This week we have Daniel Sharp writing about Christian Villemaire’s show at Exposure Gallery. And at the bottom of this post is an update about my call for recent photo school grads (with a bit of editorializing). But before we get to that let me tell you a story . . .
. . . I met Lordish Lewis in Rosedale, Mississippi. We talked for a while, she made us lunch. Afterward I asked if I might take some pictures of her.
While we were shooting a man crossed the street, came toward us. Lordish said, that’s my father.
She introduced us. He stretched himself to his full stature, looked into my eyes and told me, I’m 68 years old, I got 12 children, I been a man.
I replied, you’re wife must be quite a woman to have borne so many children.
Still looking right at me he said, took two wives.
MERGER
Photographs by Christian Villemaire
Exposure Gallery
Words by Daniel Sharp
There used to be a city called Hull. But in 2002 it was merged with some adjacent municipalities and that whole shebang was called Gatineau. Hull was gone.
These recent photographs reflect Christian Villemaire’s ongoing fascination with the streets, buildings and people of old Hull. Undertaking something like a project of exploration of his personal history and examination of his own identity, Villemaire ventures through the streets of Hull, taking pictures. He is curious but does not really know what he is looking for. He says, “I don’t belong to Hull. I don’t live there. My parents are from Hull. I always visited. I am taking pictures as an outsider, but not as a tourist. I visit these places over and over again, looking to capture these pictures.”
Villemaire’s larger project is titled HULL ( ), from which the photographs on display are selected. The title is inspired by the highway sign announcing the border of GATINEAU (HULL).
The parenthetical bracketing of HULL is a poetic notion of displacement. The old Hull is almost an afterthought, a sign of a former location, but the bracketing can also grammatically indicate that HULL could be considered separate from GATINEAU. A key image in the series, the photograph of the road sign GATINEAU (HULL) marks the entrance to the uncanny, awkward spaces of this exhibition.
Villemaire shows us photographs of places in Hull, in winter, mostly on overcast days. There is an odd feeling of emptiness in these spaces. People have come and gone. Of course there is the implied presence of the photographer, the viewer, the observer. To some people these spaces will seem familiar, if you know Hull. But there is an ineluctable strangeness to Villemaire’s choices of where he is looking. Curiosity and wonder inform his view, more so than estrangement and disaffection.
The E.B. Eddy building is photographed centred and square, on an empty street, with a grey luminous sky above and an empty field of snow in the lower part of the picture. Villemaire says this photograph shows a little about what we do with our heritage in Hull. The old factory is a beautiful building but it is not currently being used. It is a part of the heart of the history of Hull. Villemaire remarks that at least it hasn’t been destroyed. The mood of the scene as a quiet grey moment in winter shows the viewer this beautiful, lonely, seemingly abandoned historic industrial building in a place that used to be called Hull. The image is a eulogy for the past but somehow also conveys hope.
All but one of the photos in this exhibition are exterior images with no people. Most of the photos are square-format prints. Formally, the architecture and roadways contribute to dynamic compositions, forceful diagonals, emphatic horizontals and thrusting verticals. At the same time as these images convey a certain desolation of winter and perhaps an economic despair, there is a peculiar and awkward humour in some of the pictures. In the picture titled “W” the neighbourhood is a bit rundown, but why is that stop sign so short and does the declaration ARRÊT have any reference to the poverty of the neighbourhood?
One of the images that Villemaire says stands more as documentation is the interior of the hockey arena Centre Robert Guertin. The arena represents one of the older buildings in Hull that is destined to be demolished. Even so, Villemaire belies the claim for simple documentation when he relates that this is where his son practices hockey and Villemaire himself worked in the food concessions in the arena as a teenager. So in all these images of the streets and buildings of Hull, Villemaire selects his subjects and his point of view partly with a documentary impulse to preserve how the city looks – a document of this history and culture. But as well, he is always exploring the psychic space of his own life and his memories, and in making these photographs he is demonstrating a longing for beauty and hope for the future.
Daniel Sharp
January 2018
Christian Villemaire
Daniel Sharp
Exposure Gallery
MERGER
1255 Wellington St. W. Ottawa
January 8 – February 16, 2018
SEEKING RECENT GRADS (Follow-up)
Last week I sent out a call asking recent local photo-school grads to drop me a line. I want to speak to them about their trials and tribulations. I want to find out how it’s going for them, how their expectations were met and not met.
Aside from 3 SPAO grads who I actually know, and a nibble from the commercial side of the biz, there were no other responses.
Unless, of course, you consider the many emails I received from photo school teachers and students across the country, and in the USA. Great, but it’s the local scene I want to try to understand.
That I received so much interest from outside the city and hardly any from inside suggests to me that the Ottawa Photo Scene is broken. Either that, or the folks here in Kapital City figure I’m a dickweed and don’t want anything to do with me.
I can live with being thought of as a dickweed. Geez, I probably am a dickweed (but, I like to think, not exclusively a dickweed). But the lack of verve, of cohesion, the lack of desire to raise the bar and form community that I see over and over again in this photo scene kind of bums me out. Or at least harshes my buzz.
Sometimes I wonder why I care.