Canadian Photographer wins $50,000 prize

[johnnywalker]

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/story/2008/04/24/grange-prize.html

 

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

My girlfriend is a UofManitoba alumni, and receives their magazine periodically. Sarah Anne Johnson was featured on the cover page once, and there was quite an interesting article about her background and her work.

She studied at Yale (where else?) under Tod Papageorge (who else?) and she uses a Mamiya C330 with medium format colour film (what else?), and is now represented by the Stephen Bulger gallery (by whom else?).

Her work is quite interesting, in that it mixes together documentary photos with pictures of replicas made out of clay, puppets, whatnot. She makes little story, completing the onsite pictures with her little tabletop models pictures. It's further complicated by the fact that she often makes her puppets on site, so they are not studio reconstructions only.

The one she made about tree planters (and that won her the prize) is very good, see here:
http://www.bulgergallery.com/dynamic/fr_artist.asp?ArtistID=72&Body=Tree Planting Project

 

[Bob Carnie]

I have seen her work , and it is very good , reminds me a bit about my youth in the BC logging camps. though I was on the other end of the cycle but we hanged out with the treeplanters. Lots of people spent the most of the summer on Long Beach living amongs the logs that had drifted in.

 

[bjorke]

Good selection here

 

[mabman]

Interestingly, she's currently listed as a sessional instructor in sculpture (not photography) at the U of Manitoba's Dead Link Removed. Her art blends the 2, so that makes some sense.

 

[Colin Corneau]

It's interesting, and I'm always for MORE art, and especially photographers getting loadsadough.

But, this work just doesn't move me. She's getting a lot of mileage out of it, but I just don't see it especially in light of the other entrants. I guess that may be my shortcoming.

 

[mark]

My Shortcoming too. I found it pretty darn boring.

 

[mabman]

She was interviewed on CBC Radio yesterday, and one of the questions that struck me was about photography - specifically was she envious of other photographers who just "snapped the photo" (paraphrasing a bit, but that was the gist of the interviewer's phrase).

She said she was, actually, but for her she can't just do that for herself (although she does work from reference photos).

Apparently she wants to venture more into displaying her dioramas with photos as the artwork itself, rather than just taking pics of the dioramas.

 

[Vaughn]

Thanks your the post. Good stuff...but then I can relate since I planted trees for quite a few seasons. Hard work, but rewarding -- especially when it is done with a good group of people.

vaughn

 

[Doubrovsky]

There were five finalists for the prize - 2 Canadians and 3 Chinese. (See http://www.thegrangeprize.com ) Chinese all are much stronger, with sharp modern approach, more provocative. Canadians were all boring - you can do nothing about the lack of history and cultural identity in this country. Sarah Anne Johnson's work is almost identical to what another Canadian (in my vew more interesting) is doing: Dead Link Removed

I am disappointed.

 

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

Sarah Anne Johnson's work is almost identical to what another Canadian (in my vew more interesting) is doing: Dead Link Removed

Identical? In what ways?

 

[big_ben_blue]

Identical? In what ways?

combining and juxtaposing "real-life" photographs with photographs of miniature sets of the same subjects (my guess). Both appear to use the same creative strategy, just the subject matter is different. Makarenko appears to be more skilled with lighting and technical execution; Johnson's work has a decisively more "folksy" naive character (not that there's anything wrong with it).
But none of the two has the monopol on photographing dioramas; it's hardly anything new. Model builder (model trains, tanks, planes, etc) do that since decades; they just don't claim to be artists even though many of them could easily rival both Johnson or Makarenko. I am planning on doing a similar project myself in the near future (after dealing with some technical difficulties).

 

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

Ah yes, I did not notice the models in Makarenko's work.

I would say that Johnson's work is more in a "realist" vein, emulating documentary photography, whereas Makarenko is more poetic/expressionist.

 

[bjorke]

It's a tide that's been rising for a few years, as images are more and more constructed. The collision of artifice with the "direct" nature of photography has been a source of good ideas for as long as the medium has existed....

 

[mabman]

It will be interesting to see her next project - she's in Montreal right now developing it - her late grandmother was put under a psychiatrist's care there for post-partum depression in the 1950s, and was given LSD as part of a CIA experiment.

She said in the radio interview that she's not sure what form this project will take yet.

 

[keithwms]

Well, congratulations to her!

I am still unsure what to see in the photographs. Many give such a good approximation of reality that the creative role of the dollmaking isn't obvious.

For now, I suppose that I simply find the work 'interesting.'

 

[Kilgallb]

There were five finalists for the prize - 2 Canadians and 3 Chinese. (See http://www.thegrangeprize.com ) Chinese all are much stronger, with sharp modern approach, more provocative. Canadians were all boring - you can do nothing about the lack of history and cultural identity in this country. Sarah Anne Johnson's work is almost identical to what another Canadian (in my vew more interesting) is doing: Dead Link Removed

I am disappointed.

Spoken with a true Eurocentric view that ignores 10,000 years of native history and the 1200 year migration of peoples from all parts of this world to Canada. Canada is not 135 years old, it is 10,000 years old and has survived as a culture intact in the shadow of the US. We are probably the strongest culture in the world as we realize we can adopt the best of any peoples and call it our own, and we do.

 

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

It will be interesting to see her next project - she's in Montreal right now developing it - her late grandmother was put under a psychiatrist's care there for post-partum depression in the 1950s, and was given LSD as part of a CIA experiment.

She said in the radio interview that she's not sure what form this project will take yet.

Hey, those experiments were made at McGilll. I got my degrees from McGill. What's that lawn jockey doing to the pink flamingo?

 

[Paul Goutiere]

Canadians were all boring - you can do nothing about the lack of history and cultural identity in this country.
I am disappointed.

Your "cultural identity" doesn't seem to have done you a lot of good. Here you are, in Toronto Canada.

Canada is a mixture of cultural identities as well as its own. To appreciate what we have here you will have to release the cultural bias you seem to have developed.

 

[Paul Goutiere]

Spoken with a true Eurocentric view that ignores 10,000 years of native history and the 1200 year migration of peoples from all parts of this world to Canada. Canada is not 135 years old, it is 10,000 years old and has survived as a culture intact in the shadow of the US. We are probably the strongest culture in the world as we realize we can adopt the best of any peoples and call it our own, and we do.

And I wanted to say this too!

 

[Colin Corneau]

In defence of Kilgallb, it's fair to say that the depth and sheer amount of history in China -- the only other country to produce photographers competing for this prize -- easily dwarfs that of this very young country. If you want to strictly define a "country", it's a collective and coherent group sharing common bonds held together by organized governance and technology such as writing.

I won't get into a politically charged/correct cultural anthropology debate, because quite frankly it's boring to me and not what this thread is about, but if you're going to go by just people occupying a space, well...the whole earth is old, isn't it?

Lighten up, please and save the "whither the original inhabitants?" speech for the next campus rally.