The field of photography has recently been described as one that exacerbates antagonisms, “a permanent hotbed of contradictions.”[1] This is also an apt description for the work of the artists who have participated in the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize these last ten years. As you can see in these pages, the practices of the forty-one Prize nominees defy—indeed discourage—generalization. They emerge out of a range of contexts, as international as the Prize is, and embody a full spectrum of approaches, concerns, and questions about the medium’s fundamentals, its histories, and the ways photographs record and mimic, accumulate and circulate, build stories and express perspectives, be they autobiographical, political, critical, formal, or some blend thereof.
Indeed, the Prize has aimed to keep the idea of photography as broad as the range of possibilities that contemporary artists continue to see for the medium. The prize context also lends this arena of possibility a particular weight—boxers in a boxing ring.
The process
Every year, jurors reviewed a long list of twenty to thirty artists, nominated for their notable impact in the field. (In 2008 and 2009, this was interpreted as career achievement to date; thereafter, chiefly for contributions in the five years leading up to the prize year.) Each shortlist then reflected the jury’s sense of what was most relevant or current in that year. [2] Some years, this meant bringing like practices together. 2009, for instance, saw a range of approaches to the idea of documenting the worlds we encounter: Lynne Cohen’s views of empty, institutional-seeming interiors and Jin-me Yoon’s holiday “snaps”—impersonating a tourist in the Canadian Rockies—shared sly observation and deadpan humour as a means of commentary. Marco Antonio Cruz and Federico Gama each photographed individuals in disenfranchised communities, over long periods of time, channeling their empathy for their subjects into photographs that respectively aimed to humanize the plight of blind people, and to reveal the contours of a little-known sub-culture. In other years, as in 2015, there was maximum contrast. Hito Steyerl and Dave Jordano each engaged ideas of visibility, but in radically different ways. Where Jordano sought to bring new narratives to light, with portraits that document the resilience and pride of Detroiters in the face of socio-economic uncertainty—with the assumption that this visibility has a positive effect—Steyerl aimed, in her video installation, to highlight the technologies and mechanisms governing the very act of seeing, in a critique of our hyper-imaged culture.
The explicit goal of the shortlist exhibitions—as part of a public contest—was to give viewers a direct experience of each artist’s work as a way of informing their vote [3]. Of the forty-one nominees, twenty-seven exhibited their work in Toronto for the first time. (These exhibitions also became a regular stop for art school classes from OCAD University, Ryerson, the University of Toronto, York University, and others. Along with the scholarships awarded, evidence of this exposure and its impact may appear in the work of these future artists.) Each nominee’s work was presented in a standalone section, but passing from each distinct section to another also provided the direct means for staging dialogue between nominees, in ways that only prize shortlist exhibitions can do. The almost accidental eclecticism of each shortlist allows for the kinds of associations or “jump cuts” that would be hard to justify otherwise.
When else, for instance, would LaToya Ruby Frazier and Erin Shirreff be found in the same show? In the series Notion of Family, Frazier’s intense scrutiny of the impact of industrial activity in Braddock, Pennsylvania on her family’s life and health engages with the traditions of social documentary photographers in the mid-20th century, who documented poverty and industry in the United States. By using their aesthetics and means of production, Frazier’s work critiques their position as concerned outsiders, whose photographs could only offer a limited view of the communities in question, often omitting complexities of race and class. Shirreff, on the other hand—in re-presenting found images of the moon and a lake in her hometown of Kamloops, British Columbia—draws on histories of minimalism, and the relationship of light and space, to create an experience of time. Their sources and intentions are distinct, as are the ways they each ultimately deploy the medium—as medium-sized analogue gelatin silver prints, in Frazier’s case, and as source material for slow-moving time-based work, projected at large scale, in Shirreff’s. Produced within a few years of each other (Notion of Family, 2001–2014; Moon in 2010 and Lake in 2012), these works present two systems of logic and expression in contrast, each in their integrity. Their simultaneity is a fact that signals the medium’s productive malleability—the hotbed of contradictions.
Over the years, nominees have presented photographs as prints on the wall, as posters, as letters, and as postcards, draped over forms, juxtaposed with sculptures, objects, films, performances, and videos. The images have similarly run the spectrum, with some directly observed, others highly staged, and yet others culled from the family record, YouTube, a library picture collection, press photographs, tourist brochures, and textbooks. Subjects have included family relations, sports, advertising conventions, imaging technologies, urban planning, colonialism, industry, and environmental degradation.
What the Prize allowed us to do was to acknowledge the co-existence of these varied modes and to bring the members of this fractious extended family into dialogue. This will, over time, perhaps become the Prize’s most important contribution.
The public vote
The most controversial aspect of the Prize, as Hadwen and O’Neill point out in their essay, has been the public vote. Discussions around the vote’s merits as an approach to awarding a contemporary art prize revealed and questioned deep-seated beliefs about what it takes to appreciate an artist’s work and what a prize means: can a satisfying art encounter take place online? Will a majority of voters always tend to familiar photographic imagery? Will Canadians (the majority of voters) only vote for their own? What about taste and expertise?
All of this took place at a moment that saw the rise of reality-based television talent shows, crowdsourcing in a range of forms, smartphone cameras, and Instagram, to name only a few of the changes that have profoundly altered both the nature of expert authority and our image landscape. Crucially, these new means of production and dissemination have shifted our ways of making decisions and sharing opinions. As Wesley Morris wrote recently about the music industry, “Instagram posts and the like are greatness by alternative measures. This is an era in which fan bases actually might matter as much as a ranking on a list. The canon will evolve.” [4] The Prize’s public vote was a timely experiment. With ten years behind us, what can we glean about the results?
First, voters awarded the Prize to Canadian artists only three times—to Sarah Anne Johnson in 2008, Kristan Horton in 2010, and Erin Shirreff in 2013—proving that nationality didn’t play a large role in the outcome overall.
Next, the appeal of a strong documentary-style project remains perennial. Marco Antonio Cruz’s series on the blind in Mexico; Gauri Gill’s photographs of young women in India; Dave Jordano’s portraits of Detroit residents; and Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s typology of bus stops in Armenia all garnered the Prize for their makers in 2009, 2011, 2015, and 2016, respectively. This appeal perhaps presents little surprise, given the long tradition of artists working in this way, and the illustrious history of publishing photo essays and extended photographic series—the documentary mode is the most familiar to most viewers.
What is perhaps more surprising is that four other winners work in ways that can generally be described as conceptual: Kristan Horton (2010), Erin Shirreff (2013), Lisa Oppenheim (2014), and Hank Willis Thomas (2017). These artists variously question perception, sight, and the representation of historical events, and they transform and present their images through a range of processes that play with light, exposure, and stillness—historically, the medium’s building blocks—to compelling effect. In Orbits (2009), Horton maps multiple views of objects, in a bid to create a simultaneous experience of three-dimensionality in a single two-dimensional photograph. Oppenheim prints each still image in Smoke (2012–ongoing) through the light of an open flame. Hank Willis Thomas screenprints press photographs of Civil Rights actions in the United States on reflective vinyl, only visible by flash lighting.
Sarah Anne Johnson, who won in 2008, and Jo Longhurst, who won in 2012, could both be said to be switch hitters: they each create images with clearly identifiable subjects—documents of a kind, particularly for the works that earned them their nominations—but present these images in ways that expand viewers’ experiences of them. Johnson began to significantly broaden her working methods right after she won the Prize, with her exhibition installation House on Fire (2009), which included bronze sculptures, drawings on photographic prints and newspaper pages, and a dollhouse-like model. In her series Other Spaces (2008–ongoing), Longhurst employed a range of media to highlight the aesthetic demands of elite gymnastics, with sculptural wall supports, performance, video, and installations using images of ideal poses appropriated from a range of sources.
All of this leaves the question of preferred approach somewhat inconclusive, and clearly signals that public taste is perhaps less easy to divinethat many might have feared at first. One final striking observation, however: the winners in 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2017 have all created major works from found images, which they have reframed, recast, and/or re-presented. The span of years indicates not only that this way of working has persisted throughout the ten-year run of the Prize, but also that it had the strongest resonance with voters, at least half of the time. This is significant because it suggests that viewers are responding not only to artists making compelling pictures, but also to those making meaning from our chaotic and relentless image landscape.
The extraordinary changes in the ways we make and share images over these past ten years have brought photographs closer to us than ever before, made them an even greater constant in daily life, and at an unprecedented volume. Any artist working with photography today has to frame their practice in opposition to both this volume and this intimacy—the familiarity that can breed, if not contempt, then at least indifference. Indeed, Hank Willis Thomas has expressed that a driving intention in his work to find ways to create images that “stick.” As he says, “There are more photographs taken in a single second than any of us can really make sense of and I think the role of a lot of artists and photographers of our time is to really try to take these images that we have kind of amassed and give them new meaning, give them new purpose, and help to put them in a greater context with the past and the present.” [5]
A condition of our contemporary moment is the continual adjustment to and navigation of our intensifying image culture. The results of the Prize’s public vote highlight how we all, in parallel to artists, continue to explore this condition, with the same delight and concern for what it makes possible, in all its glorious fractiousness.
[1] Clément Chéroux, “The Pencil of Culture” in The Pencil of Culture: 10 ans d’acquisitions de photographies au Centre Pompidou, eds. Clément Chéroux and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska (Trézélan and Paris: Éditions filigranes and Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2016), 7. Translation mine: “En permanence déchiré entre réel et fiction, saisie et fabrication, document et oeuvre, etc., le champ photographique exacerbe les antagonismes. Il n’a de cesse d’être écartelé ou mis en tension. Il est un foyer permanent de contradictions.”
[2] I want to acknowledge the lead jurors and curators for each iteration of the Prize, each of whom brought distinct sensibilities and interests to bear on the project: David Moos (2008), Maia-Mari Sutnik (2008 and 2009); Michelle Jacques (2011); Elizabeth Smith (2013); Adelina Vlas (2015 and 2016); and Kitty Scott (2016). I held this role in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2017.
[3] Short list exhibitions were instituted as part of the Prize in 2009. The exhibition component of the 2008 Prize was dedicated to winner Sarah Anne Johnson. Her installation House on Fire (2009) was curated by Michelle Jacques, then the AGO’s Associate Curator, Contemporary Art.
[4] Wesley Morris, “Should Women Make Their Own Pop Music Canon?,” New York Times Magazine, October 8, 2017, 35.
[5] Interview with Nadia Abraham, AGO Interpretive Planner, September 5, 2017
From Ten Years: Aimia | AGO Photography Prize, 2008- 2017 Ed. Sophie Hackett, Alden Hadwen, Sean O'Neill, 2017. Text © Art Gallery of Ontario, 2017.