PAST EXHIBITIONS - ARCHIVE

Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection

September 29 – December 16, 2012
Main Gallery, Student Gallery, Media Wall

Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection focuses on the Black Star Collection as seen through the eyes of internationally-renowned Canadian contemporary artists Stephen Andrews, Christina Battle, Marie-Hélène Cousineau, Stan Douglas, Vera Frenkel, Vid Ingelevics, David Rokeby and Michael Snow.

Each artist has read the archive in their own way, selected images with which to work, and created a newly commissioned art installation in response. By commissioning new works, curators Doina Popescu and Peggy Gale enable vibrant examinations, complex re-contextualizations and exciting contemporary re-interpretations of the historic images.

As viewers of these artists’ works we are offered the rare opportunity to experience the potential for multiple layers of meaning hidden in the archive. At the same time we are invited to explore some of the creative processes behind eight significant contemporary art practices.

Stephen Andrews interweaves film sequences from news stories central to recent history – images from the 1960s of the Kennedy assassination and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc outside the Cambodian embassy in Saigon, and passages of his own creation in a conceptual “reading” of the Black Star Collection. Through his alchemy of images and of memory, Andrews’ work entitled Dramatis Personae questions the assumptions of photojournalism and cinéma vérité, seeing cinema as a forensic tool.

Christina Battle’s multi-media project, entitled Archived Disasters, examines photographs of disastrous events across several decades of press imagery. Spilling over the confines of the archive and introducing interpretations resulting from her careful study of news stories published in response to the disasters, including those from the ever-popular “yellow press,” she takes us into the uncanny realm of science fiction.

Marie-Hélène Cousineau constructs an installation, entitled Perdre et retrouver le Nord inspired by portraits and snapshots found in the Black Star Collection, which were taken in Baker Lake during the 1960s. Bringing copies of these images with her to the North, she met with the Inuit who had been photographed. Responding to her own experience of living in Igloolik, Nunavut, she also worked with Susan Avingaq and other friends to evoke Northern history and landscapes. Through recounted stories and pictures we glimpse fragments of a world of which we know too little.

Stan Douglas himself writes that the Midcentury Studio project “chronicles the career of a photographer who was introduced to his craft during the war and tried to make it into a business in the postwar period” (1945-1951). Douglas’ photographs in this series are inspired by his meticulous study of the photographers who worked for Life magazine and the Black Star Agency, as well as the obscure Vancouver figure Raymond Munro. The photographs in Archival Dialogues were chosen for their sophisticated relationship to a look that would ultimately be eclipsed in photojournalism, and for their connection to the Black Star Collection in particular.

Vera Frenkel’s video-photo-text installation, The Blue Train, centers on a key phase of the journey of escape taken by the artist’s mother at the outbreak of World War II via a combination of stills, drawings and video that trace the journey through the minds of passengers with whom the experience was shared. The narrative of escape is interwoven with the witnessing narrative of photojournalist Werner Wolff on his 1945 return to Germany. The intimate words and thoughts of the passengers will also be accessible for portable devices over the internet. The Blue Train distills the stress and anxiety of forced migration and the courage of the documentary photographers who captured the experience.

Vid Ingelevics’ Conditional Report examines the contradictions inherent in the archiving process that the Black Star Collection at Ryerson University is subject to. Conditional Report focuses on the preservation and recording of “original” photographic images by digital scanning versus the destruction of exhibition images produced through that scanning process. Video of these acts is set within a simulation of the temporary storage facility of the collection, complete with the sounds of scanners and air-handling units regulating the environment.

David Rokeby’s installation, Shrouded, presented on the Salah J. Bachir New Media Wall in the gallery’s entrance colonnade, reconstructs the way the fovea (the small central part of the eye which can see detail) passes over the image like a searchlight cutting through a murk of blurry forms, selectively revealing details in Black Star images, sometimes along trajectories determined by the artist, and at other times determined by gestures of the viewer. By separating the mechanism of seeing from the habit of seeing, the artist reframes the process of grasping the image.

Michael Snow’s new installation TAUT utilizes some of the extraordinary Black Star Collection crowd photographs, including demonstrations, rallies, riots and confrontations, in a video projected on classroom chairs, desks and green board covered in white paper. The setting thus becomes a three-dimensional white screen for the twodimensional images of three-dimensional events and places.

Peggy Gale is an independent curator and writer whose texts on contemporary art, especially video art, have become artistic benchmarks. Born in Guyana in 1944, Gale studied at the University of Toronto and the Università degli Studi in Florence. She has published extensively, with essays in Video By Artists (1976, 1986), Mirror Machine: Video and Identity (1995) and Lectures obliques (1999), and texts in many museum catalogues. She was editor, among others, of Museums by Artists (with AA Bronson, 1983) and Video re/View: The (best) Source for Critical Writings on Canadian Artistsʼ Video (with Lisa Steele, 1996). Videotexts, a selection of her essays, was published in 1995. She has organized many exhibitions including: Videoscape (Art Gallery of Ontario, 1974-1975); XIV Bienal Internacional de São Paulo (1977); Electronic Landscapes (National Gallery of Canada, 1989); the Biennale of the Moving Image (Madrid, 1990) and Tout le temps / Every Time (La Biennale de Montréal, 2000). Peggy Gale lives in Toronto.

Doina Popescu is the inaugural Director of the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC). She oversees its academic, administrative, exhibition and outreach functions, and is responsible for maintaining its national and international profile.  She is engaged in developing and executing a vision for the new Centre that addresses its three major interrelated areas of activity: exhibitions, research and collections.  Each of these areas is being developed to interact with the multidisciplinary academic communities across campus, to dialogue with the arts in Toronto and across the country, as well as to engage in international partnerships. After bringing Edward Burtynsky: OIL and Berenice Abbott: Photographs to Toronto, she has co-curated the RIC’s launch exhibition entitled Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection. 

Popescu was previously the Deputy Director of the Goethe-Institut Toronto, where she managed the Gallery and Kinowelt Hall, organising international photography, video and new media-based exhibitions and film events. For more than 25 years she has been deeply involved with both Canadian and international artists and scholars in the visual arts, film, literature, music, cultural theory, history and philosophy.  She is a co-founder of the European Union Film Festival and the International Experimental Film/Media Congress. She has served on multiple juries, has spearheaded numerous publications and has guest curated arts programs for galleries and international festivals in Canada and abroad.

This exhibition is made possible with generous funding from:
Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, Goethe-Institut, the Paul J. Ruhnke Memorial Fund, and The Howard and Carole Tanenbaum Charitable Foundation Fund.

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The Art of the Archive

Ryerson Students and Alumni
September 29 – December 16, 2012
University Gallery

The exhibition The Art of the Archive is built on the reoccurring and popular theme of photographic and video archives and is divided into three parts: uses of the archive, representation of the archive and aesthetics of the archive.

The works of the "archival artists" (Hal Foster) gathered for this occasion combine two temporalities, the past and present, through reinterpretation and creative experience. The projects cover topics as diverse as the concepts of genealogy and family experiences, the evocation of childhood, the political history of the United States and the architectural standards of archival repositories. The appropriation of old objects and images, the representation of spaces devoted to these objects, or the playing with visual forms specific to the archive seem to respond to what Jacques Derrida called the "archive fever," an irrepressible desire to create a collective memory.

The works in this exhibition come from current students and recent alumni from the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University.

This exhibition is curated by Dr. Gaëlle Morel, Curator at the Ryerson Image Centre. Morel received her PhD in the history of contemporary art from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, and she is a member of the editorial committee of the bilingual refereed journal Études photographiques. Morel was the guest curator of the Mois de la Photo in Montreal in 2009 and she has written essays that have appeared in a number of books and catalogues.

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Berenice Abbott: Photographs

May 23 – August 19, 2012
Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)

The Ryerson Image Centre is honoured to partner with the Jeu de Paume in presenting Berenice Abbott: Photographs in Paris and Toronto.

Famous for her tireless fight for the recognition of French photographer Eugène Atget, Berenice Abbott is also prominently known for her documentary project Changing New York (1935-1939). This exhibition is the first retrospective of the American photographer, Berenice Abbott, presented in France and Canada.

Berenice Abbott: Photographs explores the different stages of her expansive career through more than 120 photographs. In order to provide a larger context for her œuvre, the exhibition will present her photographic prints alongside a series of never-before-exhibited personal documents (letters, book mock-ups, drawings, magazines, scrapbooks, etc.) and a collection of first edition books.  Based on new research and incorporating all of the exhibition photographs, the catalogue brings fresh and exciting perspectives on Abbott’s life and professional career.

This exhibition is curated by Dr Gaëlle Morel, Curator at the Ryerson Image Centre. She received her PhD in the History of Contemporary Photography from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and she is a member of the editorial committee of the bilingual refereed journal Études photographiques. Her expertise lies with the artistic and cultural recognition of photography from the 1970s, and photographic modernism in the 1930s. Morel was the guest curator of the Mois de la Photo in Montreal in 2009 (with the theme “The Spaces of the Image”) and she has written essays that have appeared in a number of magazines and books. She has also taught History of Contemporary Art and History of Photography at universities in France and Canada.

Interview with Berenice Abbott: Photographs curator, Dr. Gaëlle Morel.
Produced by the Jeu de Paume, Paris (English sub-titles)

Berenice Abbott: Photographs is organized by the Ryerson Image Centre (Toronto) and the Jeu de Paume (Paris), and presented in Toronto in partnership with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.



This exhibition and accompanying catalogue are made possible with generous funding from: the Terra Foundation for American Art, and in Toronto by the Ontario Arts Council.

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Edward Burtynsky: Oil


April 9 – August 21, 2011

Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)

Edward Burtynsky: Oil, is presented by the Ryerson Image Centre, Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, and Scotiabank Group, hosted at the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto. The exhibition is an examination of one the most important subjects of our time by one of the most respected and recognized contemporary photographers in the world. The exhibition features 53 beautiful and provocative large-format photographs that explore the hotly-debated effects of oil extraction and our international dependency on the substance. With an unflinching eye, Burtynsky presents us with the reality of oil production as its role in our civilization undergoes massive transformation.



Edward Burtynsky: Oil is curated and organized by Paul Roth, Senior Curator and Director of Photography and Media Arts, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and made possible with the generous support of the Scotiabank Group.

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Images of the Berlin Wall & ‘Freedom Rocks’

Various dates, 2009
Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Toronto
Embassy of Canada, Berlin
Library and Archive Canada, Ottawa

Twenty years after its fall, the symbolic weight of the Berlin Wall continues to accompany us as an historical monument to war, politics and painful cultural divisions. In Images of the Berlin Wall Ryerson University remounts the dynamic and moving story of the Wall through a selection of iconic photojournalistic prints from its renowned Black Star Collection. These black and white documents of history are juxtaposed with the contemporary art project, Freedom Rocks by Toronto artists Blake Fitzpatrick and Vid Ingelevics. Their photographs and videos reveal the transformed material existence of the Wall in the slabs and fragments that are today scattered throughout the world.



Images of the Berlin Wall & ‘Freedom Rocks’ is organized by Doina Popescu, Dr. Arne Kislenko and Valérie Matteau.

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50 Years of American Photojournalism: 1939-1989

Various dates, 2008-2009
The Art Gallery at the Embassy of Canada, Washington D.C.
FotoWeek DC

This exhibition, comprised of images from The Black Star Collection at Ryerson University, celebrates 50 years of American photojournalism. The images feature significant people and events, and encompass three central categories of the Black Star Collection: the civil rights movement, personalities, and war and conflict.

This expansive collection was assembled at the Black Star photo agency in New York City over a period of 80 years. More than a quarter of a million photographs capture the notable figures, events and conflicts of the 20th century. As a result, these photographs form a complete media record and a compilation of memories that can be passed on to future generations.

50 Years of American Photojournalism: 1939-1989 is curated by Valérie Matteau and Judy Ditner.

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Photo Narratives: Remembering the 20^th Century

May 5 – 30,  2008
Allen Lambert Galleria, Brookfield Place, Toronto

Before the advent of the Internet, online news, and nightly television broadcasts, current and world news were visually conveyed through still images in print.  Whether in newspapers or picture magazines, photographs of news events have, since the 1880s, been used to represent what cannot be expressed merely through words.

The photographs in Photo Narratives: Remembering the 20th Century are drawn from a collection of images, assembled over a period of eighty years at the Black Star photo agency in New York City.  Chosen for this exhibition, these images have been used to form photo-stories of major historical events and developments of the 20th century. 
These photographs act as visual records of our past.  While some may remember their impact when first published in newspapers and magazines, others will be seeing them for the first time.  Regardless, these events, which affected and continue to affect the human psyche have inevitably become etched in our collective memory.

The Hindenburg Zeppelin, the end of World War II, the bombing of Hiroshima, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Birmingham Campaign, the funeral of Malcolm X, the Kent State Massacre, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Cambodia, the building and tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and the Apollo space missions – these events marked the 20th century in ways which seemed inconceivable at the time, and yet now have become integral parts of our world history.

By embracing a structure similar to that of magazine layouts made famous in North America by Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post, this exhibition returns the photographs to their original visual context, of a photographic sequence that can communicate a story. 

In these visual arrangements, the photographs speak to us without having to rely on extensive text, returning the authority to the images. Accompanied by historical quotes of the day, the photo-stories in the exhibition speak to a Western history of the world in the 20th Century.

Photo Narratives: Remembering the 20^th Century is curated by Valérie Matteau.

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The Celebrity Persona: The Black Star Collection at Ryerson University

April 30 – May 25, 2007
Allen Lambert Galleria, BCE Place, Toronto

The exhibition The Celebrity Persona explores the notion of the constructed portrait using photographs from Ryerson’s Black Star Historical Black & White Photography Collection.  The images in the exhibition speak to the concept of the constructed nature of photographic portrayal while paying particular attention to the staged celebrity persona, as well as the less controlled moments captured by the camera which provide insight into an individual’s personality and character.

The concept of the ‘objective’ image has been fundamental to photojournalism since its early beginnings; through it news is conveyed in a way that would not be possible through the written word.  By delving into areas such as politics, science, music, religion and the arts, and in keeping with the character of the collection, The Celebrity Persona proposes to examine portraiture from the photojournalistic perspective. 

The Celebrity Persona: The Black Star Collection is curated by Valérie Matteau.

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The Black Star Collection at Ryerson University: Highlights

May 7 ­– 27, 2006
Allen Lambert Galleria, BCE Place, Toronto

This exhibition reveals the significance of the collection in documenting the tumultuous global, cultural and political events of the twentieth century. In their totality, the 291,049 prints in this collection describe the personalities, events and conflicts of the twentieth century, from before World War I to Vietnam and beyond, forming a repository of collective global memory. Representing the broad themes held by the collection, this exhibition offers viewers an opportunity to witness some of the century’s defining historic moments and appreciate their continued relevance.

For those who remember these events, the collection serves to confirm their memories and is, in addition, a resource of inestimable value. An immense drama is presented in these pictures with all the clarity of the camera lens, the veracity of the optical enlargement and the immediacy of the hand-held camera. For those who do not remember the events described by the Black Star pictures, and for those in future generations, the collection is an engaging portrait of social change and struggle and a moral lesson of no small significance. The Kennedy and Johnson presidencies in the United States are often seen as a time of great idealism and accomplishment, in stark contrast to racial violence, political assassination and a pointless war; and the photographs bear this out.

The Black Star Collection at Ryerson University: Highlights is curated by Judy Ditner.