Kevin Head

To make art with a photographic portrait is always a collaborative act. As with any duo the balance tips often, sometimes to the photographer, sometimes to the subject. It is the peculiar nature of this relationship that the results, the mixture of observer and observed, are inseparable. If this were theatre we would be unable to separate the actors from the play. If it were life drawing, it would be as if the subject's hand reached over the paper and corrected our lines.

He was a victorian outcast ...

By the 1950s, Jones and his wife were still living in Lincolnshire with no electricity or running water. He was a Victorian outcast who could not reconcile himself to the realities of living in the modern age. His children were shocked to find that for many years he did not claim his rightful old age pension. Always a proud man, he considered it charity. He died at age 92 on November 15, 1959. These would be the salient events of a seemingly solid, unassuming, yet useful life except for a discovery made twenty-two years later.

Robert Flynn Johnson
Introduction to Plant Kingdoms: The Photographs of Charles Jones

Exhibition - Gibson's Art Gallery

I'm happy to announce a new show scheduled for August, 2013. The portraits will hang in the Eve Smart Gallery in the newly renovated Gibsons Art Gallery. The show will run from August 1 to September 2, 2013.

There will be a reception on Sunday August 3rd from 2-4 pm. This reception will also be the official launch of my first book. Portraits Found and Taken is a hardcover edition containing 144 pages of black and white portraits from the past three years. The book features a preface by Vancouver writer, photographer, and publisher Stephen Osborne.

The book is produced in a limited edition of 300 copies, signed and numbered. Subjects will each receive a copy. If you would like secure a copy before the release date, I've made the book is available to pre-order online here.

I look forward to seeing you at the show.

Tim McLaughlin

You are never welcome ...

You are never welcome. You have to spend time. You have to be patient. I’m never in a hurry. I have to connect with 100 people to convince one. I live with people. I try to transmit why I am so fascinated with them. And finally they say, ‘Pierre, let’s try.’

Pierre Gonnord
interview with Andrew Alexander in Arts Atl.

The portrait is finished ...

The Portrait is finished when I am able to leave my model to himself, to his thoughts, to his own mind, as if he were at home without any witness.

Patrick Faigenbaum
Text panel at the Vancouver Art Gallery Exhibition, 2013

The portrait as stage play ...

In the 19th century, the portrait resembled a small, private stage play. The subject of the portrait got ready, dressed appropriately, and set off the photographer’s. Once there, he entered the studio — which, with its plethora of props and necessary items such as chairs, armchairs, drapes, pictures and statuettes was reminiscent of a small stage — and was fitted into this grid of accessories. The background and furnishings were chosen, the pose and attitude rehearsed — “Wouldn’t you like to be holding a book in your hands?” — and finally the lighting was set up.

Urs Stahel
Afterwards: “After the climax” as a focal element in Rineke Dijkstra’a portrait photography

More crucial and far reaching ...

If the history of creative photography is considered as a whole, the publishing and dissemination of photographer’s work in book form has been more crucial and far-reaching than the showing of photographs in galleries.

The Photobook: A History, Volume I,
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger

Colin Whitworth

Colin Whitworth, technician, taken November 7, 2012.

I think a book of photographs is the most coherent way of putting across your ideas, some argument you are making about the way you see. Putting a book together, for me, has been the strongest way of using photography. But I also love the experience of a print, standing in front of something which is at an appropriate scale, so that you can dwell again in the experience. Photography has this incredible characteristic of illusion, presenting an illusion of deep space with many things going on. It stills time in such a way that if you can stand in front of it and immerse yourself in the experience it describes, you can loose yourself in there. I look for that kind of opportunity, where the photographer has been generous enough in how they have been entranced in their moment, that I have an opportunity to stand in their shoes.

Joel Meyerowitz 

That's really what photographs are ...

Richard Throssel was not only a contemporary of Curtis he was also a native: Cree to be exact, adopted by the Crow. His photograph of Bull Over the Hill’s home, titled “The Old and the New” which shows a log house with a tipi in the background, and his 1910 photograph “Interior of the best Indian Kitchen on the Crow Reservation” which shows an Indian family dressed in traditional clothing, sitting at an elegantly set table, in their very contemporary house, having tea, suggests that native people could negotiate the past and the present with relative ease. His untitled camp scene that juxtaposes traditional tipis with contemporary buggies and a family of pigs – rather than the unshod ponies and prerequisite herd of buffalo, suggests, at least to my contemporary sensibilities, that Throssel has a penchant for satiric play. But I’m probably imagining the humour, Throssel was, after all, a serious photographer trying to capture a moment, perhaps not realizing that tripping the shutter captures nothing; that everything on the ground glass changes before the light hits the film plane. What the camera allows you to do – is invent. To create. That’s really what photographs are: not records of moments, but rather, imaginative acts.

Thomas King
The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative (the 2003 Massey Lectures)