Being There

This is a por­trait series chron­i­cling the indi­vid­u­als that were part of Canada’s largest mass arrest at the G-20 sum­mit in the sum­mer of 2010 in Toronto.

Is Addad Hannah’s “Dad and David Vis­it­ing” a pho­to­graph, or a video?

I think of pho­tog­ra­phy as akin to poetry. Craft­ing a photo nar­ra­tive is like writ­ing haiku. Edit­ing is a care­ful, eco­nom­i­cal process of bal­anc­ing images against each other. Each has to have value, but those val­ues must fit together to con­struct a coher­ent mes­sage or larger image.

I’m not one to believe in nations, but today I am glad to be back with my com­pa­tri­ots. I’m back in Ottawa for the first time since I moved to New York at the begin­ning of August

Tucked in a back cor­ner on the third floor is Deana Lawson’s giant photo-mural. Lawson’s piece presents a nar­ra­tive made of appro­pri­ated images, a sort of imag­ined fam­ily album, but spread out edge to edge on a gallery wall.