online content. New entries are added every week. Join us on Twitter to be kept up to date.

Martin Bureau. Borders and Walls — Sophie Bertrand

Martin Bureau. Borders and Walls — Sophie Bertrand

March 7, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — Par Sophie Bertrand. “The number of walls has tripled since the Cold War, and it has kept growing since 2001; it now consists of almost 30,000 km of armed borders.”1 This observation, made in 2013 by the researchers of the Chaire Raoul-Dandurand en études stratégiques et diplomatiques at the Université du Québec à Montréal, during a conference on issues around walled borders, conveys much more than a malaise inherited from history…

CONTACT 2019. Violence — Jill Glessing

CONTACT 2019. Violence — Jill Glessing

February 28, 2023 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Jill Glessing. Violence runs through our lives, experienced directly or through media representations. We are subject to its power to varying degrees depending on our geographical location, race, class, gender, and access to high-speed internet. We are well acquainted with the variety of ways that humans inflict harm – whether physical, social, or psychological – upon one another…

About the Face: The Photographs of Dave Heath — Pierre Dessureault

About the Face: The Photographs of Dave Heath — Pierre Dessureault

February 13, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Pierre Dessureault. In a body of work accumulated over more than sixty years, Dave Heath (1931–2016), a Canadian photographer born in the United States, challenged the qualities of the photographic medium and its techniques. He constantly probed, through images, Montaigne’s dictum that “every man carries the entire form of the human condition.”1

Luigi Ghirri. Flatness and Its Frame — Stephen Horne

Luigi Ghirri. Flatness and Its Frame — Stephen Horne

February 6, 2024 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Stephen Horne. The Map and The Territory is a large and intricate exhibition of colour photographs by the late Italian artist Luigi Ghirri at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.1 No doubt the curator of the exhibition, James Lingwood, adopted this title following up on a note that Ghirri wrote in 1970 in which he explained that “his aim was not to make photographs, but rather charts and maps.”2

Erasmus Schröter, Contest — Andreas Höll, A Crisis of Masculinity? The Gradual Liquefaction of Identities

Erasmus Schröter, Contest — Andreas Höll, A Crisis of Masculinity? The Gradual Liquefaction of Identities

November 15, 2023 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Andreas Höll. Our image of the world has always been very fragile, and it has severely jolted on several occasions. Sigmund Freud, for example, cited the three insults to humanity that overturned our view of the world: Copernicus expected us to believe that we weren’t at the centre of the universe; Darwin proved we were descended from apes and warned us not to assume we were the pinnacle of creation; and Freud himself revealed that, following the discovery of the unconscious, we were no longer master even in our own house…

In Recent Issues

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