Stan Douglas

What you first notice about the photographs in Stan Douglas’s new series, “Midcentury Studio,” and what online and print reproductions don’t convey, is how large they are. This largeness—many of the prints are almost four feet tall—coupled with the uniformly impeccable composition and development of each image, paints Douglas as a kind of aesthete. This is not without precedent. Recent series such as “Inconsolable Memories” and “Klatsassin” have been noteworthy for their formal beauty as well as their conceptual rigour.

There remains something different about “Midcentury Studio,” however. Most ostensibly, it is lacking one of Douglas’s trademark film installations; it is, in fact, one of the purest exercises in photography of Douglas’s career. The very premise of “Midcentury Studio” bears this out. Taking as his model the intrepid jobber photographers of post-World War II North America—most famously Weegee (aka Arthur Fellig) but also his contemporaries such as Vancouver’s Raymond Munro—Douglas has created a fictional but utterly and, indeed, uncannily convincing portfolio for a fictional photographer from the years 1945 to 1951. Much research, including trips to the archives of the Vancouver Public Library and Toronto’s Ryerson University’s Black Star Collection, went into the cultivation of this persona and its attendant body of work. And much labour has gone into its execution. Era-precise locations were scouted in Vancouver, including the heritage Tudor-revival house, The Rosemary, in the city’s Shaughnessy district, which served as a primary backdrop. Dozens of film and television extras were considered so Douglas and his team could get just the right physiognomies-of-yore for their shots.

This fastidiousness may suggest a kind of empty, period fetishism—a photoconceptualist version of a Todd Haynes film—but this is not what Douglas intends. Rather, the process is passionately involved, a head-on engagement with the past and its feverishly prolific picture taking as a relevant thing in an elaborate creative gesture curiously akin to method acting. The beauty of the photos, for instance, belies their extempore qualities. According to Douglas, the photos may be a result of scenarios he constructs, but their final outcome, like that of the photographers after whom he models himself, was not completely known. It is difficult to see this in the pristine resulting images without such context—and, ultimately, one has to take Douglas’s word for it—though there are surprises in each image. Their depth, for one, is remarkable. Camouflage, 1945 is officially a product shot, and Burlap, 1948 might be the same (it could also be a crime-scene photo), but each has its chilling ambiguities: chiaroscuro and lumps of inanimate stuff that, through the curiosity of the gaze, become animate. There is also the motif of the pointing hand, which is everywhere, from the cigar-holding investigator’s index finger in Cache, 1948 to the extended fingers at the bottom right of Dancer II, 1950. Both hands fill paradoxical roles: first, drawing the eye toward the photograph’s compositional centre and, then, drawing it away, suggesting the hustle and histrionics just beyond the frame.

That suggestion is also present across the images, so “Midcentury Studio” is, it turns out, as much an installation as an accrual of individual works. Like his film loops, the photos—all of which are named according to date—were chronologically scrambled for their first showing at New York’s David Zwirner Gallery. (Conversely, the monograph is arranged by date.) The effect is to draw viewers’ attention to the aesthetic similarities of the works—what goes pleasingly together, such as all of the photographer’s fashion work—but also suggests the organizational effects of art on history. The tenets of capitalism may dictate the simulated piecework on display here, but those of curation are powerful enough to eradicate that context and to create a new, and newly objectifying, one. The story of this photographer can be replayed variously, from perfect taxonomy to total hodgepodge.

Many who saw “Midcentury Studio” engaged in a critical guessing game as to which images were more convincingly “late-1940s” than others. The game, however frivolous, is valid; Douglas seems to prompt it. (I found Worm Digger, 1949 and Actress, 1947, due to a number of subtle qualities, to betray their contemporariness.) There is the additional fact that many of these images were, in their original historical context, posed—a convention that emerged in the early 1950s when life and its ilk generated a commercial demand for impossibly gorgeous documentary work. There is also the vital consideration that these prints were made using digital technology. But it is precisely this collision of past with present, of authentic with inauthentic, that grants “Midcentury Studio” its profound mystery. Like the great films noir they so fervently evoke, Douglas’s photos deal in layers. The more of them you uncover, the more there are left to lift. ❚

“Midcentury Studio” was exhibited at David Zwirner Gallery in New York from March 23 to April 23, 2011.

David Balzar lives in Toronto and is assistant editor of Canadian Art.