Picturing Boundaries

“Deciding when to take a picture is very weird and mysterious. You don’t know what the subject is until you see it.” Montreal-based photographer Geoffrey James is talking about the photographs he took for his forthcoming book, Canadian Photographs, an artfully selected collection of 97 images taken between 2010 and 2024. (It will be published in late October of this year by Figure 1, Vancouver). He began taking the photographs in 2010 after he bought a new Leica. The camera provided flexibility and dramatically increased the number of subjects available to him. “I’ve always seen photography as a feedback system and with digital that feedback is almost instantaneous,” he said.

It also shifted how he looked at the world. “It made me pay attention to some of the more modest, ephemeral elements of the landscape and place value on the humble and the mundane,” he told historian and former Museum of Modern Art Chief Curator of Photography Peter Galassi, in the interview/conversation with which the book concludes. His 2010 photograph of the closed Blue Berries Home Baking stand in Madoc, Ontario, embodies those qualities. James gets the poignancy of a structure now gone (it was replaced by a massive McDonald’s), as well as a trace of the absurdity of how we mark space. The small white building is festooned with sad flag pennants and the word “WILD” is written twice on its front. The wildness refers to the berries in the baking, but the same surface also warns buyers, again two times, that they shouldn’t park in front of the building. “Wild no parking” has a wonky wit about it, and paying attention to that kind of detail is consistent with the generous disposition of the photographs. “I don’t go around looking for irony and I’m careful not to over-ice the cake,” James says. “A certain restraint is called for. I think there has to be a strong element of sincerity.”

The American poet Ezra Pound said that “technique is the test of an artist’s sincerity,” and by that measure, James is a very sincere photographer. His 2012 picture of the Country Music Jam Fest building on the fairground in Quyon, Quebec, with its dominant Elvis in his gold lamé suit, is wonderful on its own, but James is an artist first and a documentarian second. He shoots the building off-kilter, so that our view of the building is a long, snow-surrounded attenuation. This fairground structure in Quebec is presented with the same artful integrity as the photographs James took of Italian gardens and the Aqueduct Claudio 35 years ago. Cameras change, but the eye of the photographer remains constant: “You know what the boundaries of the picture will be when you put it to your eye, or you move to the spot where you know it will be okay. It’s very intuitive.”

When all the conditions and the light are right, the resulting images are irresistible. “It’s a gift and it doesn’t happen very often. But when it does, it gives you a pit-of-the-stomach feeling,” James says. That feeling can be shared by the viewers of Canadian Photographs: in a parking lot in Winnipeg’s Exchange District; through a nondescript City Second Hand building in Prince George that is transformed by “rainbow light from the night before”; in the grey and white formality of the uranium refinery taken from a train window in Port Hope, Ontario, in 2017; on the Copper Cliff bus with the Pietà of a sleeping mother and child in 2011; taking in the craggy elegance of the Exhibit Hall in Renfrew, Ontario, in 2011; and in a litter-packed back alley in Toronto in 2012. That alley is a photographer’s dream; the set construction and design were handled by Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau and Company, and the colour palette could have been chosen by Jasper Johns. It’s a perfect image. “I don’t have anything against too much beauty,” James says. “I’m used to putting a frame around things. It’s not the art of human vision, so you have to learn all that language about what makes a photograph.” In that language, Geoffrey James is unspeakably articulate. ❚