The Documentary Media Research Centre is happy to share a link to the recording of Phil Bergerson: A Retrospective, which took place at The School of Image Arts, on Thursday, February 25th in honor of the book launch and exhibition of the same name. The speakers included Phil Bergerson, Peter Higdon and Don Snyder.
For information on the exhibition and to purchase the book please go to the Stephen Bulger Gallery Website: https://www.bulgergallery.com/
Phil Bergerson Retrospective Launch Feb 25, 2021 06:46 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
With this book, we have the opportunity to read about, see, and understand Bergerson’s ongoing photographic odyssey. Insightful essays by fellow travellers Don Snyder and Peter Higdon offer a historical and critical context, letting us meet the artist at work and the multitudes he contains: the seemingly limitless energy, the off-beat sense of humour, the mix of warmth and edginess, all of the ingredients heading to one place and one place only. Recently Bergerson replaced his aging camper van with a newer, more roadworthy model. Should an intrepid passenger today finally ask him, “Are we there yet?,” I think I finally know what his answer would be: “We are, because we aren’t.”
—Robert Burley
The Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC) in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University is pleased to host the launch of PHIL BERGERSON: A Retrospective. Phil Bergerson has photographed and exhibited internationally for over 50 years and is represented in many prestigious collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, and the Creative Center for Photography, Tucson. His photographs have appeared in The New Yorker, TheNew York Times Magazine, The Walrus, and Toronto Life Magazine among others. In 2004, Bergerson’s first book, Shards of America was released by Quantuck Lane Press, New York, to rave reviews. Writers who understand the role of “visual thinking” have been drawn to Bergerson’s work. After examining his first book on America, Annie Proulx wrote: “If I were teaching short story writing, the only textbook I would assign would be your collection of photographs.” In 2014 American Artifacts, his critically acclaimed book, was published by BlackDog Press, London, with essays by Margaret Atwood and Nathan Lyons.
From 1972 to 2006, Bergerson was Professor of Photography at Ryerson University, where he established the influential, International “Kodak Lecture Series.” This provided students the opportunity to meet such practitioners as W. Eugene Smith, Bernice Abbott, Robert Frank, and Mary Ellen Mark and such theorists, historians and curators as Rudolf Arnheim, Allan Sekula, Peter Bunnell, Helmut Gernsheim, John Szarkowski and Nathan Lyons. He also created the first International Symposium on Photographic Theory and organized “Canadian Perspectives,” a National Conference on Photography. In 2019, his personal archive was acquired by Library and Archives Canada. He continues to work on representations of American cultural artifacts. He is represented in North America by the Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto.
Please join us for the launch of PHIL BERGERSON: A Retrospective and roundtable discussion with contributors Phil Bergerson, Peter Higdon and Don Snyder, moderated by Katy McCormick.
Spread, pages 44-45
Daylight Books, North Carolina:
Phil Bergerson’s photographs are poetic statements full of irony and pathos encapsulating this empathetic neighbour’s Canadian insight into the mysteries of our complex American nation. Using the traditions of Evans, Frank and Lyons, Bergerson constructs found, poetic fragments into powerful sequential ensembles that metaphorically express something genuine and meaningful about our country.
Essays by Peter Higdon and Don Snyder with Foreword by Robert Burley.
Design coordinator: James McCrorie, 220 pages, 140 colour photographs, 13 x 10.5 inches.
The book is available through Stephen Bulger Gallerywww.bulgergallery.com pickup or delivery, 416 504 0575.
Registered guests will receive 10% discount on $65.00, plus shipping.
Spread, pages 130-131
This retrospective publication, full of new insights and information, will delight those familiar with the photography of Phil Bergerson and seduce those new to his images. The book chronicles the photographer’s early experimentation with film and his brief adventure with performance art in the early 1970s as well as his evolution as an image maker up until today. Describing and contextualizing his varied bodies of work made over a 50 year period, this is an overdue and rich compendium of Bergerson’s artistic contribution and a much needed account of the institutions and individuals who enabled the flourishing of photography as a form of artistic expression in Canada, with a certain focus on Toronto.
—Ann Thomas, Chief Curator, National Gallery of Canada
Phil Bergerson’s Retrospective Exhibition is on at the Stephen Bulger Gallery until March 27th.
Phil Bergerson, New York, New York, 2018
Participant Bios:
Phil Bergerson (con’t) was born in Toronto in 1947 and began his photography studies at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in 1967. He attended his first regional meeting of the Society of Photographic Education (SPE) at the George Eastman House in fall 1968. In 1970, he began studying painting and printmaking at York University in the fine arts program. In 1972, he was asked to return to Ryerson to teach photography and design.
Peter Higdon is the Founding Collections Curator of the Ryerson Image Centre, (RIC), Ryerson University. Over a period of thirty-six years, he drove the expansion of its photographs collection through numerous acquisitions, among them the Black Star Collection of photojournalism. Funding accompanying this major donation allowed commencement of a long-sought building project that yielded museum-standard exhibition spaces and a research centre incorporating a print storage vault. He was also instrumental in the RIC’s acquisition of the Berenice Abbott Archive. For ten years he was consultant to graduate students in Ryerson’s collections management program, (FPPCM), and for more than twenty years was coordinator of Ryerson’s Photography Workshop in France. Upon retirement in 2014, the RIC’s Research Centre was named in his honour, and a graduate scholarship established in his name.
Don Snyder studied photography with Walker Evans at Yale University and with Minor White in the graduate program at MIT. A member of the Documentary Media Research Centre since its founding, Prof. Emeritus Snyder taught photography production, history and theory in the School of Image Arts as well as Media Writing in the Documentary Media MFA program. Recent projects have included an essay for photographer Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s book, Ritual, and the Introduction for In Canadian Workspaces, published by photographer and DMRC member Martin Weinhold. Snyder also designed and curated Weinhold’s exhibition Face to Face with Canada: A Nation at Work, shown at the Ryerson Artspace and later at the German Embassy in Ottawa. His essay for Phil Bergerson: A Retrospective was published in early 2020.
Katy McCormick is associate professor of photography studies in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University and co-director and a founding member of the Documentary Media Research Centre. She was director of the MFA in Documentary Media from 2014 to 2018. Her photographic work examines commemorative sites, revealing narratives and social histories embedded in landscapes. Her current project, Rooted among the Ashes: The A-Bombed Trees of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, begun in 2008, was recently included in Through Post-atomic Eyes, edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian.
This event is supported by the Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC). The DMRC develops new scholarship and research/production methodologies in all forms of contemporary documentary practice. The DMRC disseminates the results of its research activities through conferences, publications, public film screenings, curatorial projects and exhibitions. See: www.imagearts.ryerson.ca/docmediacentre/
The Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC) is pleased to present a discussion with directors Lindsay Fitzgerald, Lulu Wei and Ali Weinstein. All three filmmakers are graduates of the Documentary Media (MFA) program in the School of Image Arts. Their films address moments of great change: in spirituality and contemporary religious practice, in the destruction and redevelopment of one iconic block in Toronto; and in fact-finding and the challenges of journalism in the world of social media, information conglomerates, and even fake news. Change is also in play for the filmmakers who shot their features pre-pandemic, only to release them into an entirely different world.
Lindsay Fitzgerald, After Fact, 2020
Lindsay Fitzgerald’s film After Fact (2020) is an unvarnished portrait of real life news work. Shot in a cinéma-vérité style, this feature documentary illuminates the complexity of fact-finding and the pressures of being a journalist in a post-modern context. With subtle cues about the decimation of local news, the economic perils facing newsrooms and the dehumanization of journalists, the film takes a nuanced look at the task of sense-making in a world where the notion of truth is ever more malleable.
Lulu Wei, There’s No Place Like This Place, Anyplace, 2020
There’s No Place Like This Place, Anyplace (2020), directed by Lulu Wei and produced by Ali Weinstein, looks at the transformation of an iconic Toronto block – where the world- famous Honest Ed’s store once lived – through the stories of community members as they attempt to reconcile their history with the future, all while facing the biggest urban housing crisis Toronto (and Canada) has ever seen.
Ali Weinstein, #BLESSED, 2020
Ali Weinstein’s film #BLESSED goes inside a fast-growing millennial church, where Pastor Sam spreads his message of 21st century salvation to his young and hip churchgoers as they work their way closer to God.
Biographies:
LINDSAY FITZGERALD is a writer, producer, researcher and journalist in Toronto. She has been working in the documentary and media landscape for close to a decade, on independent and broadcast productions for TVO, CBC and the Fifth Estate. Her independent short films have screened at festivals around the world, most notably About Employment (2017), which won the prestigious TVO Short Doc contest. She is currently the production manager and associate producer on the documentary Betrayal (CBC, 2021), and has just finished her first feature-length film, After Fact (2020), which will have its festival premiere in 2021.
BRETT STORY is a filmmaker and writer based in Toronto. Her 2016 feature documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Brett is the author of the book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America, and co-editor of the book, Digital Life in the Global City. Her most recent award-winning feature documentary, The Hottest August, continues to screen around the world.
LULU WEI is a Toronto-based director and cinematographer whose work explores issues around urbanization, cultural identity and queerness. She has been working on There’s No Place Like This Place, Anyplace, her first feature film, for the past four years. In that time, Lulu and the film have been a part of the RIDM Talent Lab, the Reel World E20 program, the Hot Docs Doc Accelerator program and the DOC Breakthrough program.
ALI WEINSTEIN premiered her first feature-length film, Mermaids, at Hot Docs 2017. She has since directed #BLESSED, about the stunning success of an evangelical church amongst Toronto millennials, for CBC and she co-directed The Impossible Swim, about a 16-year-old marathon swimmer, for TSN. There’s No Place Like This Place, Anyplace is the first film she has produced.
Images from the event:
This event is supported by the Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC). The DMRC develops new scholarship and research/production methodologies in all forms of contemporary documentary practice. The DMRC disseminates the results of its research activities through conferences, publications, public film screenings, curatorial projects and exhibitions. See: www.imagearts.ryerson.ca/docmediacentre/
The Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC), located in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University, is pleased to announce Wayne Dunkley as the DMRC Artist in Residence 2020-21. Over the course of the year he will engage the school community in questions around social practice, public space and how we come to know each other. We are pleased to introduce the residency with a talk about his practice.
Wayne Dunkley’s practice asks, “Is it possible to truly know another?” Using photography, digital media and community-engaged actions, his inquiry provokes alternative conversations on how we relate to place and each other. Rooted in ontology, Dunkley’s practice moves beyond society’s default narratives to create a revolutionized way of being in the world.
For over 20 years Dunkley has used a photographic portrait of himself to subvert society’s default tropes on otherness, blackness and being male. He has used this portrait to disrupt spaces where these stereotypes are found: online, within social media and on public-facing billboards and hoardings.
In his most recent project,#whatdoyoufeelwhen, Dunkley had one thousand 24”x 36” posters placed in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal. The poster uses his own face that has been altered to resemble the pen and ink drawings of escaped slaves published in the 17th century Montreal Gazette. Slave owners would place these drawings in newspapers in order to hunt those who escaped. By recontextualizing and re-imagining the escaped slave poster, Dunkley references the history of slavery in Canada and the United States as well as his own contemporary feelings of being dehumanized, studied, and pursued. Dunkley’s images are an entry point for viewers to examine questions of Othering.
Parkdale, 2018
Davie, 2018
Corktown, 2018
Over the course of the DMRC residency at Ryerson, students will have an opportunity to engage with Dunkley regularly as he participates in classes, critiques and offers one-on-one office hours.
Biography: As a graduate of Ryerson University and the University of Toronto, Dunkley has worked in both commercial and art photography. He was awarded the Paul D. Fleck award for Innovation in the Arts from the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and a commission from the Banff New Media Institute. He has worked as a consultant on interactive storytelling and digital strategy with the National Film Board and served as a panellist and advisor for the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, Royal Ontario Museum and the Dak’Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art. Dunkley’s practice includes photography, digital media & storytelling, cultural mediation, lectures and workshop facilitation. He is also a trained voice actor. Wayne has lived and worked in Montreal, Edmonton, and San Francisco. He currently resides just outside Toronto.
The Documentary Media Research Centre develops new scholarship and research/production methodologies in all forms of contemporary documentary practice. The DMRC disseminates the results of its research activities through conferences, publications, public film screenings, curatorial projects and exhibitions on its website.
The Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC) in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University is pleased to host the dual launch of Through Post-Atomic Eyes, edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian (MQUP 2020) and The Bomb in the Wilderness by John O’Brian (UBC Press 2020). Please join us for a roundtable discussion with contributors: Matthew Farish, Blake Fitzpatrick, Claudette Lauzon, Katy McCormick, John O’Brian and Charles Stankievech. All registered guests will receive a 20% discount on the books.
In recognition of the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two signature events in the twentieth century with implications still evolving, these publications are both highly anticipated and timely.
The nuclear era is a contested subject in representation and as John O’Brian has suggested, few aspects of the nuclear environment have escaped the camera’s gaze. Juxtaposing the work of artists and scholars, Through Post-Atomic Eyes asks: What can photography tell us about a world transformed by nuclear catastrophe, and how has photography and contemporary art offered a lens through which to see – or not to see (because so much of it involves problems of invisibility) – aspects of the nuclear era?
Erin Siddal, Peace Camp, as part of Proving Ground, Nevada, 2017.
The Bomb in the Wilderness: Photography and the Nuclear Erain Canadaconsiders the role of the photograph in visualizing, remembering and interpreting nuclear activities in Canada since 1945. The impact of Canada’s nuclear programs has been felt ever since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the reach of those programs – its nuclear footprint – has been global.
Richard Harrington, Beijing, China: left: Children Reading Anti-American Sign; right: Movie Billboard with Mushroom Cloud and Soldier Wearing Anti-Radiation Gear.
Biographies:
Matthew Farish is associate professor of geography and associate chair, undergraduate, at the University of Toronto where he teaches courses in cultural and historical geography. He is the author of The Contours of America’s Cold War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and a forth-coming co-authored history of the Distant Early Warning (Dew) Line.
Blake Fitzpatrick is professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University and co-director of the Documentary Media Research Centre. His research interests include critical landscape studies, the photographic representation of the nuclear era, visual responses to contemporary militarism. He is co-editor of Critical Distance in Documentary Media (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) and contributed a chapter on the aerial image in contemporary documentary art for the volume.
Claudette Lauzon is assistant professor of contemporary art history and theory in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, where she specializes in visual culture, critical theory and conflict studies. She is the author of The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art (University of Toronto Press, 2017) and co-editor (with Natalie Alvarez and Keren Zaointz) of Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas (Palgrave, 2019).
Katy McCormick is associate professor of photography studies in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University and co-director of the Documentary Media Research Centre. Her photographic work examines commemorative sites, revealing narratives and social histories embedded in landscapes. Her current project, Rooted among the Ashes: The A-Bombed Trees of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, begun in 2008, offers intimate portraits of trees, both alive and dead, that survived atomic attacks.
John O’Brian was until 2017, professor of art history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author or editor of twenty previous books, including Camera Atomica, David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting, Ruthless Hedonism, and the four-volume edition of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, which was named by the New York Times as a “best” book in 1986. He is the organizer of five exhibitions on nuclear photography, which have been shown in Copenhagen, London, Toronto and Vancouver.
Charles Stankievech is the director of visual studies at the University of Toronto. He is an artist, writer and curator who has exhibited, written and lectured on a variety of interests for the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; HKW, Berlin; as well as Documenta, Venice, Berlin, Kiev, Montreal, Santa Fe, and other biennales. He is co-founder of K. Verlag in Berlin and editor of Afterall Journal in London.
This event is supported by the Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC). The DMRC develops new scholarship and research/production methodologies in all forms of contemporary documentary practice. The DMRC disseminates the results of its research activities through conferences, publications, public film screenings, curatorial projects and exhibitions. See: www.imagearts.ryerson.ca/docmediacentre/
Reframing Fields of Vision: From the ‘pencil of nature’ to environmental futures
Since its inception, photography has been used to explore the geographic and the botanical, while more it has become associated with interrogative questioning of ecosystems and environmental change. Wells’ talk focussed on British photography and ways in which photographers have used the camera to explore place and environment, particularly in relation to rural lands and landscapes.
Liz Wells writes and lectures on photographic practices. She edited The Photography Reader: History and Theory (2019), The Photography Culture Reader (2019) and Photography: A Critical Introduction (2015 5th ed.) and is a co-editor for photographies, Routledge journals. She is Professor in Photographic Culture, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Plymouth, UK, and a member of the research group for Land/Water and the Visual Arts.
In March of 2019, University of Toronto presented A Body in Fukushima: Reflections on the Nuclear Everyday Life, a multi-sited, multi-media, and multi-disciplinary event consisting (1) Photo Exhibitions – March 4 to April 14; (2) A Body in a Library Performance by Eiko Otake – March 15; (3) Video Screening and Symposium – March 16, 2019. The DMRC contributed to this last event and member Katy McCormick gave a presentation on her work in Hiroshima.
Photo: Movement-based artist Eiko Otake, photographed by William Johnston, 2014.
The official book launch for Critical Distance in Documentary Media edited by DMRC members Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick and Bruno Lessard, took place on February 14th, 2019 at The Catalyst. The launch included a presentation by each of the three editors, a panel discussion lead by Daniel Fischer and an open discussion with the audience, followed by a reception. This event was organized in collaboration with The Catalyst, a large-scale space dedicated to scholarly, research, and creative (SRC) activities within the faculty of Communication and Design at Ryerson. The Catalyst houses several SRC projects, labs, and research centres, such as the DMRC and CFE.
2019-2020 Film Series: Truth, Evidence and Disinformation
In partnership with the Centre for Free Expression (CFE), the Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC) launched an ongoing monthly film series at Ryerson University on October 19, 2017. The films are introduced by specialists and followed by a discussion with the audience. They take place every month, on the second Tuesday of each month at 7 pm, in IMA307.
The 2019-20 series is titled Truth, Evidence and Disinformation and explores the nature of truth as well as how “evidence” is selectively and/or dishonestly used to create, obscure or question truth. The series includes predominantly documentary films largely drawn from the contemporary moment.
The 2019/2020 film series includes the films:
The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1998) – October 10, 2019
Control Room (Jehane Noujaim, 2004) – November 12, 2019
Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) – December 10, 2019
Before the Flood (Fisher Stevens, 2016) – January 14, 2019
The Great Hack (Karim Amer & Jehane Noujaim, 2019) – February 11, 2020
Sicko (Michael Moore, 2007) – March 10, 2020
Cold Case Hammarskjold (Mads Brügger, 2019) – April 14, 2020
Official Secrets (Gavin Hood, 2019) – May 12, 2020
Presented in two gallery venues, Gallery 310 and Ryerson Artspace at the Gladstone, Melanie Friend’s The Home Front explores links between militarism, marketing and entertainment, with a particular focus on public air shows that take place in the UK at Royal Air Force (RAF) bases and in the skies above seaside resorts. Beaches are temporarily militarized by the fleeting screech of contemporary fighter jets such as the Tornado (in recent years deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan) interwoven with displays by WWII “warbirds” such as the Lancaster bomber. The work aims to inspire reflection on the normalization of war in UK culture. Air shows are a “fun day out” for the family: on the ground at RAF bases, tank rides are offered and armed forces’ recruitment drives afford children an opportunity to indulge in their fascination with guns. In David Gee’s independent report “Informed Choice: Armed Forces Recruitment Practice in the United Kingdom” (cited in Stephen Armstrong, “Britain’s Child Army,” The New Statesman, February 5, 2007), Colonel David Allfrey, head of the army’s recruitment strategy, once remarked: “It starts with a seven-year-old boy seeing a parachutist at an air show and thinking, ‘That looks great.’ From then the army is trying to build interest by drip, drip, drip.” The Home Front was nominated for the Prix Pictet award in 2013 & 2014 and The Home Front publication (Dewi Lewis Publishing in association with Impressions Gallery, 2013) was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photographic Prize 2015.
The Home Front first opened in 2013 at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, UK, curated by Pippa Oldfield. This selection of works, presented in two Toronto venues, was curated by Anne Massoni, Photography Program Director at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Toronto presentation is organized by Katy McCormick, Associate Professor, Photography Studies, Ryerson, with support from the Documentary Media Research Centre (DMRC), the Documentary Media MFA Program and the School of Image Arts, Ryerson University.
Melanie Friend presented a free public lecture on her work on Wednesday, September 26, 2018 at 6:30 pm in The School of Image Arts, Room 307, 122 Bond Street, followed by a reception in Gallery 310.
