Photography: Too Fragile for the Public Patrimony? – Stéphane Bouchard

Ciel variable 82 – PUBLIC ART | Essays
Authors: Stéphane Bouchard

[Summer 2009] by Stéphane Bouchard Of all the creative support programs, Quebec’s policy for the integration of the arts with architecture and the environment (commonly known as the 1 percent program) offers some of the best visibility, as well as terrific financial support, to artists. This program allots unequalled sums to bring contemporary art into […]

Negotiating the Collection in the Street : Reading the McCord Museum’s Outdoor Interventions – Johanna Mizgala

Ciel variable 82 – PUBLIC ART | Essays
Authors: Johanna Mizgala | Artists: Brian Merrett, David Miller, Laurie Kang, Louise Abbott, Nicholas Hoban, Notman & Sandham, William Notman, William Notman & Son, Zoe Yuristy

[Summer 2009] Relevance is a word that permeates discussions about the role of museums within the social fabric of community. As repositories, museums have a primary function of cultivation not only of objects but also of a public to engage with them. Museums amass, describe, preserve, and, ultimately, display facets of their contents, arranged and […]

At Play in the Frame – Stephen Horne

Ciel variable 82 – PUBLIC ART | Essays
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Ken Lum, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Rebecca Belmore

[Summer 2009] In Montreal, as in many cities around the world, works of art have often been placed in “public” urban spaces. In some cases, the placement of works is accomplished through channels of bureaucratic control or corporate interest, while in other cases artists have thought of their actions as interventions in those spheres, even […]

The City: Always Already Photographic . . . – Suzanne Paquet

Ciel variable 82 – PUBLIC ART | Essays
Authors: Suzanne Paquet | Artists: Jean-François Cantin, Ken Lum, Michel Lemieux, Nicolas Baier, Thomas Kneubühler, Victor Pilon

[Summer 2009] The world identifies with the quintessence of photographs. This identification does not occur for no reason. For the world itself is composed of a photographic face. . . . the world has become the photographic present, and the photographic present is fully perpetuated. ⎯ Siegfried Kracauer, 19271 Although photographs are generally flat, they […]

The Private Photo Albums of Hugh Le Caine – Alexandre Robertson

Ciel variable 81 - MADE IN CHINA | Essays
Authors: Alexandre Robertson | Artists: Hughes Le Caine

[Spring 2009] “… a change in time is enough to re-create the world and ourselves.” — Marcel ProustDespite his pioneering role in the development of musique concrète, Hugh Le Caine (1914–77), a well-known physicist, inventor of electronic musical instruments, and self-taught composer, remains a relatively obscure figure: information about him is limited almost exclusively to […]

Remains and Disappearances The Work of Oscar Muñoz – Elizabeth Matheson

Ciel variable 81 - MADE IN CHINA | Essays
Authors: Elizabeth Matheson | Artists: Oscar Muñoz

[Spring 2009] We live in an age of disappearances, a time of loss and change, with mass extinctions and vanishing eco-regions. These profound, sinister planetary transformations remind us of the intimate link between ourselves and our actions in the visible world. Yet it seems as if this rapid unravelling has left us dumb with dread and […]

39e Rencontres d’Arles, Christian Lacroix et ses invités : un regard anthropologique sur la photographie de mode – Serge Allaire

Ciel variable 80 - IMAGE BANKS | Essays
Authors: Serge Allaire

[Fall 2008] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

The weight of photographic history: THE YVES BEAUREGARD COLLECTION – Zoë Tousignant

Ciel variable 80 - IMAGE BANKS | Essays
Authors: Zoë Tousignant | Artists: Yves Beauregard

[Fall 2008] by Zoë Tousignant From September 25, 2008, to January 4, 2009, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) is presenting Quebec City and its Photographers, 1850–1908: The Yves Beauregard Collection, the first extensive exhibition of early Quebec photography to be organized by the museum in over twenty years. Quebec City and its […]

From Image Bank to Morris/Trasov Archive – Vincent Bonin

Ciel variable 80 - IMAGE BANKS | Essays
Authors: Vincent Bonin | Artists: General Idea, Marcel Duchamp, Pedro Friedeberg, Robert Filliou, Vincent Trasov

[Fall 2008] by Vincent Bonin In 1967, Jack Chambers of London, Ontario, received a letter from the National Gallery of Canada informing him that its staff was beginning to assemble a bank of two thousand slides on Canadian art and asking for his permission to reproduce the image of one of his works. He was […]

Preservation of Artworks in the Era of Obsolescence – Jean Gagnon

Ciel variable 79 - COLOURS OF THE CITY | Essays
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: Gary Hill, Jim Campbell, Nam June Paik

[Summer 2008] by Jean Gagnon My father, like many in his generation,1 was a big fan of family photographs. Anything and everything was an excuse to take “slides,” as he called them. We were living in Quebec City, and, aside from the pictures taken at Christmas and on summer trips to Maine, he amassed good documentation […]

Photographic Projects for the Web, Digital Photo Albums – Sylvie Parent

Ciel variable 79 - COLOURS OF THE CITY | Essays
Authors: Sylvie Parent | Artists: Beat Brogle, Ethan Ham, Marika Dermineur, Philippe Zimmermann, Reynald Drouhin, Stéphane Degoutin, Timothé Rolin

[Summer 2008] by Sylvie Parent Thanks to the growing popularity of digital cameras, with their direct connectivity to computers, the number of images sent by e-mail and of photographs published on the network has been growing exponentially. The rapid appropriation of these technologies by the public has given rise to increasingly widespread activities such as […]

Twenty Years of Ciel variable – Part Two – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 78 - COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY | Essays
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Spring 2008] To complement the first part of our look back at the first twenty years of the magazine, published in our last issue, we want here to emphasize two relatively obscure aspects of our history. The first one is the contribution of photographers to the very first version of the magazine, when its mandate […]

Montreal Collects, Contemporary Photography: The LaRochelle and Taillefer collections – James Campbell

Ciel variable 78 - COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY | Essays
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Carlos & Jason Sanchez, Edward Burtynsky, Geoffrey James, Janita Eyre, Loretta Lux, Louis Joncas, Marion Landry, Matthieu Brouillard, Mitch Epstein, Nan Goldin, Pablo Ferrer, Pablo Zutela Zahr, Pascal Grandmaison, Richard Misrach, Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, Rodney Graham, Sarah Morris, Scott McFarland, Stephanie Schneider, William Christenberry

[Spring 2008] by James Campbell Interest in contemporary photography has reached a fever pitch. In 2006, at Sotheby’s in New York, a huge colour print by Andreas Gursky (dating from 1999) went on the block and sold for $2,256,000. Six months earlier, Richard Prince’s seminal work Untitled (Cowboy), a 1989 Ektacolor print of the Marlboro man, […]

TWENTY YEARS OF CIEL VARIABLE: Twenty Years of Photography – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 77 – CULTURAL TOURISM | Essays
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Fall 2007] by Jacques Doyon This is the first part of our review of twenty years of Ciel variable. It offers an overview of the metamorphoses that the magazine has had over the years as photographic practices evolved, their field of application broadened, they were increasingly recognized by the art world, and their institutional environment […]

Photographic Projects for the Web: Site Recognition – Sylvie Parent

Ciel variable 77 – CULTURAL TOURISM | Essays
Authors: Sylvie Parent | Artists: Charles Pratt, Dan Phiffer, Don Sinclair, Kati London, Marketa Bankova, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Ran Tao, Thomas Duc

[Fall 2007] by Sylvie Parent An awareness of geography has never been totally absent from the Web. At first, however, it tended to be obscured behind utopian discourses on planetary connectivity. As the early enthusiasm about the Internet developed, regional places and specificities tended to become blurred. In recent years, though, free, user-friendly cartography tools […]

Du statique au dynamique, projets photographiques pour le Web – Sylvie Parent

Ciel variable 76 - MAPPING | Essays
Authors: Sylvie Parent | Artists: Isabelle Hayeur, Karen Trask

This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available. Summary In this essay, the author looks into photographic practices of recent years that use the fluid space of the World Wide Web as their production and exhibition medium, forgoing the static quality of printed images. The text presents a selection of works […]

Le World Press Photo ou le photojournalisme au Salon – Vincent Lavoie

Ciel variable 74 - LOGOS | Essays
Authors: Vincent Lavoie | Artists: George Merillon

[Winter 2006-2007] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract The World Press Photo grand prize, one of the most important distinctions awarded in the photojournalism field, has been handed out every year since 1955 to the person who makes […]

Recollecting home, Gabor Szilasi’s photographs of Exile and Return – Sharon Murray

Ciel variable 73 - THEATRE OF MELANCHOLIA | Essays
Authors: Sharon Murray | Artists: Gabor Szilasi

[Fall 2006] What is less well known is that he photographed in Hungary around the time of his flight to Canada in 1957 and again during his return to Budapest more than twenty years later. Photography was fundamental to Szilasi’s experience: it acted as a means for him to both articulate and negotiate the disjunction […]

La tyrannie paysagère – Suzanne Paquet

Ciel variable 73 - THEATRE OF MELANCHOLIA | Essays

[Fall 2006] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Since the nineteenth century, the rule for collecting photographic “landscapes” has allowed a certain “tyranny of the landscape” to endure and proliferate, making it so that the capturing of places […]

Edward Burtynsky – Bruno Chalifour, L’oeil d’un coloriste sur le sublime contemporain

Ciel variable 72 - PHOTO PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: Bruno Chalifour | Artists: Edward Burtynsky

[Summer 2006] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract This article addresses the new work by Edward Burtynsky as it was presented, in part, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In this exhibition, twenty-four images on contemporary China were […]

(Un)framing Interior Views Cultural Geography in the Work of Lynne Cohen – Jean-François Bélisle

Ciel variable 71 - IMAGE WORLD | Essays
Authors: Jean-François Bélisle | Artists: Lynne Cohen

[Spring 2006] by Jean-François Bélisle Since the early 1970s, Cohen has lived and worked in no fewer than nine countries, photographing unpopulated interiors in public and private establishments such as schools, spas, and laboratories. Her practice has been informed by her nomadic lifestyle. Her mostly black-and-white images may seem to be documentations of specific awkward […]

Life on the Edge of Perception: Immobility in Recent Video Installations – Randolph Jordan

Ciel variable 67 - STILL MOVING | Essays
Authors: Randolf Jordan | Artists: David Claerbout, NomIg

[Spring 2005] by Randolph Jordan Frame-by-frame analysis confirms that beneath the apparent non-movement of the plant world, the most awful and violent things are brewing: heart-rending torsions, horrible intertwinings, endless growth . . . such is Man. No moment is ever as intense as when there is no more outward bodily agitation to hide the infinitesimal speed […]

Angela Grauerholz et ses livres (extraits) – Colette Tougas

Ciel variable 66 - ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ | Essays
Authors: Colette Tougas | Artists: Angela Grauerholz

[Spring 2005] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract In this essay, the author stresses two characteristics of Angela Grauerholz’s photographic corpus: the fortuitous and the systematic. The author highlights the important role played by desire on the part […]

Between Heaven and Earth, the Loci and the Cosmos: At Work in the Reading Room for the Working Artist – Cheryl Simon

Ciel variable 66 - ANGELA GRAUERHOLZ | Essays
Authors: Cheryl Simon | Artists: Angela Grauerholz

by Cheryl Simon The relation of language to the world is one of analogy rather than of signification; or rather, [the value of words] as signs and their duplicating function are superimposed; they speak the heaven and the earth of which they are the image. Language possesses a symbolic function; but since the disaster at […]

Anne Bénichou – Renouer avec l’esthétique de l’archive photographique

Ciel variable 59 - ARCHIVES | Essays
Authors: Anne Bénichou | Artists: Angela Grauerholz, Melvin Charney

[Fall 2002] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Abstract Since the 1960s, a number of Western art practices have revived the æsthetic of the photographic archive as it was developed in the nineteenth century. Starting from the work of […]

Frontières – Robert Lévesque

Ciel variable 55 – BOUNDARIES | Essays
Authors: Robert Lévesque | Artists: Geoffrey James

[Fall 2001] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Summary Lévesque quotes a poem by Lamartine to show that, from century to century, idealism collides with the notion of borders, the historical factor in wars and deaths. His text, inhabited […]

Hyperpaysages, À l’affût de territoires réticulaires et mentaux. – Luc Lévesque

Ciel variable 54 - GARDENS-LANDSCAPES | Essays
Authors: Luc Lévesque

[Spring 2001] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Summary Although, by working to push the limits of the gaze, photography indirectly contributes to stimulating new paths for the garden, the elusive complexity of the garden reciprocally defies capture by […]

La mémoire et le double – François Paré

Ciel variable 53 - IDENTITIES | Essays
Authors: François Paré | Artists: Raymonde April

[Winter 2000-2001] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Summary This text, the product of parallel readings of Mercure, a novel by Amélie Nothomb, and L’avenir de la mémoire, an essay by Fernand Dumont, explores the tight links between identity, […]

Reading Photographs: Playing the Visual Literacy Game – Susan Close

Ciel variable 52 - EVERYDAY OBJECTS | Essays
Authors: Susan Close

[Fall 2000] by Susan Close A knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the use of camera and pen alike. –Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1923 But What Does It Mean to Read a Photograph? Because of its representational and documentary qualities, photography has, […]

Une esthétique de chiffonnier (le photographe itinérant) – Olivier Asselin

Ciel variable 51 – ELSEWERE… NOWHERE | Essays
Authors: Olivier Asselin | Artists: Eugène Atget

[Summer 2000] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Summary Asselin recalls the various modem figures of the walker and the modalities of their aesthetic contemplation. The photographer bears a resemblance to the Baudelairean figure of the flâneur, torn between […]