News & Events

The Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) celebrates photography as part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival taking place across Toronto from May 1 to 31.

CONTACT is the world’s largest annual photography event and this year Toronto’s newest cultural destination – the RIC – is loaded with exhibitions to highlight the art and profession of photography. An international photography symposium, the launch of an extraordinary hand-made photography book by Lumiere Press, and four new exhibitions including two primary festival exhibitions, Scotiabank Photography Award: Arnaud Maggs and Arthur S. Goss: Works and Days, will all take place at the Ryerson Image Centre.

Scotiabank Photography Award: Arnaud Maggs is the second annual Scotiabank Photography Award exhibition. Arnaud Maggs, winner of the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award in 2012, is best known for his multiple-grid, serial photographs of faces and collections, systems and historical ephemera. Scotiabank Photography Award: Arnaud Maggs was designed by Arnaud Maggs with Barr Gilmore, shortly before Maggs’ passing in November 2012. The exhibition will be on view in the main gallery May 1 – June 2, 2013.

Arthur S. Goss: Works and Days, curated by Blake Fitzpatrick, image arts professor, and John Bentley Mays, presents several multi-image depictions of buildings and sites in the burgeoning city of Toronto. Arthur S. Goss holds the distinction of being the first official photographer of the City of Toronto. Employed by the City’s Public Works Photography and Blue Printing Section from 1911 to 1940, Goss was called upon to create images of municipal activities both groundbreaking and routine. Over his long career, Goss gave us a precisely focused public record of a developing modern metropolis as it emerged incrementally over time. Arthur S. Goss: Works and Days is presented in collaboration with the City of Toronto Archives and will be on view in the university gallery May 1 – June 2 and June 19 – August 25.

Here and There: Photography and Video Works on Immigration, curated by Gaëlle Morel, RIC exhibitions curator, spans from the 1950s to today with photographs from the Black Star Collection and photographic, new media and video works by contemporary Canadian artists. This exhibition, on the theme of immigration, will be the first group show featured on the Salah J. Bachir New Media Wall. Works deal with issues such as voluntary and hopeful immigration to Canada in the 1950s, refugee shelters in the United States and Canada today, and first generation of immigrants now settled in Canada. Here and There: Photography and Video Works on Immigration will be on view May 1 – June 2 and June 19 – August 25.

Lead and Light: The Evolution of Lumiere Press will be on view May 1 – June 2 in the student gallery, and a book launch of Lumiere Press’s 22^nd limited-edition publication, Black Star, will take place on May 8. The exhibition, drawn from public collections and the press’s archives, is being researched, curated, designed, and mounted by 10 second-year students in Ryerson’s Photographic Preservation and Collections Management master’s program, under the direction of Professor David Harris. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication documenting the press’s history and the curatorial perspectives taken by this exhibition.

The ‘Public Life’ of Photographs Symposium, taking place May 9 – 11, will bring together experts in the history of photography, art history, philosophy and visual culture to analyze and discuss the dissemination of photographic images from the 19th century to the present. Photography can be a vehicle of information, an instrument of ideology, a means of scientific exploration and an artistic medium. The reproducibility of a photograph largely determines how it is used, shared, and made accessible. While the advent of the Internet has increased the number of channels through which images can be accessed and shared, the circulation of photographs has been made possible through a variety of networks and media. Each of the symposium’s four sessions will include presentations by renowned national and international scholars and curators such as Joel Snyder from the University of Chicago, who will give the keynote address; Ryerson Image Centre Director Doina Popescu; Thierry Gervais, image arts professor, and RIC head of research; Sophie Hackett, Art Gallery of Ontario; Olivier Lugon, University of Lausanne, Switzerland; Mary Panzer, New York University, New York; Nathalie Boulouch, Université Rennes-2, France; and Heather Diack, University of Miami.

The symposium will take place at the Eaton Lecture Theatre (RCC-204) in the Rogers Communications Centre.