Photogenic Montreal: Activisms and Archives in a Post-industrial City 9780228009788

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photogenic montreal

mcgill- queen’s/beaverbrook canadian foundation studies in art history martha langford and sandra paikowsky, series editors

Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peerreviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered. The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an Introduction by FrançoisMarc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet

Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Peter Feldstein On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher Armstrong Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson

Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips

Visibly Canadian Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 Karen Stanworth

The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy

Breaking and Entering The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted Edited by Bridget Elliott

Family Ties Living History in Canadian House Museums Andrea Terry Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City Sarah Bassnett Architecture on Ice A History of the Hockey Arena Howard Shubert For Folk’s Sake Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia Erin Morton Spaces and Places for Art Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990 Anne Whitelaw Narratives Unfolding National Art Histories in an Unfinished World Edited by Martha Langford Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955 Writings and Reconsiderations Lora Senechal Carney Sketches from an Unquiet Country Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940 Edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney I’m Not Myself at All Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada Kristina Huneault The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China Anthony W. Lee Tear Gas Epiphanies Protest, Culture, Museums Kirsty Robertson What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? Edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear

Through Post-Atomic Eyes Edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian Jean Paul Riopelle et le mouvement automatiste François-Marc Gagnon Jean Paul Riopelle and the Automatiste Movement François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Donald Winkler I Can Only Paint The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton Irene Gammel Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980 Edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers Architecture and Immigrant Reception in Canada, 1870–1930 David Monteyne Women at the Helm How Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih, and Shirley L. Thomson Changed the National Gallery of Canada Diana Nemiroff Voluntary Detours Small-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta Lianne McTavish Photogenic Montreal Activisms and Archives in a Post-industrial City Edited by Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan

photogenic montreal Activisms and Archives in a Post-industrial City

EDITED BY MARTHA LANGFORD JOHANNE SLOAN

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 ISBN 978-0-2280-0857-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-0978-8 (ePDF) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding was also received from Concordia University’s Aid to Research-Related Events program, administered by the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Graduate Studies, and from the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Photogenic Montreal : activisms and archives in a post-industrial city / edited by Martha Langford, Johanne Sloan. Names: Langford, Martha, editor. | Sloan, Johanne, editor. Series: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210324597 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210324767 | ISBN 9780228008576 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228009788 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture and photography—Québec (Province)—Montréal. | LCSH: Art and photography—Québec (Province)—Montréal. | LCSH: Art and architecture— Québec (Province)—Montréal. | LCSH: Photography—Social aspects—Québec (Province)—Montréal. | LCSH: Montréal (Québec)—Pictorial works. Classification: LCC NA2543.P46 P56 2021 | DDC 770.9714/28—dc23

Cover and book design by pata macedo

Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan

PART ONE

Activisms: City as Social Laboratory

1. Re-activations: Alain Chagnon’s Plateau-Mont-Royal in Translation 31 Martha Langford

2. Melvin Charney and Photography: “The Image Behind the Image” 56 Louis Martin

3. Through the Lens of Edith Mather: Photographing Demolition and the Transforming City 80 Tanya Southcott

4. Returning to the Ninth Floor: An Interview with Selwyn Jacob 100 Johanne Sloan

5. Is the Artist an Unreliable Archivist? Reflections on the Photographic Preservation of a Montreal Neighbourhood 111 Clara Gutsche

6. Post-industrialist Passions: Urban Exploration, Photography, and the Spirit of Place 131 Suzanne Paquet

PART TWO

Archives: Ruins and Revisions

7 Picturing The Old Architecture of Quebec: Ramsay Traquair and Cultural Conservatism, 1913–39 151 Annmarie Adams

8. A Heuristic Archive: Jean-Paul Gill’s Red Light Photographs 174 Philippe Guillaume

9. The Pastness of Allô Police 199 Will Straw

10. Architecture, Photography, and Power: Picturing Montreal, 1973–74 217 Cynthia Imogen Hammond

11. Fading In and Fading Out: Negatives and Positives in the Photographic Afterlives of Ephemeral Site-Specific Installations by Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe 246 Martha Fleming

12. Erase and See: The Photogénie of a Metropolis in Progress 263 Martha Langford

13. Expo 67 and the Future of Montreal 292 Johanne Sloan

Illustrations 311 Bibliography 317 Contributors 337 Index 341

Acknowledgments

Two research platforms hosted the beginnings of this book: the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS), which met for the first time in Canada at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Concordia University in June 2016; and a multi-city team-research project, Networked Art Histories: Assembling Contemporary Art in Canada, 1960s to the Present (Johanne Sloan, Principal Investigator), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2013–2017. The ACHS conference posed the question “What Does Heritage Change?” as its central research question. Conscious of the fact that photography would be shown in every session as an indexical window onto the world, Martha Langford convened a session (which became a double panel) asking about mediation: “What Does Photography Preserve? Reification and Ruin in the Photographic Heritage of a Place Called Montreal.” We want to thank all the participants in that conference for their inspiring contributions, and for helping to lay the foundations for this book. We also appreciate the support of Professor Lucie K. Morisset, Canada Research Chair on Urban Heritage (UQAM), who was one of the main conference organizers. Networked Art Histories was an extremely productive project, holding its own workshops and conferences in the three focal cities, Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Montreal, with published findings in a special issue of the Journal of Canadian Art History on print culture, as well as Martha Langford’s edited collection Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (2017). Still, the topic was

far from exhausted, and as the project explored the art and cultural production of particular cities, Photogenic Montreal was able to extend that urban focus. This book builds on many cross-country conversations and encounters facilitated by that SSHRC grant, and indeed the present volume is the final outcome of the Networked Art Histories project. The Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art has continuously supported or co-sponsored the activities of its director and research chair, Martha Langford, and deputy-director, Johanne Sloan. Members Annmarie Adams and Cynthia Hammond have also contributed generously to the Institute’s Urban Art Histories research axis, as have the members’ doctoral students, Philippe Guillaume and Tanya Southcott. Concordia University contributed funding for this publication, through its Aid to Research Related Events (ARRE) program, and we are thankful for that support. We are infinitely grateful to the artists and institutions who generously allowed us to reproduce their images or holdings. As a collective work, Photogenic Montreal represents a network of individual and institutional support that its contributors also wish to acknowledge. Annmarie Adams is grateful to the School of Architecture, McGill University, as well as the following individuals: Justin Bouttell, Duncan Cowie, Jennifer Garland, Peter Gossage, Brian Merrett, Jennifer Phan, Cigdem Talu, and Dell Upton.  Martha Fleming would like to thank Lyne Lapointe for decades of inspiration and collaboration, Marik Boudreau for half a century of incisive and elegiac photo-historiography of Montreal, Petunia Alves for help in documenting the “bank heist,” and both Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer and Kelley Wilder for pointing her toward the “foto-objekte” a dozen years ago.  Philippe Guillaume thanks Robert Petrelli, retired professor of urban studies at UQAM, and Sam Stroll, who ran the family-operated Superior Pants Clothing Store on Sainte-Catherine Street East, for sharing memories of growing up and daily life in the Red Light neighbourhood. He is also grateful to Lucie Côté, social and community development agent at Corporation d’habitation Jeanne-Mance, as well as the staff at Archives Ville de Montréal for their assistance in locating the source photographs and map, and for granting permission to reproduce them. Clara Gutsche is grateful to the Concordia University Part-time Faculty Association for the professional development funding that assisted this project. She is also deeply appreciative of the space of calm contemplation offered by the Grey Nuns’ Reading Room, where she wrote her chapter. Matthew Brooks expertly

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Acknowledgments

prepared the images for publication. Sarah Gutsche-Miller provided generous feedback during the writing. Cynthia Hammond thanks Louise Abbott, Charles Gurd, and Brian Merrett for their generosity and their time in sharing their memories of the personal, political, and creative circumstances surrounding their work as photographers in the early 1970s, as well as Pamela Caussy (Visual Collections Repository) and Alexandra Mills (Special Collections) of Concordia University, and Heather McNabb of the McCord Museum, for their research assistance. She is also most grateful to Phyllis Lambert for her recollections and insights. Suzanne Paquet offers thanks to Jarold Dumouchel and Alexandrine Théorêt, as well as the Insight Program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Tanya Southcott’s chapter draws on her M.Arch. and current work as a PhD student at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, for which she has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du Québec. This work was made possible by a Fred and Betty Price Research Award from the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas at McGill. She is grateful for the generosity and support of her supervisor, Annmarie Adams. She also thanks Hélène Samson, the McCord Museum, and Edith Mather, as well as Ben Sweeting for his insight and perseverance in reading multiple drafts. Will Straw wishes to express his gratitude to Jennifer Garland and staff in the Rare Books and Special Collections division of the McGill Libraries. As editors and contributors, we are all indebted to Jonathan Crago, editor-in-chief of McGill-Queen’s University Press, for his unflagging interest and encouragement throughout this process, and especially for his solicitation of two anonymous reviews whose complementary insights warmly encouraged our final revisions to the manuscript. In this, we have been professionally assisted by Georgia PhillipsAmos, a doctoral candidate in the Interuniversity PhD program at Concordia University. We would also like to thank the entire MQUP team, who so expertly guided the publication through stages of editorial work, production, and design. M.L. and J.S.

Acknowledgments

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photogenic montreal

Tiohtià:ke/Montreal is located on unceded Indigenous lands. The Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of these lands and waters. Historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations, Tiohtià:ke/ Montréal is today home to a diverse population of Indigenous and other peoples.

Introduction Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan

One of photography’s earliest missions was recording the built environment: preservation with a point. Excursions Daguerriennes: Vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe (Paris, 1840–42), a series of annotated aquatints based on photographs, claimed Greece, the Middle East, and even Niagara Falls as the building blocks of Western civilization. In 1851, the Missions Héliographiques assigned French photographers to document medieval monuments deemed worthy of restoration by architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. In the city of Montreal, museums and archives offer an embarrassment of riches in this foundational category of photographic practice, some relatively recent.1 In the mid-1970s architect and photographer Phyllis Lambert (b. 1927) and photographer Richard Pare (b. 1948) created the Greystone series (1973–1974). Conceived and self-directed as a photographic mission, the series functioned, in Lambert’s words, as “a catalyst for increased concerns about the conservation of the city’s heritage. Greystone buildings create a unifying sense across the island of Montreal.”2 The project was revisited in an exhibition organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Greystone: Tools for Understanding the City (2017–2018) (Fig. 0.1). At this writing, the McCord Museum is exhibiting the first in a series of photographic commissions under the heading of Evolving Montreal. The program intends to document the transformation of the city by asking photographers to focus on a neighbourhood of their choice. Robert Walker (b. 1945) has responded

0.1 Greystone: Tools for Understanding the City, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2017–18. Installation view. Photograph © CCA . Greystone photographs by Phyllis Lambert and Richard Pare.

with Griffintown, his two-year study of a nineteenth-century industrial and working-class area undergoing intense gentrification, which the photographer had assigned himself to capture. What is recorded in Walker’s brilliant colour and sometimes sardonic composition is bullish capitalism in the ascendant (Fig. 0.2). This is another “unifying sense” of the city that Photogenic Montreal intends to trace through episodes of intense photographic activity in a hybrid genre. Hybrid because no representation is neutral: the simple act of framing is an obvious expression of agency. Hybrid because its meaning is unstable: the most descriptive architectural records, cataloguing building types, styles, or decorative elements, can be passionately redeployed for the sake of argument – to preserve a neighbourhood or to tear it down. Photographic style follows function. While celebratory architectural photographs offer soaring elevations and expansive interiors, documentary photographs of buildings in use seek middle-ground complexities, treating the building contextually and experientially as an evolving site of socio-political encounter – the nineteenth-century bourgeois parlour becomes the twentieth-century room for

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Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan

0.2 Robert Walker, Looking North from Basin Street, 2019. Ink jet print. From the exhibition Griffintown, McCord Museum, Montreal, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

rent. Competing narratives of urban experience, whether timeless or anecdotal, are imbricated in architectural photography, which is by nature a repeat process. Projects are systematically documented in what are called “progress photographs,” and at all the industry milestones: unveiling of plans, groundbreaking, topping off, completion, dedication, renovation, rebranding. Then the official photographer goes away. But as it is at the beginning, so it goes at the end. Activist architectural photographs happen – specific buildings or neighbourhoods enter into photographic representation – because they are marked for demolition and people react. From this purist coupling, the modernist photography of urban storefronts and rural clapboard houses was born – the eerie stillness of the preservationist mode, buildings in amber.3 Montreal is no exception; indeed, for many of its observers, Montreal is a perfect example of utopic/dystopic development, a history in which photography has often played a dual role, as both visual record and work of art. The Montreal mediation, or the one that interests us here, is generally more engagé. Indeed, it is through encounters between social documentary photography

Introduction

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and artistic intervention that the medium crosses the threshold of Montreal’s fine art museum, and just as quickly exits, heading back into the social spaces – the neighbourhoods, industrial buildings, and thoroughfares from which it came. In Montreal, iconic images and exhibitions have radicalized the photographic urge to preservation – as a coming-to-consciousness, they are memorable in the city’s cultural and political history. In this edited volume, a question that was initially formed around heritage preservation – what does photography preserve? – became a conversation about agency, that of the human actors, before and behind the camera, and that of the medium itself. Photography’s prescribed functions and the codified values attached to its operations and spaces of circulation are paramount in this collection, as are the slippages and shifts that occur in the afterlife of any image, in its proper agency, in its refusal to come to rest, even in the archive. To be photogenic, in the sense that interests us here, is to be able to thrive within a range of photographic practices and relationships, while resonating across architectural history and theory, urban planning, community building, civic pride, and civil unrest. Montreal has been that photogenic subject, benefiting from its mid-nineteenth-century affluence and the coincident advances in photographic technology. Photographic historian Michel Lessard calls its nineteenth-century efflorescence a “ville triomphale,” and this is certainly its photographic effect.4 The promise of the Empire is crystallized in that moment, and its accelerated transformation begins, toward a modern city whose ownership is in question at every stage.5 Neither industrial reification, nor its post-industrial ruin, fully explains the terms of this capitalist contest, which makes it all the more interesting to its artists and the interpreters of their work. As our opening volley suggests, we are hardly the first to explore this phenomenon – indeed, its institutional history is of primordial importance. Cultural inventory, in the name of cultural identity, or patrimoine, has been ongoing in Quebec since the early twentieth century, sometimes rationalized by tourism. Different levels of government have intersected in the evaluation of historic properties; commissioned reports still simmer in the archives. If some of the buildings are gone, their photographic representation and its astute visual analysis by architectural and urban historians have left their own legacies of cultural activity, albeit in the bureaucratic shadows.6 More public events have broadened the discussion. Some twenty years ago, Esther Trépanier’s exhibition for the Musée du Québec, Univers urbains: La representation de la ville dans l’art Québécois du XXe siècle (1998), shone a lasting light. Her exhibition of realist paintings, drawings, and photographs surveyed the transformation of the province into an urban society, systematically correlating artistic themes and social movements, and paying particular attention to the complex identity of the modern subject-in-formation: “l’œuvre devient également révélatrice 6

Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan

des mythologies et des nouveaux rapports que l’individu crée à partir de cet espace qu’il habite.”7 Publishing at the same millennial checkpoint, Lessard had divided his Montréal au XXe siècle: Regards de photographes (1995) by social-historical periods: the animated city, 1910 to 1950; the international city, 1950 to 1970; the claimed city of the politicized 1970s; and the pluralistic city at century’s end, from which juncture he was constructing his photo story. Of the writers commissioned for Lessard’s project, Serge Allaire is the closest to us in spirit.8 His survey of photographic practices puts the accent on collective activity as manifest in compilations of photo books and catalogues. Some of these are affirmative, such as André Gladu’s study of Quebec family albums, while others are assertive, notably Melvin Charney’s Montréal, plus ou moins? Montreal, plus or minus? (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1972) and both the individual and collective works of feminist artists Louise de Grosbois and Plessigraphe (Marik Boudreau, Suzanne Girard, and Camille Maheux). The projects cited by Allaire appeal to popular socio-political movements through a range of photographic forms and attendant experience: they claim Montreal by seizing hold of its archives. Photogenic Montreal draws on the same bodies of work – architectural records, social documentary photography, portraiture, photojournalism, photoconceptualism avant la lettre, and the apparently deskilled snapshot – though with diminishing confidence in the outcome of activist photography, some of us having been fooled before. Photogenic Montreal weaves together a number of strands, enlarging the place of photographic art and photographic experience in the cognate fields of heritage studies and urban art history. Two important fora for its development need to be mentioned. The first was the four-year team-research project Networked Art Histories: Assembling Contemporary Art in Canada, 1960s to the Present (2013–2017), led by Johanne Sloan, with its subtheme of how art and urban histories intersect. Montreal, Winnipeg, and Vancouver were the focal points. Considerations of Montreal’s status and function as an art centre conjured up many art works and performances in which the city had featured as more than a backdrop – in fact, as a driving force. The second was the 2016 Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference, held at Concordia University and the Université du Québec à Montréal. In a call for papers, Martha Langford sought to complicate the conference’s line of inquiry, “What Does Heritage Change?,” with a supplementary question: “What Does Photography Preserve?” Early versions of some of the chapters published here were first heard at that all-day session, creating a platform from which to venture further into architectural history, communications theory, and the Internet. Suddenly, it was 2017, with its outbursts of celebration: the fiftieth anniversary of Expo 67; the 375th birthday of Montreal; and the sesquicentennial of Canada, all motivating and greasing the wheels of exhibitions, performances, and publications. Introduction

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0.3 Patrick Dionne and Miki Gingras, Identité Centre-Sud, 2012. Mural: 18 ink jet prints (each 2 x 2 m). Maison de la Culture Frontenac, Montreal. Courtesy of the artists.

A very different book could be done about Montreal’s birthday celebrations, but as editors of this collection, we were perhaps more interested in the critical reflection that celebration occasioned, especially as the city itself was going through another of its periodic transformations: the condoization of abandoned industrial buildings; the gentrification of neighbourhoods; and the densification of the downtown through high-rise construction. An apposite project is Promenade dans le passé de Montréal (2017), edited by heritage activist Dinu Bumbaru and social historian Laurent Turcot, from the archives of La Presse (founded 1884). Their source – a daily newspaper – lends both photojournalistic actuality and, within the boundaries of this modern city, a relatively longue durée. One is thereby exposed to the photographic experience of its readership. Another temporal bridge is opened by Quebec filmmaker Martin Frigon’s Cities Held Hostage (2018), based on the investigative reporting of a writer for the Gazette, Henry Aubin, and his book City for Sale: International Financiers Take a Major North American City by Storm (1977). More than a eulogist for Montreal’s greystone and working-class neighbourhoods, Aubin followed the money, disclosing patterns of international “investment” and corruption that made a livable city much less so, and continue to work their dark magic. 8

Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan

The phoenix atop this rubble is photography, and more specifically, photography as a practice that constructs what is preserved, explored in a thematic issue of the photography magazine Ciel Variable, “Montréalités/Montrealities” (winter 2017).9 Key works from the 1970s and 1980s are revisited in this issue,10 as well as a digitally constructed “snapshot” of a Montreal neighbourhood, Identité Centre-Sud (2012) by Patrick Dionne (b. 1975) and Miki Gingras (b. 1957) – a never-was streetscape that is somehow completely plausible in this resilient city (Fig. 0.3). In 2018, as our conversations continued, the news media was informing us that “for the first time in decades, Montreal’s economy is hot.”11 This diagnosis was linked to statistically low unemployment figures, to a significant influx of foreign investment, and because the city could boast (!) of an overheated housing market.12 If the collapse of the city’s manufacturing and other traditional industries had created an economic and social void, at that point they were replaced by thriving aerospace, information technology, and gaming companies. Our downtown was buzzing, while vibrant neighbourhoods seemed to abound. At that point, Montreal resumed its evolution into a successful, exemplary post-industrial city. It was not so long ago, however, that Montreal’s post-industrial status was linked to a stagnant economy, abandoned buildings, and boarded-up storefronts – these symptoms of urban ruination existing alongside famously low rents for the city’s long-term inhabitants, newly arrived immigrants, and artists in search of affordable spaces. This set of dramatically opposed perspectives – the post-industrial city as a decaying ruin versus the reborn post-industrial city – has informed this book, although what emerges through the chapters is in fact a more complex picture of how the city changed over the course of the twentieth century. Authors and photographers alike are interested in figurations of the industrial past, but also point to negotiations over modernism and futurity, and contestation over neighbourhoods, streets, buildings, and vacant lots. There are shared flashpoints, but no singular vision of post-industrial Montreal is to be had; rather, as the editors and authors engage with the accrual of photographic traces, multiple perspectives – lived experience and photographic experience – come in and out of focus. URBAN CITIZENS

Johanne Sloan insists she doesn’t feel particularly Canadian or Québécoise but is comfortable describing herself as a citizen of Montreal. Partly, this is due to parentage: her franco-ontarienne mother moved from a small town in the Ottawa Valley to the big city, while her father, the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants, grew up in the same part of town where she now resides (Mile End). Montreal was where her parents met, it was where they could act out their atheist and communist Introduction

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beliefs, it was here they could marry and raise a family without encountering social opprobrium. Thus, a cosmopolitan, ethnically mixed, politically charged city was what Sloan took for granted while growing up. The Boulevard Saint-Laurent would play a key role in Sloan’s social life as a young adult in the 1980s, and in her understanding of photography. Back then, the stretch of ten or so blocks from Sherbrooke to Mont-Royal still boasted dry-goods emporia, snack bars, and grocery stores run by Eastern European immigrants, but there were also numerous cafés and bars catering to a younger clientele, along with the galleries, artist-run centres, cinemas, and bookstores contributing to a lively art world. This was the epicentre of Montreal’s outbreak of postmodern photography in the 1980s, whereby artistic practice could be based on the deconstruction and re-signification of pre-existing photographs. Optica Gallery (3981 Saint-Laurent) organized exhibitions and conferences on the topic; the pages of Parachute magazine (4060 Saint-Laurent) staged debates about postmodernism among Canadian, American, and European authors, writing in French or English; Artexte documentation centre/bookstore (3575 Saint-Laurent) was a key site for the latest books on international art and theory (Fig. 0.4). The long list of Montreal-based artists who flourished at the intersection of postmodernism and photography includes many women (Dominique Blain, Geneviève Cadieux, Sorel Cohen, Moyra Davey, Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, Angela Grauerholz, Nicole Jolicoeur, Nina Levitt, Lani Maestro, Anne Ramsden, Sylvie Readman, Cheryl Simon, Cheryl Sourkes, and Nell Tenhaaf, amongst others), and indeed much of the postmodern experimentation with photography that occurred in Montreal was imbued with feminist ideas. Sloan would befriend many of these artists, and follow their careers, and this set the terms for her photographic education. It is worth noting that while this group of artists did not photograph or directly represent the city itself, a sense of community and emplacement within Montreal was engendered through a collective photographic project. Conducting research on Montreal art and visual culture of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Sloan has sought to explore the singularity of this one city, while drawing on interdisciplinary urban scholarship to address the question of how artistic, curatorial, and discursive practices become embedded in the city.13 (She has elsewhere argued that a city-centric approach to art can be a way of countering the abstraction of nation-based art historical narratives.14) The contemporary study of cities as complex social environments – or, it could be said, as large-scale cultural objects – is indebted to the early-twentieth-century interventions of authors such as Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, who were interested in the commodification of urban space and the shock effects of modern urban life, but also in the emancipatory potential of the modern city. Moreover, both these authors developed methodologies based 10

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0.4 Angela Grauerholz, Interior view of Artexte, 3575 Boulevard Saint-Laurent, Montreal, 1984. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist.

on the enhanced perception of urban ephemera. Simmel insisted on the multisensorial dimension of urban interaction,15 while “Benjamin is concerned not with the development of some grand, overarching theoretical framework, but with rendering the fleeting moments and minute details of urban existence through ‘small and disparate notes.’”16 The urban theorizing of the 1960s and 1970s introduced an explicitly agonistic city; in New York City, Jane Jacobs fought to protect her neighbourhood from inner-city highways, modern mega-projects, and gentrification, while, over in France, Henri Lefebvre was arguing (contra traditional Marxists) that the city was a legitimate site of political action. And yet this generation of authors had something important in common with their predecessors, methodologically speaking: an attention to ephemeral gestures and material traces. Jacobs argued for the value of small-scale streetscapes, and described the shift in perspective that was required to appreciate that the choreography of interactions occurring at street level is anything but chaotic: “to see complex systems of functional order as order and not as chaos, takes understanding.”17 Lefebvre’s commitment to everyday life Introduction

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provided the foundation for his urban philosophy: a challenge to the notion of the city as a static object, and a markedly utopian way of recognizing the contribution of ordinary urban dwellers to the meaning of collective life.18 Without denying the importance of macro-scale politics and economics in determining the destiny of cities, all the above-mentioned theorists of cities thus acknowledge that the identity of a city is forged through an accumulation of everyday actions. The photographic traces gathered in this book can thus be regarded in such a way – as component parts of Montreal’s ever-evolving urban culture. And as those photographs get exhibited, published, exchanged, and otherwise circulate, they help to define what Andreas Huyssen has defined as an “urban imaginary … the cognitive and somatic image which we carry within us of the places where we live, work, and play.”19 ARMCHAIR URBANISM

Reading the city archeologically, as a palimpsest of its histories, draws on the evidence of emplacement – on the marks of the purposive, possessive encounters that made it. Investigation along these lines activates the entire sensorium. It likewise privileges embodied knowledge and its transmissive performances. However impressive the city’s cultural capital – its museums, performance spaces, and libraries – its inhabitants and their habits are its everyday archive, which is how architectural theorist Melvin Charney (1935–2012) framed his groundbreaking exhibition Montréal, plus ou moins? Montreal, plus or minus? (1972): as “day-to-day experience … what is seen in the city and how these things are understood.”20 This principle would be extended by the site-specific projects of Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe – “a hybrid of social theory, architectural archaeology, scholarly research, popular history, and metaphysical investigation”21 – which, as Lapointe stated in a press release issued in December 1982, involved taking cultural objects, such as a camera or a building, and returning them to un point brut, “a raw state” that would allow her to reveal and comment on their social processes – on the representation and designation of space.22 This tipping-point is mediation or, more precisely, the point at which representation becomes the reality – an agent-object, writing its own autobiography, within a curatorial or artistic process. Charney’s project validated photography epistemologically by treating its reality effects as dialectical provocations and institutionally by bringing it into an art museum, where it previously (and for some time afterwards) had no purchase on the collection. Pictures of and by the people were dizzyingly uplifted in the process, an aspect that worried Charney and some of the participating artists, notably the collective Groupe Point Zéro.23 As for Fleming & Lapointe, their ephemeral work depended on the photographic archive for its production and 12

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preservation. Paradoxically, as these artists knew, direct experience was the power borrowed by photography; its loan guarantees were mechanism and reproducibility. These were and still are considerable assets, despite current fascination with the medium’s omissions and erasures – and despite what Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón refer to as “photography’s semiotic malleability.”24 Introducing their study of photography and the optical unconscious, Shawn Michelle Phillips and Sharon Sliwinski feel obliged, as we do here, to acknowledge our deeply ingrained habits of photographic consumption: “Photography mediates our experience of the world. Of this there can be little dispute.”25 How we characterize and value such experience is another matter, and one that our respective life experiences have helped us dialogically to ponder. Johanne Sloan, it has already been established, grew up in Montreal and has lived in the city for most of her life. Martha Langford is by contrast a recent arrival – born in Ottawa, Ontario, the nation’s capital, some two hundred kilometres away, she spent eighteen years developing the federal government’s collection of contemporary Canadian photography before coming to Montreal for a second career in academia. Her childhood references to Montreal are a mixture of autobiographical memories and fictional encounters that bubbled up from her Catholic girlhood and Can Lit youth: Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion (1945); Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes (1945); Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959); a pilgrimage led by Grey Nuns to Saint-Joseph’s Oratory of Mount Royal; family and class visits to Expo 67, including first rides on the Metro; Jacques Godbout’s Salut Galarneau! (1967), set in the off-island suburb of Île Perrot; the less colourful maternal relatives known to be living in the on-island suburb of Dorval; Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-soeurs (1968); a teenage escapade to Crescent Street bars, circa 1970; a newspaper clipping from 1973, “Van Horne House Demolition Begins,” preserved in its brittleness to this day;26 disaster tourism on the ravaged streets of Saint-Henri, circa 1975; Robert Morin and Lorraine Dufour’s claustrophobic imaginary in Le voleur vit en enfer (1984) (Fig. 0.5). Contra Expo’s futurism, the architectural vocabulary of the city was dominated, in her mind, by Montreal’s famous outdoor staircases, structures that filled her with dread. We can draw the curtain here, having traced not just a repertoire of images, but a pathway for their migration between diachronic and episodic experience – between the life course and its storied interruptions. Literary theorist Ceri Morgan writes of the “mindscapes of Montreal,” and with particular resonance for Langford when the emplotment of neighbourhoods comes into play. Such social constructions and their eruptions are as close to universal as things ever get. Likewise Morgan’s correlation of walking and reading draws the Montreal novels into the modern canon27 – think Ulysses – and also evokes photographic practice as it is pursued on Introduction

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0.5 Robert Morin and Lorraine Dufour, Le voleur vit en enfer. 1984 (still). Video, 20 minutes, colour. Courtesy of Vidéographe.

foot.28 Langford’s study of private albums held by the Notman Photographic Archives of the McCord Museum put places to spaces she had previously conjured up from novels.29 As her photographic education continued, urban documentary projects by Montreal practitioners – Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Michel Campeau, Alain Chagnon, Roger Charbonneau, Serge Clément, Clara Gutsche, Edward Hillel, Serge Laurin, Brian Merrett, David Miller, Michel Saint-Jean, Gabor Szilasi, Sam Tata, and others – were transformed by intertextual references, cultural memories, and the occasional flash of recognition.30 She was still getting to know the city when author, filmmaker, and photographer Gordon Sheppard published HA! A SelfMurder Mystery (2003), with its wild textual montage of layered place-memory, as he relived a two-car race with Hubert Aquin through the streets of Montreal – her own photographic memories at every hairpin turn.31 The character we have been profiling is not very far from an armchair traveller, whose mode of apprehension needs to be remembered, as it has been mirrored in practice. “As soon at there was photography there was travel photography,” writes Peter D. Osborne;32 and as soon as travel photography began to circulate, there was the armchair traveller, later mobilized by the photography gallery as a world explorer in the white box. The armchair traveller, whether at home or abroad, 14

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absorbed other places in print culture’s dual structure of familiarity and otherness, contrasts rendered photographically in terms of old and new, rich and poor, progress and preservation.33 The catalogue cover for Montréal, plus ou moins? (1972) exemplifies these sturdy dualities34 (Fig. 0.6). Designed by John Honeyman, the cover is a photomontage. The featured image is a black and white streetscape of a working-class neighbourhood taken by Michel Campeau. Built for dense occupation, two of these flats are “For let” – advertised, one might deduce, in the language of the landlord. Cropped vertically and presented full bleed, this documentary photograph is overlaid – the facade of the building is partially erased – by a “postcard” of the Montreal skyline. This view is also overlaid. The treed foreground is partially masked by the word “Montréal,” which is rendered in a heavily stylized, three-dimensional cursive font, yellow and fire-engine red.35 The subtitles of the exhibition (French and English) are delivered in a fat font sans-serif red lettering at the bottom of the page. These oppositions established, they are developed in a variety of photographic tropes and graphic mediations throughout the book whose deceptively informal compilation is designed to argue for the uniqueness of this bilingual North American city. Picture-by-picture, however, what is proven is that Montreal is photogenic – being there delivers photographic experience. Whether categorized as street photography, social documentary, snapshot, or architectural record, whether straight, staged, or montaged, Montreal gives itself to dialectical visual statements – the language of development, the vernacular of resistance. And these images lend themselves to comparative statements, as on a spread that is shared by two black and white photographs, a slum dwelling hard by an auto graveyard in the work of Michel Saint-Jean and a pristine suburb photographed by Brian Merrrett.36 All of this is understandable to a remote reader, as it participates in the visual/textual interplay set up in the early twentieth century by Dada – the posterish character of the cover – and by picture magazines, such as VU, Life, or Weekend, whose editors made their arguments through blunt, often cartoonish visual juxtaposition. It can be argued that this comparative structure omits much of what was interesting about Charney’s project – its performances and dialogical outreach crucial to its development of urban knowledge37 – but the catalogue in its artifactuality has outlived all that, belonging now to the history of photography in print. The copy examined here belongs to a self-confessed “armchair urbanist,” who can re-experience its dialectical realities and internal vibrations by pulling it down off the shelf. Then is simultaneously now, a state of continuous performative revision mediated by Montreal’s photographic artists and archivists. Such is the still photographic version of the enervated modern condition.

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0.6 Melvin Charney, ed., Montréal, plus ou moins? Montreal, plus or minus? 1972. Exhibition catalogue. Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Cover design: John Honeyman. Cover photograph: Michel Campeau.

A CITY-SUBJECT

When does Montreal become modern? The answer to this question depends on whether the term “modern” is used to connote modern technologies, transportation systems, and communication networks; modern ideas such as secularism, women’s emancipation, and racial equality; and/or characteristically modernist forms of art, architecture, and visual culture. It can be argued that all these factors contributed to the modernization of the city over the course of the twentieth century. Montreal in the 1930s was modern insofar as its prosperity depended on the speeded-up circulation and exchange of goods and capital. Paintings by Adrien Hébert and Marian Scott from this decade attest to the bustle of urban activity, even while the aesthetic impact of their compositions depends on modernist geometry and graphic punch. The 1948 artistic manifesto (Refus global) written by Paul-Émile Borduas and his fellow abstract painters, and available for purchase in a small Montreal bookstore, is an emblem of modernist utopianism, whereby artists dreamed of proto-political emancipation. In other words, “modern Montreal” is not only about the city’s changing skyline. The 1960s must be recognized as a period of accelerated and intensified urban reconstruction: highways circled and penetrated the downtown core, the Metro system was built, a cluster of concrete, steel, and glass skyscrapers appeared, and a spectacular world’s fair arose on the margins of the city (Fig. 0.7).38 This sort of thing occurred in other cities across North America as well, but what makes Montreal unique is that the modernization of the built environment coincided with a revolution – what is indeed referred to as the révolution tranquille. Beginning in the 1960s, the francophone people of Quebec shrugged off the burden of tradition, revelled in the freedom to construct a new collective identity, and engaged in conversations with a wider world. The epicentre of this revolution – which was political, social, cultural, artistic, pedagogical, linguistic, etc. – was Montreal. The modern project also brought competing interests and ideologies to the surface, as will be seen in several chapters in this book. In the late 1950s, the urban-renewal project Les Habitations Jeanne-Mance involved the razing of a working-class neighbourhood. This was only one erasure among many; Goose Village was bulldozed in 1964, while great swaths of historic industrial neighbourhoods, such as Little Burgundy, Saint-Henri, and Tannery Village, were wiped out for a modern expressway.39 Many of the photographers who set out to document Montreal’s people and neighbourhoods realized that they were participating simultaneously in a great social upheaval and transformation, as their parents’ traditions and religious affiliations were questioned and overturned to make way for a new Québécois reality.40 During this same period, other forms of revolutionary identity politics also flared up, as epitomized by the occupation of Sir George Williams (now Concordia University) Introduction

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0.7 Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, Construction of Man the Explorer Pavilion, August 1966. 35mm colour slide. Library and Archives Canada/Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition fonds/e011171652.

in 1969. Visual documents from the time feature the university’s strikingly modern Hall Building under siege. It is only recently that the courage and leadership of the youthful Black protestors, as they stood up against institutional racism, have been more widely celebrated as a modern-age achievement. This is unfinished business to be sure, and in some ways, this volume returns to that crossroads. For, by the early 1970s, a different kind of urban discourse was in play; Montrealers began to contest decisions being made about the city – the prioritizing of new constructions, property owners given permission to demolish historic architecture, the bolstering of real-estate speculation, civic resources being put into a shiny new downtown, while older, working-class neighbourhoods were neglected or destroyed. The voices of activists began to be heard, arguing for the value of the old city. In any case, the Parti Québécois’s first electoral victory in 1976 seemed to scare off foreign investors and local profiteers alike – with the result that, for the next two decades, hardly any new construction projects were undertaken in Montreal, making the city something of a haven for artistic practice, with industrial spaces converted to galleries and studio lofts.

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Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan

Responding to the “ghosts of industrial ruins” that occupy many European and North American cities, Tim Edensor writes: “the modern city can never become a wholly Apollonian, seamlessly regulated realm for it continues to be haunted by the neglected, the disposed of, and the repressed, most clearly in marginal sites where ghostly memories cannot be entirely expunged.”41 Many of the chapters in this volume are only obliquely concerned with the modern city, because the focus is on photographs of soon-to-be-demolished or nearly demolished neighbourhoods, empty lots, half-ruined buildings, and other such historical traces. Several of the authors in this book explore that juncture when a number of impulses collide. There are vestiges of the modern belief in creating new worlds, but there is also anger about the failure of modern urban planning; there is a desire to overcome the constraints of the past, but also a growing appreciation for the old, industrially produced city. What resulted from this set of tensions was a critical, post-industrial consciousness, which has extended into the present day. At times, abandoned factories and warehouses become forbidden sites of urban exploration. Two major themes have emerged at the crossroads of our editorial perspectives: activism, as both engine and form in photographic practice; archives, as the container and producer of present-based historical consciousness. These preoccupations are distinguishable but inseparable in the studies commissioned for this book. What a post-industrial condition or consciousness provokes is the need to make decisions about the city – to determine what buildings, neighbourhoods, and communities are important, worth saving, worth remembering, worth commemorating. Part 1 of this book looks at those turning points as they begin to generate the archives that are the focus of Part 2. ACTIVISM: CITY AS SOCIAL LABORATORY

How does the image turn activist? In the 1970s, Alain Chagnon’s social documentary project on his inner-city neighbourhood, Plateau-Mont-Royal, was upheld by his political beliefs. However affectionate his collective portrait, Chagnon’s project extends the history of class struggle in Quebec, which fuelled Québécois nationalist movements with righteous anger. That Chagnon’s images present such a unified community is, in some ways, more threatening to the establishment, though political feeling is manifest only in Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day street parties and legal labour strikes. The afterlife of socio-political photography is examined by Martha Langford in “Re-activations: Alain Chagnon’s Plateau-Mont-Royal in Translation.” A body of social documentary photographs that first saw the light of day in a church basement is embraced by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, then returned to the

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neighbourhood that spawned it as an outdoor exhibition and self-published book. The project is emplaced yet somehow out of place, in a much-altered environment. Architect, activist, and artist Melvin Charney saw and argued for Montreal’s formal and social complexity, a densely woven urban fabric, which he described in pictures, some his own. In “Melvin Charney and Photography,” Louis Martin surveys the various uses that Charney made of the medium, which he considered central to his work. Charney’s mediated Montreal underscored the human factor of the city – its processes and passages as they formed the built environment. Translating architecture to photography, Charney’s photomontage streetscape Le Main (1965) exposed the spine of the city in a facade-to-facade representation of Boulevard Saint-Laurent; he included this work in Montréal, plus ou moins? The increasing politicization of Charney’s practice in the succeeding decade is epitomized by the public art exhibition Corridart (1976), a key episode of protest against the destruction of the downtown core. Photographs of Charney’s work were widely disseminated after Mayor Drapeau ordered Corridart demolished; they compete with the image of the Van Horne Mansion, in the senseless-destruction-of-Montreal sweepstakes. Martin’s study shows us how an idiosyncratic photographic archive underpinned Charney’s research, writing, artmaking, curatorial activity, teaching, and activism. Tanya Southcott’s study of a contemporaneous preservationist, “Through the Lens of Edith Mather: Photographing Demolition and the Transforming City,” connects the coming-into-being of a photographer with architectural preservation. Mather’s practice began in the late 1960s, as she observed the transformation of Montreal into a modern city and the toll it was taking on its nineteenth-century character. With particular attention to downtown neighbourhoods west of the urban divide, Mather built a taxonomy of architectural elements associated with Montreal’s industrialist period – an architectural language of accelerated growth and metropolitan aspiration that was turning neighbourhoods into expressways. While Mather’s activity was legendarily tethered to motherhood – she walked the streets with camera and pram – Southcott situates it more accurately as professional participation in heritage campaigns. Mather compiled her work in indexed binders, now held by the McCord Museum, but she also published it with specialist commentary, and with particular attention to detail that would enrich the experience of any pedestrian. Crucially, though – and this is Southcott’s point – it is not just anybody’s life story but Mather’s “experimental individualism” that is at stake.42 Never very far from home, she was nevertheless reinventing herself as an actor in the public sphere. In every project mentioned so far, activism that began in the cultural sphere of soft power inevitably encountered the constraints of state and ideology. In the feminist arena, for example, the recuperative, site-specific approach to women’s history developed by Fleming & Lapointe is rooted in their personal relationship but 20

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also in social articulations of gender violence. Clara Gutsche evokes the influence of her consciousness-raising group and pictures its stellar membership; the group’s politicized program of validating women’s rights and experiences complemented the campaign to save their homes. But the uproar over Milton Park (Milton-Parc) included the arrests of demonstrators. In a lower key, the clearing of Corridart also represents a violation – artworks were irreparably destroyed. This dialectic between soft power and violence is also on display on the cover of this book; the still photograph by Louise Abbott evokes the traumatic physical shock of an explosion and collapsing building. And then, protests could turn violent as famously occurred in 1969 during the occupation of Sir George Williams by students protesting racism at the university. The sit-in on the ninth floor of the Henry H. Hall Building culminated in a police assault, the destruction of computers, and a fire, leading to arrests, prison sentences, and for some Caribbean students, deportation. The escalation, never satisfactorily explained, has been examined in a National Film Board of Canada documentary, Ninth Floor, produced by Selwyn Jacob and directed by Mina Shum (NFB, 2015). Johanne Sloan’s “Returning to the Ninth Floor: An Interview with Selwyn Jacob” examines the episode in the context of how this moment of political protest in Montreal has been discursively framed and mediated. A number of contributors to this book refer to the activist-preservationist photographs of Milton Park taken by Clara Gutsche and David Miller in the early 1970s. In a dedicated chapter, “Is the Artist an Unreliable Archivist? Reflections on the Photographic Preservation of a Montreal Neighbourhood,” Gutsche offers valuable background information to this emotionally and politically charged moment, then steps back to consider her personal motivations – how the project can be nested in her development within consciousness-raising groups as a feminist; how privileged access to the domestic sphere as a neighbour shaped her as an artist. She offers answers to questions we would like to pose canonical figures, such as Charles Marville, who was no preservationist, Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott who were, and Walker Evans, always pursuing formalist goals. First, in these domestic spaces at risk, were you aware of their photogenic qualities? Second, did you “stage” their worthiness, in a photographic language of composition and light? Gutsche learned to photograph at a time when the indexical image was posited as recording, witnessing, and testifying. The word “truth” appears nowhere in her candid exposition. Questions of intent and aesthetics likewise circle around the urban explorers discussed by Suzanne Paquet in “Post-industrialist Passions: Urban Exploration, Photography, and the Spirit of Place.” Paquet explores the subculture of “urbex” practitioners, who enter (often illegally) Montreal’s disused and abandoned industrial architecture. Their missions self-assigned, urbexers treat photography as a means to Introduction

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accreditation, proof that they have penetrated a city’s subterranean or abandoned industrial spaces. But, as Paquet argues, urbexers can also be placed in relation to photography’s preservationist missions and their creation of photographic networks. The documentation of ruins as heritage and the circulation of these images becomes the means to reflect collectively, sometimes critically, on a city’s “glorious” past. Not just intent, but style, forges these connections. Comparative formal analysis shows that urbexers are deploying time-honoured effects to produce timeless images. Photographs taken in these milieux reveal sublime expanses of ruination and attest to an individual’s successful break-and-entry. In that sense, they are documents. But the addition of amped-up illumination and other special effects, before these photo-trophies are posted to online sites, gives such imagery, which is sometimes referred to as “ruin porn,” a spectacular and fantastical character. While their privileged sites are beyond restoration, their photographic acts revitalize photo heroics, with strong connections to disaster tourism – excursions to sites of violence or natural disaster – as well as ecotourism, with its preservationist admonitions. ARCHIVES: RUINS AND REVISIONS

Every photograph in this book derives from a collection, whether public or private, material or virtual. Both a reality and an abstraction, the archive is a resource for the privileged who know how to navigate its corridors and boxes. It is also mysterious as a centre of knowledge authored by its keepers.43 The archive accumulates historical sediment that actors in unfinished narratives may revisit and resift – this was the making of Ninth Floor, which involved iconic images as well as previously unseen material, unearthed and accorded new meanings. As contemporary art historians, we are mindful of the stimulus of archive theory on late-twentieth-century art practice – both the fever and its focus as artists moved from cool information practices to more affective works.44 A heightened sense of subjects-in-formation and expressions of agency accompany twenty-first-century scholars and readers into archival research.45 Unofficial archives may be just as volatile – and they are certainly plentiful. Faute de mieux, as Clara Gutsche points out, every photographer becomes the archivist of a lifetime’s serial production. Each individual photograph in this book constitutes a creative moment. It also frames and calls attention to something, asks us to look more attentively at certain details of the urban environment. Whether commemorative, pedagogical, nostalgic, or propagandistic, and however intended in the day, the photographic archives opened up by this project are united by one motive force: they make an argument. By thus focusing attention, the photograph also has the potential to monumentalize what is pictured. As Mark Wigley has 22

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commented, “The monument is a gesture of preservation in the face of disintegration, diffusion, or disappearance. It isolates something from the entropic forces of time by collective decision.”46 Both the monument and the photograph thus have the capacity to intervene in collective memory, and to imaginatively reorganize the built environment. This interventionist function is brought out by Annmarie Adams in “Picturing The Old Architecture of Quebec: Ramsay Traquair and Cultural Conservatism, 1913–39,” which analyzes the photographic archives of Scottish-born architect Ramsay Traquair, Macdonald Professor and director of McGill University’s School of Architecture from 1913 to 1939. Incorporating photography as a teaching tool for architectural students, Traquair also saw its value in crafting and promoting a type of architecture that he identified as authentic to Quebec society. In photographs, as opposed to drawings, the pastness of buildings might be punctured with the inconvenient presence of modern conveniences – the telephone, for example – which the camera mechanically and unimpeachably witnessed. What Traquair’s teaching collection also preserves is his severe antipathy toward the modern, which merged with his misogynist and racist beliefs. It could be said that the modern city is an unwelcome spectre that haunts his project, for some of his most treasured monuments could be found marooned in the industrial districts of Montreal Another trail of inconvenient truths is mapped by Philippe Guillaume’s contribution to this book, “A Heuristic Archive: Jean-Paul Gill’s Red Light Photographs,” which showcases an example of unapologetic destruction that took place in the late 1950s, when a large part of the so-called “Red Light District” around lower Boulevard Saint-Laurent was razed to make way for new social housing. The neighbourhood, known for its sex workers, was written down as a decrepit slum, while the discourse emanating from City Hall was formulated in the name of a “modernist urban credo” (Guillaume) about the clean, newly built cities of the future that would arise without a trace of the old cities’ dirt, crime, or poverty. The fonds that Guillaume analyzes – photographs by Jean-Paul Gill, official photographer for the city – was supposed to be a mere tool in this process, nothing more than matter-of-fact documentation of the condemned buildings, but instead these images have become elegiac glimpses of a lost world, in which families curiously watch the photographer as their homes are numbered for the wrecking ball. Will Straw’s chapter, “The Pastness of Allô Police,” calls attention to the glimpses of entropic urban scenery that appeared in the pages of Allô Police during the 1970s. This lurid Montreal tabloid newspaper was perpetually alerting its readers to the criminality that simmered below the surface of everyday urban life, threatening to erupt in violence and chaos. The photos in question are often exterior views of the restaurants and bars where such crimes occurred, alongside mug shots and Introduction

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blurry portraits, and these greyish newsprint pictures serve to emphasize the city’s gritty quality. Straw also notes that these images and stories contravened the positive, celebratory images of Québécois life accompanying the nationalist surge of the 1970s, while also ignoring Montreal’s non-white citizens, whether criminals, victims, or consumers. The scandal of Montreal’s self-destruction is emblematized by Abbott’s photographs of the wrecking of the Van Horne Mansion (see cover and fig. 10.1). But some sections of Montreal, like other post-industrial cities, simply faded away, their former grandeur reduced to empty husks: disused factories, foundries, grain elevators, warehouses, and even the mansions of the “Golden Square Mile” – the glory of Montreal at the height of empire. Many of these homes were built by railroad barons and factory owners, by the elite who had extracted their wealth from the commercial and industrial infrastructure of Montreal – and indeed, from Canada as a whole. Photographers and tourists trained their cameras on the exteriors of these domestic piles; getting inside was another matter. In 1974, Montreal architect Charles Gurd saw the end of an era and was sufficiently well placed to gain access and trust. His photographs depict the design and decor of these sumptuous Edwardian spaces, as well as their servant-custodians, who stand and wait for their final orders. In “Architecture, Photography, and Power: Picturing Montreal, 1973–74,” Cynthia Hammond reads these images against the grain, in relation to larger discourses about labour, wealth, heritage, and human obsolescence. The decimation of Montreal’s industrially based economy had a disastrous effect on adjacent neighbourhoods and their inhabitants. Martha Fleming’s chapter, “Fading In and Fading Out: Negatives and Positives in the Photographic Afterlives of Ephemeral Site-Specific Installations by Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe,” looks back at the art practice that she and Lyne Lapointe undertook in Montreal during the 1980s, when they gained access to abandoned civic architecture (a fire station, a post office, and a theatre), mounting site-specific installations that lasted for only a short time. The artists did not restore the buildings they entered, but instead worked with the material ruination to open up temporary spaces of memory play and knowledge exchange. What aspects of these evanescent projects could be captured by photographs? Fleming enters the drawers and boxes of the artists’ archive to explore this question. Martha Langford’s “Erase and See: The Photogénie of a Metropolis in Progress” introduces a sequence of photographs to narrate a history – not of emptied out buildings, but rather of spaces identified as vacant lots, terrains vagues, or interstices. This shifting nomenclature is accompanied by multiple photographic strategies, and a range of ideas and affective responses, beginning in the aftermath of a great fire, moving through the sense of ennui, lack, and entropy associated with Michael 24

Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan

Snow’s One Second in Montreal, 1969, contemplating social landscapes and new topographical studies of empty parking lots and barren gardens, to emerge into the performative possibilities of temporarily forgotten spaces. Langford’s chapter reflects a growing conviction that is held by numerous cultural actors and civic activists, post 2000, that ostensibly empty spaces in the city should be recognized and safeguarded as sites of social, ecological, and spiritual renewal. This phenomenon is epitomized by a green space in Montreal’s Mile End district, an abandoned rail yard repossessed by flora and fauna, renamed and fiercely defended by a citizen’s group, Les Amis du Champ des Possibles. Throughout the book, there are circumstances where the ideological aspects of modern urbanism were actively resisted. Johanne Sloan’s “Expo 67 and the Future of Montreal” examines the enduring impact of Expo 67’s futurity on Montreal’s identity, with a particular focus on Buckminster Fuller’s iconic geodesic dome. In the intervening years since 1967, images of the city-like world’s fair have continued to be appropriated and transformed – by governmental bodies, advertising agencies, and publishers, as well as by artists and filmmakers. This essay looks closely at two films – Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s 1967: A People Kind of Place (2012) and Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze’s By the Time We Got to Expo (2015), asking how, in each case, their engagement with archival material reactivates the futurity embedded in Expo 67 images. Such transformed imagery allows the world’s fair to be imaginatively reinhabited, again and again; in such ways Expo 67’s future-orientation has become part of Montreal’s heritage. In this book, two different lenses, one long, one wide, are turned on Montreal’s photogenic-ness. The editors’ original searchlights – “What distinguishes Montreal’s art practice?” and “What does photography preserve?” – have prompted considerable reflection on the partiality and remoteness of our respective positions, and more significantly, on how our prioritization of knowledge forms and deforms our situated points of view. Each of the authors has drawn our attention to degrees of mediation and to the different imaginaries that the image of a modern city, or this modern city of Montreal, may evoke. Cooperation, collectivity, community, and coevalness are themes that run through the chapters, la photographie par la bande only the most visible manifestation of continuous interaction between photographers collaborating or talking back to each other (sometimes ironically) in pictures.47 The same collective spirit drives current art practice, as well as experimental pedagogy in Montreal’s neighbourhoods; projects represented in this book as mutually inspiring and inextricably intertwined. We are struck by the ongoing cultural industry in this post-industrial city, which convinces us even more deeply of the need to probe its activist impulses, and possibly reinvigorate them for urgent projects in the present.

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NOTES 1 The Canadian Centre for Architecture’s pre-eminent photographic collection spans the international history of the genre and contextualizes it with architectural records; the Notman Photographic Archives of the McCord Museum focuses on Canada, with a strong concentration on Montreal, both in its professional and amateur holdings; and Archives de la Ville de Montréal provides access online, organized for browsing and research under thematic headings that are developed in informative articles at http://archivesdemontreal.com/. See, for example, Mathieu, “Les quartiers disparus de Montréal: Le secteur de la Place des Arts.” In the same “quartiers disparus” series are illustrated articles by other researchers on le Red Light, le Faubourg à m’lasse, Victoriatown, the area around the Ville-Marie expressway, and la Petite Bourgogne. 2 See Greystone: Tools for Understanding the City, Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2017, accessed 1 May 2020, http://moussemagazine.it/ greystone-tools-understanding-city-cca-canadian-centre-architecture-montreal-2017-2018/. 3 Vassallo, “Documentary Photography and Preservation, or the Problem of Truth and Reality,” 15–33. Vassallo looks at key figures, such as Eugène Atget, Charles Marville, Walker Evans, and Berenice Abbot, situating their studies of buildings at the intersection of documentary photography and art. 4 Lessard, “Un regard en quatre temps,” 18. 5 For an illuminating historiography of power relations in nineteenth-century Montreal, see Young, “Patrician Elites and Power in Nineteenth-Century Montreal and Quebec City,” 229–46. 6 For example, we find a 1978 report produced by the Section d’analyse en architecture, IBHC (Inventaire des bâtiments historiques du Canada, Parcs Canada), which is illustrated with historic photographs and discusses other photographic images found in archives in terms of their agency, as they exaggerate or dissimulate certain features. Historians of architectural photography are very familiar with this phenomenon. See Galarneau, Hallé, and Lapierre, “Comptes rendus de certains bâtiments dans la ville de Montréal (PQ) et dans les municipalités avoisinantes.” 7 “[T]he artwork becomes equally revealing of the myths and new relations the individual creates based on the space they inhabit” [authors’ translation]. Trépanier, Univers urbain, 70. 8 Allaire, “Montréal 1970–1980,” 171–87. 9 Doyon, “Montréalités/Montrealities.” 10 Dessureault, “Montréal en images/Montreal in Images,” 28–39. 11 Serebrin, “Montreal’s Economy Is Hot,” n.p. 12 News stories with economic indicators from 2018 include: “Montreal Unemployment Rate Drops to Lowest Level since December,” Montreal Gazette; Marowits, “Montreal Area Real Estate Market Growth Outpaced Other Canadian Cities in May.” Also see “Talent Is the New Oil.” 13 Sloan, ed. Urban Enigmas. 14 Sloan, “Urban Art Histories (in Canada),” 271–87. 15 Simmel, “The Sociology of Space,” 155–7. 16 Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, 38. 17 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 376. 18 Lefebvre, Writings on Cities. 19 Huyssen, ed., Other Cities, Other Worlds, 3. 20 Charney, “Montreal … More or Less,” curatorial essay in Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal, plus ou moins? Montreal, plus or minus? 15, 19.

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21 Fleming, “Introduction/Bare Bones,” in Fleming, with Lapointe and Johnstone, Studiolo, 11. 22 Lapointe, cited in the press release for Projet Building/Caserne #14, a project for an abandoned firehall in the Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood of Montréal. January 1983, in “Documents,” Fleming, et al., Studiolo, 13. 23 As Charney frets, “one has also to be aware that there is a danger of mystifying the expression of the common everyday language of the city by presenting it in a repressive context.” See Charney, “Montreal … More or Less,” 19. 24 Kriebel and Zervigón, “Introduction,” in Kriebel and Zervigón, eds., Photography and Doubt, 2. 25 Smith and Sliwinski, “Introduction,” in Smith and Sliwinski, eds., Photography and the Optical Unconscious, 1. 26 Ernhofer and Gabeline, “Van Horne House Demolition Begins,” 1–2. 27 Morgan, Mindscapes of Montreal, 21–3. Walking is the narrative engine of Jacques Renaud’s Le Cassé (1964), exposing the linguistic and economic divisions represented by Montreal’s have and have-not neighbourhoods. 28 See Guillaume, “Every Foot of the Sidewalk: Boulevard Saint-Laurent,” 335–41. 29 Langford, Suspended Conversations. 30 The context of these practices is developed by Dessureault, Regards échangés/Exchanging Views. 31 Sheppard, HA!, 409–15. The race as remembered ran from a restaurant on Mountain Street (rue de la Montagne), Osteria dei Panzoni, to the Akropolis, on Avenue du Parc. 32 Osborne, Travelling Light, 3. 33 Lutz and Collins, Reading National Geographic. 34 The lingering relevance of this exhibition has been recognized by art historians and curators Marie Fraser and Anne-Sophie Miclo, Université du Québec à Montréal, who in 2018 co-directed a pedagogical curatorial project to study the exhibition and reprise some of its aspects. See Vox: Centre de l’image contemporaine, Créer à rebours vers l’exposition. 35 The exhibition and catalogue were both designed by Honeyman, a graduate of the Pratt Institute, New York, active in Montreal from 1960 to 2002. His ownership of this typographic icon is asserted on pages 162–3. 36 Charney, “Home Sweet Home 1 et 2,” photographs by Michel Saint-Jean and Brian Merrett, in Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal, plus ou moins? Montreal, plus or minus? 140–1. 37 Sloan, “Montréal plus ou moins, 1972,” 32–57. 38 Lortie, ed., The 60s. 39 For a recent oral and aural history project on the neighbourhoods around the Lachine Canal, see Miller, Little, and High, Going Public, especially “Chapter 6: Listening to the Post-Industrial City,” 224–54. 40 Essential readings on this period are: Simon, Translating Montreal; Warren, Ils voulaient changer le monde; Mills, The Empire Within; and Austin, Fear of a Black Nation. For a close study of Quebec iconography and iconoclasm, see Zubrzycki, “Aesthetic Revolt and the Remaking of National Identity in Québec, 1960–1969,” 423–75. 41 Edensor, “The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins,” 833. 42 Sociologist Celia Lury defines “experimental individualism” as the successful adaptation of the self through flexible role-playing within a certain set of conditions or challenges that are

Introduction

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internalized: “It is an individual who in looking in the mirror of the technological order no longer sees a reflection, but looks through the mirror to what he or she could be.” See Lury, Prosthetic Culture, especially Chapter 2, “The Experimental Individual,” 7–40; citation, 23. 43 Schwartz and Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power,” parts 1 and 2. 44 Spieker, The Big Archive. 45 Cartwright and Wolfson, eds., “Affect at the Limits of Photography.” 46 Wigley, “The Architectural Cult of Synchronization,” 36. 47 The phrase comes from Lise Lamarche, “La photographie par la bande,” covering a range of exhibition projects in the 1970s.

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part one

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Photogenic Montreal

1.

Re-activations: Alain Chagnon’s Plateau-Mont-Royal in Translation Martha Langford A society is not fully available for analysis until each of its practices is included. Raymond Williams, Montreal, 19731

EMPLACING THE PHOTOGENIC

Photography was recognized as an instrument of heritage preservation from the moment of its inception. Excursions Daguerriennes (1840–42), a set of Romantic engravings of monuments based on photographic documents, established the links between sight and science, memory and history, hortatory reification and “ruin lust.”2 At first missing, but increasingly dominating the practices of photographers in the late-nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century was the human presence. Bodies, sometimes read as embodiments, arrived on the scene: living, breathing heritage recognized as something to be recorded and preserved. In rural settings, towns and villages were depicted as expressions of collective memory, their living inhabitants sometimes bewildered by economic adversity or the pace of change. Their children were migrating to the industrial city, where workers and their families would come to be pictured as the human tailings of capitalist progress. Urban communities formed “alternative” or “oppositional” subcultures under pressure.3 There were photogenic signs of these social conditions, messages of exploitation and resiliency. These were photographs of people and their shelters, not as constructed by novelists or statisticians, but as felt to be seen. As James Agee wrote in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (the book that inspired so much of this activity), a house or a person photographed “exists, in actual being, as you do and as I do, and as no character of the imagination can possibly exist.”4 This sense of

immediacy penetrated the walls of dwellings, farms, and factories, whether occupied or abandoned. Their light-reflecting surfaces were the palimpsests of lives lived. For Walter Benjamin, the seeing of buildings involved more than contemplation: the reception of architecture combined use and perception – architectural experience is tactile and optical, casual and attentive. A building is absorbed through habit, as much as contemplation.5 Eugène Atget’s documentation of Paris is often cited as a turning point in photographic representation of the built environment, from scientific preservation to a more personal response. The “disappearing world” that he sought to preserve included the types of inhabitants most immediately affected by this inevitability. Atget seems to have identified with those who had been or would be displaced.6 In these bodies of work, and countless other projects conducted in the country and the city, the distinct genres of architecture, landscape, and portrait photography were conjoined in social documentary practice. Style and process were codified as unifying factors of this mixed mediation. Beginning in the 1930s and carrying through to the present, social documentary photographs were defined as realist images taken in a field of observation and encounter. While some projects developed organically, most sprang from conscious intentions, sparked by an interest, self-generated or assigned, in a definable and justifiable topic – at the intersection of heritage preservation, we might speak of a period of architecture, a threatened neighbourhood, or a segment of society. Basic data would be gathered with these images, sometimes including names, addresses, and occupations, though more commonly limited to location, occasion, and year. Some photographers were more systematic than others. Sincerity was a basic ingredient. Today street photographers travel with release forms and the process of photographing neighbourhood life has been encumbered – effectively discouraged – by privacy laws. In the 1970s, when the baby-boomer generation hit the streets with their cameras, their professional guidelines might best be described as artistic dogma: natural light, natural conditions, natural poses. Social documentary photographers mastered the medium to minimize darkroom manipulation, thereby optimizing truth. All this, including the absence of paperwork, induced an effect of trust and transparentness, which was often the case when the photographer was part of the community – embedded, as we now say – whether hanging around taking pictures or semi-officially recording its special events. In documentary photography, as in direct cinema, the line between intention and content is very thin, and both are inflected by the maker’s temperament and the temper of the times. Overall, these social documentary projects were imbued with seriousness, photographers increasingly conscious of their communicational roles and social contracts. This history of ideation and ideals informs an important set of photographs by Alain Chagnon (b. 1948), a collective portrait of a Montreal borough, 32

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1.1 Alain Chagnon, Taverne de Paris, l’homme au journal, 20 octobre 1973, 1973. Gelatin silver print, 16.5 x 24.1 cm. From the series La Taverne (1974), presented at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the group exhibition Auteur Photography in Quebec: A Collection Takes Shape at the Museum (2013). Courtesy of the artist.

1.2 Alain Chagnon, Deux amies, 13 septembre 1985, 1985, from the series Bande à Part (1984–1986). As exhibited in Vie de quartier, Avenue du Mont-Royal, 4 August–31 October 2015. Installation photo: Donigan Cumming. Courtesy of Alain Chagnon and Donigan Cumming.

Plateau-Mont-Royal, and adjacent parts of the city, made between 1972 and 1986. Some of these images have long circulated as discrete projects organized under two titles: La Taverne (1974) and Bande à part (1984–1986).7 The first captured the sociability of a local watering hole, its regulars a mix of pensioners and working men (Fig. 1.1); the second, the energy of youth, on the street and in social clubs and bars (Fig. 1.2). Place was an explicit theme of the first series, while the second ranged out from the neighbourhood (as young people will). The original series now bracket a larger corpus – a public art exhibition and a softcover book, Vie de quartier (both 2015)8 – whose conception and materialization affirm Chagnon’s lifelong commitment to the representation of everyday life in his community.9 The original presentations of these series and their re-edited reappearance perform what social historians James Opp and John C. Walsh recognize as the “unfinished and uneven” production of place, as well as those feelings of attachment that are personal, political, and frequently inchoate.10 The cover photograph of Vie de quartier, entitled Rue Laurier, 16 juillet 1974, seems perfectly nested in the mental space that is occupied by memories of place, both occupied and observed (Fig. 1.3). 34

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1.3 Alain Chagnon, Vie de quartier (Montreal, 2015). Cover: Rue Laurier, 16 juillet 1974, 1974. Courtesy of the artist.

It is anecdotal in photography’s way: an automotive breakdown at the corner of Laurier and De Lanaudière; an ordinary mishap in a do-it-yourself economy; just a guy, delayed or going nowhere, on a Tuesday. What he is doing in the trunk of his car is anyone’s guess, but the interest of the photograph lies not in solving this little mystery, but – paradoxically – in the message, plainly articulated, that there is nothing exceptional here at all. The contents of the trunk have been pulled out and left on the street, as though the man were in his own backyard, which is the point of the picture. He is. So should he worry about his stuff? No, his neighbour, the photographer, is watching his back. A blend of social documentary portraiture and street photography, Chagnon’s images are the very definition of being there through an everyday relational photography. They have been historicized as such – as exemplifying a rooted and possibly bounded practice – by a close, sometimes stern, observer, Serge Jongué (1951–2006). Focusing on the agora of social photographic practice in the late 1980s – what Hannah Arendt might have identified as its ready-made “space of appearance”11 – Jongué wrote of accelerated changes to Quebec’s photographic culture: “With Alain Chagnon’s Plateau-Mont-Royal in Translation

35

essentially no transition period, Quebec photography has moved from the public places it adorned – the traditional church basements and the walls of smoke-filled taverns – to the structured but confining space of the gallery.”12 The content has changed, as have the political agendas that made social documentary photography in Quebec into “a subjugated practice” – led by its ideology.13 Jongué’s trenchant analysis covers every aspect of the period. Relevant here is his suggestion that the photographic exhibition’s shift in locale changed the orientation of Quebec practice from activism to art; his demarcation year is 1983.14 It might be argued that uses of social documentary photography in art exhibitions opened up new activist fronts, but the episodic nature of these appearances must also be acknowledged. The reality effect of social documentary photographs seen in the art gallery was memorable because it was fleeting. In the 1970s, when Chagnon took up photography, Montreal’s two art museums, the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MBAM/MMFA, founded 1860) and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM, founded 1964), occasionally exhibited, but did not systematically collect photography, despite the growing clamour for recognition. The MACM placed its accent on contemporary art in all media, prioritizing Quebec, Canada, and international acquisitions. The museum’s inattention to documentary photography made a kind of sense at a time when artists were using photography for its indexical and mechanical nature but did not consider themselves photographers, i.e., denizens of the darkroom. In the event, these compartments were far from watertight. In Montreal and elsewhere, documentary photographs were regularly presented by art museums in thematic exhibitions on social issues.15 Demarcations could be more confusing still at institutions dedicated to social history, such as Montreal’s McCord Museum (McCord National Museum, founded 1921), whose collection spanned visual culture. As Chagnon’s practice developed, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA, founded 1979), would arrive on the scene, its international photography collection featuring both documentation and experimentation in relation to its architectural mission. The MBAM/MMFA collected photographs as works of art, but in 2013, there was considerable fanfare around the announcement of an institutional focus, launched by a group exhibition, Auteur Photography in Quebec: A Collection Takes Shape at the Museum, which included Chagnon’s La Taverne. Two years later came Chagnon’s do-it-yourself exhibition, Vie de quartier (2015), mounted as a temporary outdoor display along avenue du Mont-Royal, Plateau-Mont-Royal’s main street and neighbourhood partition, and complemented by a self-published book. These were two retrospectives, with two very different sets of objectives in play. As indicated by its title, the MBAM/MMFA exhibition marked an institutional

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moment: the incorporation of photography into its collection of contemporary art in Quebec. This much-anticipated expansion of the museum’s mandate introduced its audiences to images of Quebec that had previously circulated in quite different arenas. Chagnon’s social documentary photographs were thereby recognized as art. Institutional translation of this nature is not without precedent. It was indeed much practised in the late 1980s, and vigorously decried in some critical quarters, especially American postmodern criticism, as distortions of cultural history. In 2013, the MBAM/MMFA was not subject to such attacks, and the rationale for the exhibition, echoed in its critical analysis, successfully relegated it to background. Here I want to bring it forward; its soft-pedalling by the Auteur project and its critics is very telling. Another cultural backstory – a history of Quebec documentary practice – is evoked by Chagnon’s street exhibition two years later. His photographic placards, lining a Montreal neighbourhood’s main street, reawakened memories of the philosophical and political positions that had driven collective and individual photographic activism in that very place and time, and tested them under a new set of social conditions. In both exhibition and book, Chagnon’s gesture is a model of consistency: he keeps faith with the precepts that inspired him. “Re-activations” communicates a series of reflections sparked by encounters with the same photographs in different settings, first in a gallery, then along a street. These responses are informed by theoretical constructs – some might call them “orthodoxies” – that have been circulating and influencing Western photographic practice since the late 1960s. Photography theory and political philosophy are entangled in Chagnon’s work, which emerged at a moment of profound reflection on documentary practice and whose roots in Quebec national identity and Montreal’s class struggles run deep. These ideas produced images, which had an impact in their times and are now in their afterlife. One might see this as a classic example of documentary photography’s “two moments,” as Martha Rosler defined them in 1981: the historical moment dominating the first appearance of the photograph; an ahistorical sense of “pastness” dominating its reappearance – “topicality” having dropped away.16 Here I am suggesting other histories in the making, and the function of translation in this process. Without exaggerating the importance of this single case history, recourse to Aby Warburg’s construction of Wanderkarten – graphic displays mapping the movement of images over space and time – is helpful. Certainly, the translation of images can be seen to have occurred.17 Grassroots activism – the photography of the people – has entered the permanent collection of Canada’s longest established art institute of record. Those same images have since rebounded, back to their place of origin. Do they return to Plateau-Mont-Royal

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transformed by institutional association? Is this a clash between cultural memory and collective memory, or is there perhaps an intra-realm, where these images of Montreal now reside? ENTERING THE MUSEUM

Not social memory, but art and its acquisition were the leitmotifs of the MBAM/ MMFA exhibition. Its very title, Auteur Photography in Quebec: A Collection Takes Shape at the Museum, expressed both an aesthetic rationale and an acquisition policy that was yielding results in the present and looking forward to even greater harvests. The exhibition marked the institution’s first steps toward a representational collection of the history of contemporary photography in Quebec. From the wall panel, visitors learned that 1970 was the start date of this new collection and that fifteen hundred works had been acquired to that point. This inaugural exhibition had been organized to represent in-depth photographic series produced by eleven photographers: Benoît Aquin (b. 1963), Claire Beaugrand-Champagne (b. 1948), Michel Campeau (b. 1948), Roger Charbonneau (b. 1947), Alain Chagnon, Serge Clément (b. 1950), Donigan Cumming (b. 1947), Clara Gutsche (b. 1949), Brian Merrett (b. 1945), Normand Rajotte (b. 1952), and Gabor Szilasi (b. 1928). Their works were hung in separate clusters around the walls of a single gallery, with photographs by Beaugrand-Champagne and Gutsche installed back-to-back on a free-standing partition (Fig. 1.4). The ordering of the individual bodies of work was not overtly meaningful, rather suggesting their representativeness of larger holdings, whether the complete series or additional projects by the same photographer. Most of the photographs were either social documentary photographs – images of Quebec society, urban or rural – or views of the built environment taken at a time when Montreal’s architectural heritage and neighbourhood life were being threatened. They were, in other words, preservationist and activist, both materially and in their expression of socio-political values. “Auteur photography” was lucidly defined by guest curator Marcel Blouin as an approach with affinities to documentary photography, but akin to literature in terms of subjectivity and therefore meriting recognition as art.18 Indeed, the book form is implicit in this term, which is currently used to narrate the history of the self-edited photographic monograph, a practice that emerged in the 1930s. As David Bate explains, “Documentary photographers became ‘auteur’ photographers, authors with control over their own work, publishing their photographic work as photo-books.”19 A less literal meaning was intended by Blouin – it had to be, as so

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1.4 Auteur Photography in Quebec: A Collection Takes Shape at the Museum. Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2013. Works by Benoit Aquin, Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Alain Chagnon, Michel Campeau, Roger Charbonneau, Serge Clément, Donigan Cumming, Clara Gutsche, Brian Merrett, Normand Rajotte, and Gabor Szilasi. Chagnon’s La Taverne forms the cluster on the right. Courtesy: MBAM/MMFA , Denis Farley.

few of the projects in his exhibition had ever been published as photobooks. For the visitor, inter-media parallels were irresistible, especially in Quebec, where direct cinema and experimental documentary are so powerful in the national imaginary. Veut, veut pas, the MBAM/MMFA exhibition’s title evoked auteur theory in cinema, suggesting authorial control over all aspects of a project, with expression privileged over content. This made it Art, with considerable thrust from art historical authority. Without direct appeal to Erwin Panofsky – the German art historian’s insistence on cinematic form and style – modernism’s emphasis on the subject, on the originality of the maker, seemed to be in the ascendant.20 The corresponding devaluation of content was implied. This rationale was arresting, for by repositioning the work, the museum was reperforming the redefinitional acts that had inflamed Western photographic theorists in the 1980s and doing so with the same kinds of photographs: social documentary photography, views of the built environment, collective portraiture, and so on. All the photographs in the Auteur exhibition were in the documentary genre. Of the eleven groupings on display, Brian Merrett’s work was the most pointedly activist, with its views of heritage buildings under threat from developers. In a 1972 review for the Montreal Gazette, art critic Michael White had written that Merrett’s preservationist photography expressed “concern for the city,” showing “the destruction of Selby St. for the Trans-Canada Expressway and … working with the Local Initiatives project Photo-Montreal photographing the threatened Windsor Station.”21 The curatorial statement in the Auteur exhibition introduced Merrett’s mission, while praising his “exceptional mastery of technique and sense of composition, a profound knowledge of architecture and above all a great sensitivity to beauty and harmony.” Content nevertheless rose to the surface. Within the Auteur exhibition, Merrett’s work, hung first inside the door, created something of a traffic problem. Visitors clustered around his photographs, orienting themselves, pointing, sometimes angrily revisiting places that they had loved and lost. In 1972, Merrett described his urban-activist documents to White as “calculatedly cold.”22 In 2013, audience reaction was anything but, his preservationist message raising the temperature in the white box. Across the room, Chagnon’s fourteen images from La Taverne were also familiar to some, but generally received with a wink and a nod, as such spaces of sociability (and addiction) have long since disappeared – victims of gentrification. But Chagnon’s project was never proleptic nostalgia, nor was it salvage anthropology. It was indeed the opposite – a collective effort to create a portrait of contemporary Quebec. Nor was it precisely authorial, in the sense of singular

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creativity. In the 1970s, Chagnon, Marc Brosseau, Jean Fiorito, and André Sénéchal formed a collective known by its acronym GPP (Groupe des photographes populaires). Their statement for an early exhibition at Optica (15 March to 15 April 1973) rejected the “jouissance égocentrique” of the magazine photographer, insisting on the photographic act as a means of connection, “penetrating inside the people to really grasp their reality,” leading to “social implication” – we might say, engagement. The photograph was defined as a visual thought about society. This vital channel could not be restricted to magazines, but needed to “be broadcast in the homes, the districts and the street of the concerned people. It is necessary that we give them back their images.”23 Chagnon characterizes the group’s mission as a “quête identitaire” – a collective search for identity. Esther Trépanier evokes the same quest in her discussion of post-1960 Quebec art in Univers urbain: La représentation de la ville dans l’art québécois du XXe siècle. She situates this collective desire in the city, pairing it with social unrest, and characterizing its actors as figures who recognize “despite the vagaries of this way of life, their sense of belonging to the urban universe, as well as to mass culture, mass media, and technology.”24 Trépanier sees parallels with social expression of the thirties and early forties, noting, however, its domination by anglophone artists, and more precisely, the Jewish artists of Montreal. Post-1960, the baton of democratization passes to a young francophone community, artists with and across many media, including photography.25 The socialist leanings of GPP are certainly comparable, backing their interest in popular culture with “militant (and unpaid) photographic work for the Bulletin Populaire,” published by the Agence de presse libre du Québec (APLQ) from 1973 to 1976.26 Chagnon’s contribution to the collective portrait Images du Québécois, 1972–1984 included photographs of working-class neighbourhoods in the east of Montreal, street parties (especially the politically charged Saint-Jean-Baptiste celebrations), labour and women’s movement demonstrations, the everyday traffic in small shops, and families. The country music and rodeo Festival Western de Saint-Tite drew him to a rural industrial community, self-styled as the “Leathertown of Quebec.”27 La Taverne, shot in a working-class tavern on rue Saint-Denis and completed by 1974, was just the preamble to this complex social web, a finite project whose terms of engagement are noteworthy. Chagnon did not ask to photograph the tavern; exposed to his work as part of a group exhibition in a church basement, “la femme du tavernier” (the tavern-keeper’s wife) approached him.28 For Chagnon, it was the moment when the people of his neighbourhood recognized him as their photographer – when the aspirations of GPP to integrate and give back became a reality.

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A COLLECTIVE FRAMEWORK

Collective practice is of singular importance in the Quebec ethos – gone, but not forgotten. This condition is stamped on Lise Lamarche’s groundbreaking study, “La photographie par la bande: Notes de recherche à partir des expositions collectives de photographie à Montréal (et un peu ailleurs) entre 1970 et 1980.”29 Published in an edited collection designed to survey contemporary visual art exhibitions from 1970 to 1990, Lamarche’s decision to concentrate on one decade prompted some critical comment.30 It is fully understandable, given the amount of activity between 1970 and 1980, and more significantly, its collective structure and broad definition of what constituted an exhibition space: not just museums, public and private galleries, artist-run centres, and archives, but also community meeting places, such as restaurants and church basements, and other means of dissemination, such as books, catalogues, photo magazines, bulletins, newspapers, artists’ statements, and manifestos. As Lamarche outlines her research, she shows that an inclusive approach seemed necessary to form a clear picture of photography, the publication of which was not systematically considered a secondary means of documentation or illustration. The photo essay or photobook was often intended as the primary vehicle of creation and circulation. Access was the watchword of the decade. Lamarche cites many supporting statements in the literature, none more illuminating than an article published in the Montreal-based Magazine OVO/OVO Magazine in February 1972: “On a parlé alors de vulgarisation de la photographie.”31 The article takes the form of a transcript, capturing a heuristic conversation hosted by co-editor Jorge Guerra. Participants were three founding members of GAP (Groupe d’Action Photographique, formed October 1971): Michel Campeau, Roger Charbonneau, and Serge Laurin (b. 1947). French-born photojournalist Pierre Gaudard (1927–2010) and Hungarian-born documentary photographer Gabor Szilasi, who would formally join GAP in February 1972, were also present, as was art critic Michael White.32 Another incoming GAP member, Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, was not. For adepts of the Marxist talking circle, the photographic record of the meeting says it all, with half the participants seen from behind. In 1972, Chagnon was just getting started; the GPP would be founded the following year. Magazine OVO was already taking stock of documentary photography, and especially its function in society, in light of four recent projects. Campeau had photographed in a Montreal neighbourhood restaurant and Laurin in a tavern; their exhibitions were hung in those same locales. These installations are illustrated in the article. Gaudard’s monumental study of Quebec workers, Les Ouvriers, had recently premiered at the National Film Board of Canada/Office national du film (NFB/ONF) Photo Gallery/Galerie de l’image in Ottawa – a photographic unit still 42

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dedicated to the NFB/ONF mandate of showing Canada to Canadians. Szilasi had presented recent documentary work as part of a group exhibition at Galeries photographiques du Centaur, a photographic space in the lobby of the Centaur Theatre in Montreal. Michael White’s credentials were well established by his coverage of such socially accented events. This remarkable conversation ranged nimbly over many of the issues motivating and troubling documentary practice at that time. Each point could be the subject of lengthy analysis, tracing its political roots and cultural manifestations. Here I can only tease out some key assumptions and conditioning factors, as they illuminate the discourse of the moment. The participants’ choice of words is telling. Vulgarization is understood as the rendering of photography in the vernacular of the people (the vulgate). In the aftermath of Vatican II, at which the Roman Catholic Latin mass was retired in favour of local languages, this keyword is deliberately secularized. But if the Church was losing its grip on the younger generation, its parish halls were no less functional as spaces of congregation – Chagnon and his colleagues put their pictures up there. In this light, popularization is also subtly redefined. It is not simply a matter of attracting people to exhibitions, but of making photography accessible to greater numbers of people, and especially socio-economic groups that do not frequent art galleries. Those that do, the discussants note, are sometimes drawn to seeing how the other half lives. This desire to stare at the other is also nuanced, and in a way that would fly over the heads of cultural critics – some quite famous, such as Susan Sontag.33 The discussants are not strictly referring to a bourgeois consumption of photographs of the poor and disadvantaged. For them, this is a two-way street. Ordinary people also want to stare; they are dazzled by photographs of the rich and famous. So, reading between the lines, it is not so much a question of exercising power or not exercising it. Photography must advance the project of demystification; a socio-political photography must counter such myths with an affirming realism. Photography is a tool for self-knowledge. The social function of photography is the construction of individual and collective identities. The political function of the medium is as a tool for activism through the raising of working-class consciousness. The discussants hope that visual education or the barest exposure to social and political photography will raise the photographic literacy of ordinary people who seem only to recognize portraits that are made according to commercial and ideological norms, and therefore reject photographs of themselves in their everyday social settings. For GAP, this discussion would be prescient: the collective would later experience such criticism when they circulated their collective portrait of a farming community, Alain Chagnon’s Plateau-Mont-Royal in Translation

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Disraëli, Quebec. Some people complained that the vestiges of traditional lifestyle favoured by the photographers created a false impression of backwardness.34 This makes the circumstances of La Taverne even more intriguing. What did the tavern-keeper’s wife see in Chagnon’s photographs that won him not just trust, but recognition? Class difference and economic disparity are recurrent themes. The discussants acknowledge the economic barrier that prevents the human subjects of social documentary projects from acquiring their own image. The financial prospects for the worker-photographer are also examined, including personal goals and the satisfaction in seeing projects brought to term in exhibitions and books. Working methods are analyzed. A social documentary photographer must make some kind of commitment to the subject-community. The discussants see important qualitative differences between projects conducted by resident photographers and those enacted by itinerant social documentarians or freelance photojournalists. While motivated by Quebec practice, the discussion occasionally broadens to include exemplary projects conducted outside Quebec. They are all inner-city neighbourhood projects, including American photographer Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street (New York, 1970), a social documentary study of a Black and Hispanic neighbourhood in New York City, as well as another unspecified project that had recently taken place in Detroit. There are scant but important references to theory. Laurin has been influenced by his reading of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s Un Art moyen: Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (Paris, 1965), translated much later as Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. This study connected the uses and understandings of photography to established social structure. Laurin deduces that any deviations from established uses of photography verge on class warfare: “Si tu vas à l’encontre de cette conception, tu débouches presque sur la lutte des classes.”35 This was his hope, of course, and shared by many of his contemporaries. “On a parlé alors de vulgarisation de la photographie” is essential reading for the history of photography in Quebec, preserving the flavour of the discourse and its germination in collective analysis. The importance of these circles for Quebec practice at the time cannot be overestimated. There were numerous collectives: GAP and GPP, already named, Photocell, mentioned by Laurin, and more to come.36 It will be noted, however, that no women were present at Ovo’s staged encounter. The contributions of GAP member Claire Beaugrand-Champagne notwithstanding, photography had not yet assimilated the feminist fact. In the mid-1970s, the formation of Plessigraphe (Marik Boudreau, Suzanne Girard, and Camille Maheux) responded to feminism’s call for more authentic representation before and behind the camera.37 Chapters in this volume by Clara Gutsche (Photocell) and Martha 44

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Fleming (on her partnership with Lyne Lapointe) capture the collaborative nature of their activist projects. On his website, Chagnon signals the importance of social solidarity to his work, remembering GPP as well as his involvement in Vox Populi (1985–89), founded by the Collectif des jeunes sans emploi de Saint-Louis-du-Parc to provide low-income communities with the means to communicate as a tool to improve their quality of life. Chagnon had already restarted the collective engine in Sans honte et sans emploi (1984), a group exhibition about unemployed youth in the district.38 Pace Jongué, collective action in Quebec has sometimes waned, but never entirely disappeared, ebbing as a force for social activism and popular education. The forming of auteurs – distinct creative voices – has occurred either deep inside this institutionalized social space or on its fringes. CRITICAL DECONSTRUCTIONS

Institutional recognition for photography as it is more commonly understood – as the desire for validation and support by fine arts museums, art galleries, arts councils, and publishers – was also part of the Quebec photographic community’s collective struggles. The Auteur exhibition marks a watershed – belated but welcome, and remarkable in its focus. As Zoë Tousignant notes, in her careful analysis of the MBAM/MMFA’s institutional turn, “The ‘art vs. documentary’ debate has been played out ad nauseum throughout the medium’s 170-year history, but it is still surprising that a museum until recently unconvinced of photography’s validity as an art form has wholeheartedly embraced a period in the history of Quebec photography that is defined primarily by documentary practices – a period that precedes the more self-consciously subjective strategies that would take over from the mid-1980s onward.”39 In other words, as she explains, Quebec photographic practice has successfully made a pronominal shift from “we” to “I.” Tousignant’s explanation for the shift is persuasive as she profiles the two curatorial auteurs, MBAM/MMFA curator Diane Charbonneau and consultant Blouin, the former informed by the material turn in photographic studies and the latter formed by the documentary tradition of the province. Blouin has put in his time with collectives. He was one of the founders of Vox Populi as it tried to revive that tradition in the late 1980s; there he connected with Chagnon. If the collective approach must be relegated to history, Blouin remains convinced of its objectives – a nation must document the life of its people. Whether by “we” or “I,” a political philosophy invigorated by Vox Populi in its meeting spaces at the old YMCA building on the corner of Park Avenue and Saint-Viateur Street (a Montreal neighbourhood much photographed by Chagnon) is found to have burrowed into the MBAM/MMFA.40 Alain Chagnon’s Plateau-Mont-Royal in Translation

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Tousignant does not raise, as here I must, certain key debates about documentary photography of which the founding members of Vox Populi were most certainly aware. The photographic polemics of the 1980s were spirited attacks on neo-liberalism, launched by the American academy and its critical practitioners against the photographic institutions of the day. “Ad nauseam” perhaps, but nevertheless vital to this discussion was photography’s existential question, then as now unresolved: should photography be considered a document or a work of art? This was both a political and philosophical debate, as much was being written on the nature of photography by Marxists, post-structuralists, and phenomenologists. In some quarters, the modernist practice of social documentary photography was utterly rejected as sensationalism or unethical exploitation of the (usually marginalized) subject.41 Deconstructive criticism also reinterpreted historical photographs. Semiotic readings based on the mechanical nature of the medium – its indexicality – formed curious alliances with intentionality – why the photograph had been taken (and by whom). The latter question involved not just the documentary photograph’s commissioning, but its subsequent use. Critics argued forcefully that the meaning of a photograph was inflected by institutional policy – the place of encounter. The essence of the argument was that presenting a documentary photograph in an art museum submitted it to aesthetic criteria and was therefore a distortion. In 1981, American critic Douglas Crimp launched a vociferous attack on the acquisition policies of the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Public Library, arguing that their dissimilar collections were equally implicated in an ontological and custodial scandal: photographs created to perform useful functions – “information, documentation, evidence, illustration, reportage” were being elevated to art. He first published this polemic in the Montreal-based magazine Parachute.42 The redefinition of the archival object by the Western art museum was similarly attacked by American critics Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Rosalind Krauss, and Martha Rosler. Likewise, Allan Sekula’s now-canonical text “The Traffic in Photographs” condemned what he saw as a market-driven aestheticization that erased historical materialism.43 On the New York stage, where much of this played out, the essence of the complaint curiously echoed capitalism’s rallying cry: “location, location, location.” But these ideas also left New York. Circulating widely, cited liberally, these texts became pillars of photographic discourse, and today, students of Western photography history and theory are still required to read them. For Canadians readers in the 1980s, the economic stakes in these arguments were somewhat abstract – there was no photographic art market in Canada to speak of. Some thirty-six years later, these critiques may carry more weight, since Canada has in the meantime developed a market for photographs, and museums that were 46

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not systematically collecting photography have begun to do so, the MBAM/MMFA being a case in point. Does the acquisition of these photographs as works of art defeat their original purpose, as Crimp and his cohort would have argued? Does the strengthening of authorial singularity weaken their social history and mute their political message? I did not conduct an exit interview for this exhibition – would that I had – but I did spend some time observing the behaviour of audiences, who appeared not the least bit caught up in aesthetic notions, but wholly engaged with the content of the photographs, which functioned for them as windows to the past, damning evidence, nostalgic pleasure, and collective reinvigoration. The exhibition could thus be defined in French historiographer Pierre Nora’s terms as a lieu de mémoire – the materialization of collective identity in the form of photographic relics.44 Seen through that lens, the museumization of Chagnon’s oeuvre might be seen to preserve its vitality: its firm attachment to place; its trust in the resident photographer; his or her imaging of the people; the shock and possibly the displeasure of the tavern’s regulars at seeing themselves through a street photographer’s lens. Rather than museumization deactivating the work, this act of translation might be redesigning the bourgeois art museum into an armoury for class warfare. The idea is tantalizing, if somewhat fantastic. BACK ON THE STREET

Installing Vie de quartier as an outdoor exhibition along avenue du Mont-Royal guaranteed the project a certain visibility. Plateau-Mont-Royal today claims to be the most densely populated borough in Canada, with 101,054 people living in an 8.1-square-kilometre area. Parts of the borough are considered very “hip,” especially its inner neighbourhood, Mile End, which has become a cultural destination and a creative seedbed. Mile End has periodically been touted as a laboratory for ethnocultural diversity, its modus vivendi of superficial relations – cool cohabitation and varied consumerism – characterized in a 2008 sociological study as “‘fuzzy’ cosmopolitanism by default.”45 But Plateau-Mont-Royal is not growing in population; it is in fact a study in depopulation, even as its ethnic and economic diversity fluctuates. In 1971, just before Chagnon moved in, the population was 158,585. Singles and couples of the baby-boomer generation were moving into Plateau-Mont-Royal, taking over apartments that had previously housed Quebec’s famously large families. Chagnon was part of this demographic shift. Still, there was plenty of the old working-class neighbourhood left to see. By today’s standards, housing was bursting at the seams. Residents lived on their balconies and stoops, sunbathed on their roofs, worked Alain Chagnon’s Plateau-Mont-Royal in Translation

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on their cars at the curb, and shopped locally – pure catnip to an aspiring documentary photographer. And this certainly described Chagnon, who had quit his job to concentrate full time on photography. For the next fourteen years, Chagnon ranged over Plateau-Mont-Royal, including its neighbourhoods of Mile End and the Plateau, and their ethnic enclaves. As he wrote in his brief introduction to Vie de quartier, the lack of commercial or institutional opportunity for a photographer did not concern him and his fellow photographers. What motivated them was to bring the people their own photographic images, “showing them in the very locations where they had been taken.”46 Some forty-odd years after the photographic fact, this aim was not to be taken literally as a return to the self-same people, but a restitution of their images to the place they had once called home. Vie de quartier was not Chagnon’s first public art exhibition in Plateau-MontRoyal. Between 2007 and 2012, he had participated in five editions of Les fenêtres qui parlent, a multimedia exhibition installed for the Journées de la culture in windows and on balconies along the residential rue Marquette. His solo exhibition was far more ambitious, constituting an approved and subsidized project of the Société de développement de l’avenue du Mont-Royal and its non-profit affiliate Odace événements. Its creation sent Chagnon into his substantial archives of negatives, work prints, and archival prints, from which he chose fifty-three images, at least half never before exhibited. Images were enlarged and mounted back-to-back on two-legged, blackboard-sized placards. A title panel, offered at each end of the exhibition, included a map of the exhibition. The full experience formed a solid walk on a circle route, with a few short diversions onto the side streets. The arrangement was plainly thoughtful, though in no discernable way methodical. This was not a history walk – no compare and contrast, and surprisingly few direct connections, except at the western starting point. Images from La Taverne were installed close to the place where the series was born: the Église Notre-Dame-du-Très-Saint-Sacrement, now the Sanctuaire du Très-Saint-Sacrement, where parishioners socialized after mass. It was there that Chagnon first met the tavern-keeper’s wife. Under her patronage, he entered a society largely made up of white working men, some who studiously ignored him, some playfully fending him off – no one, it seems, the least bit concerned with his presence. Chagnon’s photographic style encourages such casual co-presence. He is an unobtrusive worker, respectful of personal space and social boundaries – indeed they are clearly demarcated in his selection of pictures, many compositionally divided into foreground, middle ground, and background. If a child in a long print dress steps forward to have her picture taken, her family and neighbours are watchfully milling nearby, against the backdrop of their houses. Then, and more forcefully now, this approach recommends the work. Children in social documentary photographs 48

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1.5 Alain Chagnon, Vie de quartier (Montreal, 2015), n.p. Left: Rue Plessis, 29 juin 1973, 1973; right: Rue Plessis, 29 juin 1973, 1973. Courtesy of the artist. 1.6 Alain Chagnon, Vie de quartier, 2015. Exhibition view. Left to right: Boucher cacher, rue Saint-Viateur, août 1986, 1986; Cordonerie Godinho, rue Saint-Viateur, août 1986, 1986. Installation photo: Donigan Cumming. Courtesy of Alain Chagnon and Donigan Cumming.

1.7 Alain Chagnon, Vie de quartier (Montreal, 2015), n.p. Left: Photographies de mariage au Jardin botanique, juillet 1983, 1983; right: Photographies de mariage au Jardin botanique, juillet 1983, 1983. Courtesy of the artist. 1.8 Alain Chagnon, Vie de quartier, 2015. Exhibition view. Left to right: Fête de la Saint-Jean, Parc du Mont-Royal, 1975; Fête la Saint-Jean, 1974; Dépanneur, rue Saint-Viateur, août 1986, 1986. Installation photo: Donigan Cumming. Courtesy of Alain Chagnon and Donigan Cumming.

are rarely enfolded in this way, by which I mean the cool appraisal of the woman seated in her aluminium chair (Fig. 1.5). Everything transpires in public view; there is only one photograph of a domestic interior, a man sitting on his bed in a rooming house. The private sphere is otherwise limited to glimpses through doorways or open curtains. Chagnon sometimes photographed discreetly – the single image of a Black family is taken from behind – but he also talked to people, later remembering what had made them available to his camera, such as three guys waiting for a moving truck, their place having gone up for sale. He photographed shopkeepers, saleswomen, barbers, tradesmen, and municipal workers in situ, captioning his subjects by trade and sometimes ethnicity – a Portuguese fishmonger, kosher butchers, and a Chinese street party (Fig. 1.6). He attended public celebrations and private moments, but the latter only as they manifested in the public sphere. And like so many photographers of his generation, Chagnon photographed people being photographed: wedding parties using the Montreal Botanical Garden (Jardin botanique de Montréal) as the backdrop for their romantic life stories. Paradoxically, these are the most intrusive images in the group, as Chagnon captures the achingly banal staging of the pictures and the tedium of waiting in the heat, in tight shoes and polyester dresses, to be called. In the book, these images à la sauvette (Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moments”) appear in a double-page spread, forming a kind of continuum across the gutter (Fig. 1.7). On the street, they were mounted back to back, so that spectators coming along the sidewalk in opposite directions were conjoined in the same observational act. By lining Plateau-Mont-Royal’s main street with photographic encounters, Chagnon was simultaneously rehearsing the past, including its photographic rituals, and stimulating the everyday sociability of city dwellers as they went about their business. And what happened to his oeuvre in the process? By turning his forty-year-old black and white images into signs and installing them along a shopping street, Chagnon performed his own act of integrative translation. The borough has continued to change, following trends of gentrification and diversification that had already started in the 1970s. Documentation of the installation captures some of these factors: the surroundings are colourful with advertising, graffiti, and fall foliage; the neighbourhood is visually noisy, culturally complex, and with mixed socio-economic messages. Behind his placards, coffee franchises are competing with corner cafés. Avenue du Mont-Royal is the very antithesis of the white box. An outdoor photographic display in this context – black and white prints mounted on stands – is also the opposite of cool, high-tech communication, one of gentrification’s big drivers. Rather it seeks to be part of the flow, with almost old-fashioned deference Alain Chagnon’s Plateau-Mont-Royal in Translation

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to the pedestrian. As documented toward the end of the exhibition, some of the photographs have been tagged, some of the mounts are leaning; the work is showing the marks of its own life experience, something that will never happen at the museum (Fig. 1.8). What is crucial about such a project has been reanimated, and that is its topicality. Faced with this snapshot of what was, not so very long ago, a place that appealed to its resident photographer as a site for social action through collective self-identification, it is impossible not to wonder how this statement might be striking the millennials of Mile End, or Plateau-Mont-Royal’s more recent arrivals – immigrants putting down roots and Indigenous people reclaiming traditional territory. Chagnon’s public display of his personal search for Quebec’s collective identity brings one set of memories into relation with others at a time when peaceful cohabitation, in memory and actuality, is ever more crucial. NOTES 1 Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” 13. In a note on page 4, Williams refers to the article as “Revised text of a lecture given in Montreal, April 1973.” 2 Ruin Lust is the title of an exhibition curated by Brian Dillon, Emma Chambers, and Amy Concannon from the permanent collection of Tate Britain and presented from 4 March to 18 May 2014. The title derives from the German word for the aesthetic appreciation of ruins, “Ruinelust.” 3 Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” 10. 4 James Agee, “Book Two – Preamble,” in Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 12. 5 Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility (Third Version),” in Eiland and Jennings, eds. and trans., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 4: 1938–1940, 251–83; on habit, 268. 6 Vassallo, “Documentary Photography and Preservation, or the Problem of Truth and Beauty,” 25. 7 La Taverne was exhibited at the Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal, in May 1974. Bande à part (forty prints) was exhibited at the Maison de la culture de Maisonneuve, Montreal, in April 1987. An edited version (seventeen prints) had been acquired in 1986 by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa, and organized by CMCP curator Pierre Dessureault as a travelling exhibition that was launched at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (23 October 1986–4 January 1987) and travelled to eight other venues before being retired in 1997. 8 The website for Odace événements, a non-profit organization affiliated with the Société de Développement de l’Avenue du Mont-Royal that hosted Chagnon’s exhibition, calls it Portraits de Québécois, but this title appears nowhere else, suggesting that it was either provisional or constructed. 9 Montreal critic Nicolas Mavrikakis’s brief introduction to Chagnon’s book tries to resist nostalgia, while dreaming of more social spaces for communitarian exchange of ideas. See Mavrikakis, “Critique d’art insupportable cherche communauté supportable,” in Chagnon, Vie de quartier, n.p. 10 Opp and Walsh, “Local Acts of Placing and Remembering,” 6. 11 Arendt, The Human Condition, 199. 12 Jongué, “The New Photographic Order,” 38. 13 Ibid., 39.

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14 Ibid., 38. 15 Photographs of Montreal taken by the Groupe d’Action Photographique (GAP) were prominently featured in guest curator Melvin Charney’s “politicized, multi-media, and interdisciplinary exhibition,” Montréal plus ou moins? Montreal plus or minus? (1972). See Sloan, “Montréal plus ou moins, 1972.” GAP exhibited in December of the same year at the Musée d’art contemporain (MAC). A sampling of that work in Ateliers, the museum’s magazine, places emphasis on social relations within traditional or working-class communities. See Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, “Groupe d’Action Photographique,” 6–7. 16 Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography),” 1981, in her Decoys and Disruptions, 185–6. 17 For a clear and succinct explanation of Warburg’s process, see Despoix, “Translatio and Remediation,” 129–50. 18 The “auteur” framework was proposed by Blouin, who worked in close consultation with museum curator Diane Charbonneau, under the direction of chief curator and director Nathalie Bondil. Charbonneau, whose original collecting area at the museum was decorative arts, had taken on photography out of personal interest and with a particular focus on materiality. Acquisitions were also made under the category of contemporary art. It bears mentioning that most acquisitions were acquired through donation, and were therefore dependent on the existence of private collectors, who were not plentiful in the Montreal community. 19 Bate, “Documentary and Story-telling,” Photography, 47. Bate refers to Gerry Badger and Martin Parr, editors of The Photobook: A History, volumes 1 and 2 published in 2004 and 2006 respectively. 20 As Philippe-Alain Michaud reminds us, Panofsky insisted that “only auteurist cinema would be accessible to iconological discourse.” Michaud cites correspondence of the 1940s between Panofsky and photo-cinematic theorist Siegfried Kracauer, with Panofsky dismissing any notion of objective content. Panofsky’s lack of interest in documentary cinema is evident in his “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” (1937), says Michaud. See Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 278–82. 21 White, “Pictures Express Concern for City,” 20. 22 Ibid. 23 Groupe des photographes populaires, “Portfolio G.P.P.,” 71–81. A statement by Marc Brosseau, Alain Chagnon, Jean Fiorito (Le Groupe des Photographes populaires, G.P.P.) on the occasion of their exhibition at Optica (15 March to 15 April 1973). The statement is preserved in its English translation only: Photographies: “We often see in photographic magazines, photographers using things, models and human beings in the realisation of their work. This type of picture is in fact unilateral and the photographer through his photography obtains an egocentric feeling (jouissance égocentrique). The contact which must be established between the photographer and those photographed is the main thing. It should not only be a concerned use. All the dimensions of a communication between those two persons must be felt in the photography. He must not be satisfied only with a photo taken as an observer, but penetrating inside the people as to really grasp their reality. Once this reality is understood, our work must lead into a social implication. Through a greater knowledge of the context, we reach a point where our photo becomes a visual mean of thought on our society. The

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photographic magazines must not be our sole means of distribution, but we must also and mostly broadcast in the homes, the districts and the street of the concerned people. It is necessary that we give them back their images.” 24 Trépanier, Univers urbain, 32. Author’s translation. 25 Ibid., 34. 26 See Jongué, “The New Photographic Order,” 49–50n17. Founded in 1968, the APLQ was a press bureau for popular and leftist journalism. Its archives are held by the Université du Québec à Montréal. See Fonds d’archives de l’Agence de presse libre du Québec, accessed 30 May 2020, https://archives.uqam.ca/fonds-archives/archives-privees/11-gestion-archives-historiques/46fonds-archives.html?varcote=29P. 27 Chagnon has recorded his part in “Images du Québécois, 1972–1984,” noting that his own activity continued after the dissolution of the project: “J’ai ajouté à ces séries, des photos prises vers 1985, rue Saint-Viateur; à ce moment là je faisais partie du collectif Vox Populi qui travaillait dans le même esprit que le GPP quinze ans plus tôt.” [Author’s translation: “I added to this series photographs taken around 1985 on Saint-Viateur; at that point, I belonged to the Vox Populi collective, which was working in the same spirit as GPP, fifteen years earlier.”] See Chagnon, “Images du Québécois, 1972–1984,” Alain Chagnon Photographe. 28 Chagnon gratefully remembers this woman’s invitation to photograph her husband and sons at their Taverne de Paris. See Chagnon, Vie de quartier, n.p. 29 Lamarche, “La photographie par la bande,” 221–65. 30 See Hakim, “Exposer la photographie,” n.p. 31 Magazine OVO/OVO Magazine, “On a parlé alors de vulgarisation de la photographie.” 32 Membership in GAP can be hard to pin down. The four photographers credited with the collective’s best-known project, a collective portrait of Disraëli, Quebec, were BeaugrandChampagne, Campeau, Charbonneau, and Cedric Pearson (b. 1949). The first three are explicitly identified in the credits as belonging to GAP; non-member Pearson’s work is amply represented in the publication, which leads to the erroneous assumption that he was a member. 33 Sontag’s interpretation of realist photography as the exercise of power was first published in the New York Review of Books (18 October 1973). I am not suggesting that the OVO discussants were responding directly to it; rather I would propose that their exchange demonstrates a level of acuity and sensitivity that Sontag and her followers might have learned from. 34 Jongué rehearses this controversy in “The New Photographic Order,” 40–1. 35 Magazine OVO/OVO Magazine, “On a parlé alors de vulgarisation de la photographie,” 67. 36 Ibid., 66. 37 A 2005 conference paper by then doctoral candidate in political science Ève Lamoureux adroitly synthesizes the emergence of feminism in Quebec artistic practice, including Plessigraphe, which formed in the mid-seventies to produce documentary photographs of Quebec women that countered stereotypes. Their critique was aimed at society and particularly at a misogynist history of art – oppressive attitudes countered by authentic images of women’s experiences. Secondwave feminism in Quebec initially participated in the independence movement, influenced by socialism and Marxist theory. By 1976, feminists were moving away from leftist political struggle, and developing more autonomous collective structures. See Lamoureux, “La question du genre dans les arts visuels.”

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38 See Chagnon, Alain Chagnon Photographe, “Images du Québécois” and “Biographie.” The archives of Vox Populi are held by the artist-run centre Vox, Centre de l’image contemporaine and were exhibited in 2016 as part of the centre’s thirtieth anniversary celebrations. See Vox, Centre de l’image contemporaine, Vox Populi: 1985–1989. 39 Tousignant, “Leaping Forward,” 54. 40 Ibid., 54–6. 41 Susan Sontag was the new orthodoxy. Her searing collection of essays On Photography had appeared in 1977 and in a French translation, Sur la photographie, in 1982. 42 Crimp, “The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject,” here cited from Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning, 7. 43 Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” 15–25. 44 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7–24. 45 See Germain and Radice, “Cosmopolitanism by Default,” 112–29, especially their conclusion, 126. The top ten countries of origin of immigrants to the metropolitan region of Montreal during the 1990s were Haiti, China, Algeria, France, Lebanon, Morocco, Romania, Philippines, India, Sri Lanka (116). 46 Author’s translation from Chagnon’s statement of intention: “c’est de rendre aux gens leurs images en exposant dans les lieux mêmes où les photographies ont été prises.” See Chagnon, Vie de quartier, n.p.

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2.

Melvin Charney and Photography: “The Image Behind the Image” Louis Martin

Photography, either the images I produce or those I appropriate, is an important constituent of my work. It lies at the very source of my art. In fact, I only look at so-called “reality” through the photographic image … What I look for is the image behind the image. Melvin Charney, 1995 1

Artist of international renown, architect, and university professor, Melvin Charney (1935–2012) established himself as an influential critic of late-modern and postmodern architecture, and as an original creator in the field of contemporary arts in Canada and abroad. The contribution of this paper is to carefully examine the relationship of Charney to photography and the various roles this medium has played in his productive career. Clearly, photography was the basis of his critique of the architectural image, a critique that unfolded in many directions throughout the years: from the assertion of the dichotomy of “process” and “image” and a commitment to representing the street or the city, rather than individual buildings, to the appropriation of media photographs for the purposes of ideological critique and the invention of alternative commemorative devices in the form of “built photographs.” Photography became for Charney a means to create an alternate view of the world, rather than a mere reproduction of its image. As he pointed out himself, his work, visual and written, testifies to his attempt to reveal what lies behind, or beyond, the mediated relationship to the world realized by photographic images. His crossing of boundaries, expressed in his superimposition of one medium on another, does not derive from some alleged limitation of each single medium, but from his obsession “to come to grips with what is essential.”2 From the outset, one distinguishes two types of photographic images in Charney’s visual universe: images he collected from printed sources (newspapers, reviews,

books, trade magazines, etc.) and photographs he took himself. Collecting images from printed media was a habit the artist developed very early on. As a child in the 1940s, he filled scrapbooks with images of distant cities, machines, rockets, and technological visions of an anticipated space age. For him, “these images were an important source of [his] learning about the world,” and “a way of assimilating the horrors of distant wars and evidence of a rapidly changing world.”3 It was in his teens that he began to photograph his surroundings, the streets of his neighbourhood, and further away, the older parts of Montreal and the industrial structures of the port. Montreal is present as privileged object of study throughout his work, and this from the very beginning. Yet, surprisingly, photographs of Montreal are not abundant in Charney’s archive. Moreover, the pictures he took himself are few; most of the images of Montreal he published were drawn from printed publications or provided by his students at the Université de Montréal. “DES YEUX QUI NE VOIENT PAS”

During his studies in architecture at McGill University, from 1952 to 1958, Charney was profoundly stimulated by Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, the central chapters of which were entitled “Des yeux qui ne voient pas.” In that famous manifesto, the author argued that architects were blind to the new industrial aesthetic emerging all around them. For Le Corbusier, American grain elevators were the modern equivalents of the great monuments of humanity, such as the pyramids, the Coliseum, and Hagia Sophia. The grain elevators, with their simple, geometrical forms, anticipated a new modern architecture, an architecture he defined as a “fait brutal,” a pure plastic fact, that is as “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.”4 Yet, Charney discovered inconsistencies in Le Corbusier’s discourse. Firstly, one of the “American elevators” illustrated on page 18 of the book was not situated in the United States, as Le Corbusier believed, but in Montreal: it was grain elevator no. 2, built in 1910, in front of the Bonsecours Market. Secondly, Le Corbusier had touched up the photograph he reproduced (Fig. 2.1). More precisely, he erased the adjacent market to isolate the volume of the elevator in a void, and he marked out the edges of the building to accentuate its symmetry. The comparison of Le Corbusier’s image with a similar one that Charney found in a publication of the early-twentieth century revealed that the master transformed the image to make it fit his own discourse. This discovery had a profound effect on the young architect, who realized that Le Corbusier had a distant and purely aesthetic understanding of grain elevators, but also that Montreal was in possession of monuments anticipating the new Melvin Charney and Photography

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architecture promoted in his book. This modification of the elevator’s photograph was disturbing: Charney noticed that Le Corbusier did not show the reality of the grain elevator as it arose in the urban fabric of Montreal (Fig. 2.2). Moreover, the master looked at elevators only as images, rather than as real structures performing real functions. Charney intuited that modern architects could learn something from grain elevators that Le Corbusier did not see. So, he set out to study them as objects in their environment and as machines. He took pictures of Montreal’s grain elevators when they were still in operation. He tried to show what Le Corbusier hid, using photography as evidence. He said in 1995 that “photography has been a milestone for the twentieth century, and that it is through that medium that this century has validated its image of reality.”5 Evidently, for the young architect in the 1950s, photography was an objective documentation of reality. The imposing structures of the port of Montreal were obviously not monuments isolated in the American prairies; neither were they made to stir emotions, as Le Corbusier argued. After he studied their evolution and design, Charney realized that each elevator was a link in a system of distribution, built at the scale of the continent, for the global provision of grain. Charney summarized his thoughts in his essay “Grain Elevator Revisited,” published in the British magazine Architectural Design in July 1967, in a special issue on Montreal and Expo 67.6 In this eye-opening essay, he concluded that Le Corbusier and his contemporaries of the 1920s did not understand that the elevators were not buildings, but large-scale machines, made to keep grain in motion. Because they looked at them merely as images, the “moderns” of the 1920s saw the elevators as formal analogues for a future architecture. In Charney’s opinion, contemporary architects made the same aesthetic mistake when they looked at the installations of the Kennedy Space Centre and Apollo vehicles as a prefiguration of a new lifestyle. For him, “rather than the static and lumpish neo-monuments of yesteryear,” the elevators were the image of a process, a “process we must study if we believe that architecture is an involvement with human processes rather than with designed things.”7

2.1 “Silos et élévateurs à blé aux États-Unis,” reproduced from Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: Crès et Cie, 1923), 18. Top: Photographer unknown, Grain Elevator No. 2, Montreal. 2.2 Melvin Charney, View of the Principal Façade of Marché Bonsecours with Grain Elevator No. 2 (Now Demolished) in the Background, Montreal, Quebec, 1968. Gelatin silver print, 23.5 x 34.6 cm. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, PH1987:0622. Courtesy of the estate of Melvin Charney.

THE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN PROCESS AND IMAGE

The dichotomy between “process” and “image,” which emerged out of Charney’s study of Montreal grain elevators, was a central motif in his criticism of the 1960s, a distinction he had perhaps already articulated during his studies at McGill, where, inspired by Stuart Wilson,8 he found more architecture of interest in the alleys of working-class neighbourhoods than in the large mansions of Upper Westmount designed by architects for wealthy clients. In the early 1960s, Charney travelled to places visited by Le Corbusier fifty years before, in Italy, Greece, and Turkey.9 It was probably Louis I. Kahn, his mentor during his Master’s studies at Yale University in 1959–60, who triggered his search for the origins of architecture.10 According to Kahn, the characteristic of a true beginning was that “in the start lies the seed for all things that must follow.”11 In architecture, archaic form was still loaded with possibilities. Consequently, in looking at how ancient cultures answered architectural problems, the contemporary architect could learn how to get to the core of the emerging new societal demands. To accomplish this task, Charney used photography and survey drawings to illustrate his first publications. Clearly, his photographs were meant to document the built architecture, the human figure being generally absent in most of his pictures. In Istanbul, Charney found an architecture embodying “construction,” the principle of which was the “piling up” of material. Separation of small, familiar elements was the rule of the architectural game in that city. In this way, buildings retained “a sense of process.” Thus they had meaning for a contemporary architecture similarly made of small, prefabricated industrial elements.12 In contrast, the troglodyte architecture of Cappadocia was based on the principle of “excavation,” by which material was removed from natural rock formations to create inhabitable space.13 Yet, the landscape of Cappadocia was also characterized by the presence of the discordant image of “constructed architecture” imported by the Christians during the eleventh century. While the “plan of a rock-cut dwelling began with the cutting of its spaces,” religious architecture “began with an image,” the image of a known style, of previous examples. In other words, rock-cut churches were not “construction,” since their sculpted decoration was merely an “image of construction.” Charney’s photo meant to show that the columns and arches of these churches held nothing up (Fig. 2.3). What differentiated the indigenous dwellings from the religious environment of Cappadocia was not a difference of principle – both were realized by way of excavation – but more precisely, the difference between process and image.14 Upon his return to Montreal in 1964, Charney found instances of process and image in the new architecture that emerged out of the frenetic modernization of 60

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2.3 Melvin Charney, Partial View of the Arcaded Porch of Saint John the Baptist Church Showing a Column, Arches, and Dentils, Cavusin, Cappadocia, Turkey, 1961. Gelatin silver print, 23.0 x 34.9 cm. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, PH1987:0615. Courtesy of the estate of Melvin Charney.

his native city. Large sectors of the Victorian city were demolished and replaced by often disappointing commercial structures. The traditional city of streets and squares was being transformed into a city of dense, vertical clusters of buildings. In a detailed analysis of Place Victoria, he indicated the semi-successful insertion of tall skyscrapers in the urban fabric. Place Victoria and its siblings, such as Place Ville-Marie, presented a special environmental problem: their “interior circulation spaces are part of the private building yet because of their size really serve the public as streets and are in a sense an extension of the public city.”15 This dichotomy, he argued, was not clearly resolved in the planning of these building complexes. Yet Place Victoria was superior to the other recent Montreal high-rise office towers because it emphasized “a sense of process set up both in the grouping and in the phasing of the elements of this building.”16 By comparison, Place Ville-Marie and the CIL House (now Telus Tower) exhibited “an overt formalism and a two-dimensional composition of parts”; their architecture followed a “packaging ideology,” which had “all the semblance of cool integration” of technology. “However, in Place Victoria,” Charney concluded, “integration has in itself become part of the Melvin Charney and Photography

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form; the technology of this tower is realized in architecture, and, as architecture, technology here becomes a human factor.”17 If Place Victoria demonstrated what could be learned from the grain elevators as the “image of a process,” it was not in the port but in the older parts of the city that Charney found an architecture anticipating “the style of the later international modern movement.”18 And in his opinion, it was the precursors of Modern architecture in Montreal that possessed qualities lacking in contemporaneous corporate architecture (Fig. 2.4): Commercial buildings dating from the mid-nineteenth century were the first to use an all-glass facade for maximum interior lighting and an open interior plan that lends itself to a flexible arrangement of partitions … The solids of the facade explain with a pristine clarity the structure of the building – a simple cage of beams and columns. To emphasize the clarity of the buildings, the builder-designers modulated the parts and proportions of the building according to their height and placement in relation to the observer in the street; in Place Ville-Marie, a detail on floor 1 is identical to that on floor 31.19 Just like the archaic form of ancient Mediterranean architecture, the protoModern architecture of nineteenth-century Montreal was still full of possibilities that the contemporary architect could develop. THE STREETS OF MONTREAL

The photographs Charney took of the streets surrounding him were meant to reveal both their physical characteristics and social origins, which he described in his essays of the 1970s and 1980s. An older street like Saint-Paul Street illustrated a fundamental principle: the street is a collective space created by the facades of individual buildings. In his words, “the street is a physical entity which subsumes individual buildings”20 (Fig. 2.5). Other photographs of the quartiers populaires showed that a main feature of the evolution of the street form in Montreal was the introduction of trees in sidewalks and subsequently of small gardens in front of the facades. “The urban architecture evolved with the extension of each flat into the street, creating a unique social zone appropriating the space of the street,”21 which tended to become in certain areas a linear garden (Fig. 2.6). While these photographs were documentary evidence of the unique spatial configuration of Montreal’s streets, The Main, a photomontage created in 1965, 62

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showing Boulevard Saint-Laurent between Dorchester (now Boulevard RenéLévesque) and Sainte-Catherine, revealed another way of looking at a street. The fascinating aspect of this “mythical and kitsch” stretch of Montreal’s Main, the traditional frontier separating francophone and anglophone populations, was the fact that it acted like a passage, or a corridor, absorbing the flow of passing people.22 In other words, the street was an object, a specific place, a social container that could be represented like a room by a montage of frontal photographs. Discussing The Main in 2002, Charney argued that photography has the power of transforming space into an image of itself, into an object reflecting that “self ”23 (Fig. 2.7). Charney showed this photomontage in a collective exhibition of which he was the curator: Montréal, plus ou moins? Montreal, plus or minus? presented at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1972. The intent of the exhibition was “to say that the future of the city is found not only in urban growth, in technological innovations, or in the exercise of planning and design talents, but in the social and cultural evolution of Montreal.”24 The show brought together dozens of Montreal individuals and groups (artists, architects, writers, photographers, caricaturists, journalists, activists), who were invited to provide a citizen’s insider view of the city. Among others, the catalogue included photographs by Roger Charbonneau from the recently formed Groupe d’Action Photographique (GAP),25 which realistically captured the dereliction of the daily environment of ordinary people, as well as more brutal images of demolition by Brian Merrett. Showing a similar sensibility for the daily environment, Charney’s photomontage introduced into the museum a mode of representation that was common in studios of architecture, where such montages are used to facilitate the survey of the context of a building site. The view in elevation adds to the “objective” character of the image. Charney shows the street at the level of the sidewalk and frames only the first and second floors of each building. The effect and mode of presentation are almost identical to Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip from 1966, a work known to Charney.26 Today, more than fifty years after the photos were taken, this part of Boulevard Saint-Laurent is largely demolished. Unexpectedly, Charney’s photographic survey preserves the lost image of this mythical portion of Montreal’s Main. PEOPLE’S INNATE KNOWLEDGE

With his 1971 text “Towards a Definition of Architecture in Quebec,” Charney’s criticism was radicalized, through the introduction of an overtly political outlook.27 The starting point of his argument was the identification of a contradiction in contemporary architecture, “between its elitist and repressive condition and its obvious origins in social content.”28 To illustrate this contradiction, Charney Melvin Charney and Photography

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2.4 Melvin Charney, 415–419 Des Récollets Street, Montreal, n.d. Courtesy of the estate of Melvin Charney. 2.5 Photographer unknown, Saint Paul Street West, Montreal, 7 July 1953, 1953. Archives de la Ville de Montréal. VM94-Z500-41.

2.6 Melvin Charney, View of the Stairs and Gardens of Row Houses, Waverly Street, Montreal, 1971. Gelatin silver print, 34.9 x 23.1 cm. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, PH1987:0618. Courtesy of the estate of Melvin Charney.

2.7 Melvin Charney, The Main … Montreal, 1965. Montage: Saint-Laurent Boulevard between Sainte-Catherine Street and René-Lévesque, Montreal. East side: montage of twelve gelatin silver print on two cardboards. Panel 1: 44.5 x 11.6 cm; panel 2: 44.5 x 91.6 cm. West side: montage of seventeen gelatin silver prints on three cardboards. Panel 3: 44.5 x 111.5 cm; panel 4: 44.5 x 120 cm; panel 5: 44.5 x 126.6 cm. Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Courtesy of the estate of Melvin Charney.

compared photographs, excerpted from governmental publications, of two individual houses built north of Montreal. This is indeed an early example of how Charney engaged critically with many kinds of readily available photographic imagery provided by the press. On the one hand, the picture of an architect’s house found on the cover of a book on contemporary architecture in Quebec embodied the ideology and failure of “architecture as an institutional system.”29 On the other hand, the photo of an anonymous house in the Laurentians, which illustrated an article denouncing the ugliness of Quebec’s landscape, represented the repressive side of this same elitist cultural institution, one that was incapable of seeing in this image “an authentic architecture born of real things and rooted in people’s real lives.” A scrupulous description of the architect’s house indicated that its ambiguous formalism detached the building from its environment. In its formal isolation, this house, largely derivative of American examples from the 1950s, recalled “the language of an aesthetic myth.” “Objet trouvé” on the side of the road, the other house was, on the contrary, totally integrated into its environment. This anonymous house was “specific to its occupants and to its place.” Its real significance lay in the fact that it reflected “the condition of those who had to struggle – with a minimum of resources available – to find a way to house themselves.” The house belonged to a living popular tradition.30 Charney argued: “A tradition refers to an attitude towards building, an attitude rooted in an innate response to the need for organization of physical space and conditioned by the resources available.”31 Just as ancient vernacular traditions of the Mediterranean could be the source for classical architecture and industrial building could be the source of modern architecture, Charney maintained that “the source of contemporary architecture in Quebec is in a way of building that has shaped the relationship between people and the built form they inhabit.”32 With this provocative comparison, Charney reframed the previous dichotomy between image and process. Obviously, the architect’s house represented the image of a foreign Modern architecture, which represented both a stylistic phenomenon and a “packaging ideology.” In contrast, the anonymous house illustrated a process, which was the stamp of an authentic modernity rooted in real experience. What was new in this presentation was Charney’s contrasting of the authoritarian essence of architecture as an institutional system and the liberatory potential of popular architecture. There is no evidence that Charney ever saw the two houses. It was his scrutiny of the two photographs that allowed him to draw such conclusions. His alternative interpretation seems entirely based on the mediation provided by the printed photographs he juxtaposed, the new meaning emerging from their juxtaposition and allusions to ideas drawn from other fields. Melvin Charney and Photography

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Charney’s originality, when compared with Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s contemporaneous apology for “ugly and ordinary architecture,”33 was that he situated meaning in the interaction between people and their environment. In Quebec, people’s “innate response to the need for organization of physical space” gave a “central role to the meaning of street and square in the organization of towns and cities.”34 Charney went on to articulate a position that amounted to a quasi-revolutionary political program. His essay concluded: “the liberation of the architect depends on the political and social liberation of both the individual and the community. And in Quebec, this means that it depends on the assertion of a new and renewed Quebec identity.”35 Written during the 1970 October crisis, Charney’s text considered the spontaneous formation of citizens’ groups – made up of people who united to protest the destruction of their neighbourhoods and formed cooperatives in order to buy and collectively maintain their dwellings – to be the beginning of a new phase in the history of Quebec architecture.36 In that phase, the appropriation of the quartiers populaires by their inhabitants was a sign that people could at last liberate themselves from the authoritarianism of the architectural institution. In contrast with previous essays, which were illustrated in part with photographs he took of Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s, the “revelation” of “Towards a Definition of Architecture in Quebec” was based on the appropriation of images representing the official discourse of Quebec’s architectural culture. Charney’s political criticism interpreted these images in such a way that they came to symbolize values exactly opposite to those promoted by the authors who published them first. Although Charney never acknowledged it, his rhetorical strategy was strikingly similar to the Situationist practices of détournement he had seen emerge during his stay in Paris from 1960 to 1963.37 IMAGE-TYPE: FROM DOCUMENT TO MONUMENT

The beginning of the 1970s marked a shift in Charney’s appropriation of photographic images. While photography was still conceived of as an indexical trace of reality, Charney began to reflect on the commemorative content of images. That content, which transformed documentary photographs into monuments, fuelled Charney’s parallel quest for alternate forms of architectural monumentality, to be expressed in the construction of installations. The Memo Series (1971), Charney’s entry for a Canadian competition to design an Air Force memorial, was a pivotal work in this transformation. The project was meant to liberate architecture from “the dominant conception that architecture resides solely in the design of a specialized object in the form of a building.”38 Rather 68

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than a building constructed in a specific location, Charney proposed the creation of a Canadian memorial network through which people would discover the history of air flight while interacting with artifacts dispersed throughout the country. The raw material of the memorial was found “in readily available artifactual bits known to materialize for people the remembrance of air flight and Air Force.”39 These objects were classified in a series of “images-types,” which suggested possible expressions for the memorial.40 Yet, the Memo Series, as an artifact, strictly juxtaposed images found in print media and texts of his own. The idea of “learning from the wire services,”41 as he put it, emerged gradually and enabled him to develop an understanding of architecture as a form of knowledge about the interaction of society and architecture, rather than a mere knowledge of forms. The significant shift here was the substitution of the object by its image, which represents a radical departure from Charney’s previous dismissal of architecture as image. Books, magazines, and especially newspapers provided the raw material, the living archive of anonymous images depicting people’s daily struggle in various environments, as well as traces of architectural ideology and representations of power. This led to the creation of the Dictionnaire d’architecture, a visual learning device Charney exhibited in several versions over three decades. Because of their worldwide diffusion via the “wire services,” the snapshots of reality identified by Charney should have participated in the formation of a global consciousness. Yet, their proliferation and unthinking daily consumption contributed, paradoxically, to the formation of a collective unconscious, in which the dialectics of architecture as both a means of repression and liberation remained almost invisible. It was therefore essential to isolate such images from the stream of everyday life, as did Pop Art in the 1960s.42 The act of collecting retrieved them from the cycle of inattentive consumption and transformed them into monuments. Inspired by Michel Foucault, who suggested that history transforms documents into monuments,43 Charney intuited that all architecture was a document commemorating the heroic content of life.44 Consequently, he argued that “every built gesture seemed to assume a monumental connotation.”45 The conjoining of elite and popular architecture implied a dialectical understanding of architectural monumentality – as the very site of a political struggle about memory. He wrote: “the heroic content of building is reserved for the strategic embellishment of the lives of those who control the purse strings if not the privileges in society … The idea of the monument is still promoted as some atavistic emblem of class structure that dominates the practice if not the spirit of architecture.”46 In opposition to this model, Charney set out to commemorate what architecture as an institution repressed: the popular built forms, which were symbols of people’s innate knowledge and also unconscious monuments of their struggle for a place. Melvin Charney and Photography

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THE IMAGE BEHIND THE IMAGE

In the first part of the 1970s, Charney extensively used photographs to illustrate essays on the politics of housing.47 To him, housing programs in Canada served to “maintain the market function” rather than provide affordable homes to the majority.48 Housing, he maintained, had become “the political instrument for entrenching consumer values.” The single-family house was “served up to the nation as a consumer goodie, and access to any other form [was] denied.”49 Two images of Montreal’s metropolitan area served to illustrate his point. A photograph of unknown origin showing the demolition of a triplex (Fig. 2.8) ironically revealed the unique characteristics of Montreal popular housing, which he described as an expedient, climatic shell developed by craftsmen working for speculative builders. It consisted of a roughcut, wood plank frame 3-inches thick with a continuous plank infill equally 3-inches thick, covered by an air space, and enclosed in a brick veneer; the traditional roof slope of the maison québécoise was reversed – instead of the dangerous cascades of ice, the accumulation of snow on this “Montreal roof ” served as insulation along with the layers of air trapped beneath the outer membrane. This shell represents an important breakthrough – a more efficient envelope and one that was easier to assemble than traditional building – the first truly indigenous construction to emerge out of the experience of this continent.50 Yet, the cultural value of this genuine architectural invention was invisible to the political elite. Instead of maintaining the stock of traditional housing, which represented 44 per cent of all low-cost housing in the city in 1970, federal government programs almost exclusively subsidized the construction of bungalows in the suburbs that were burgeoning on the urban fringe. While housing in the quartiers populaires was the expression of a collective ecology of settlements, the consumer packaging of housing in the suburbs robbed people of the symbols of their collective identity. Charney drew a parallel between the repression of militant action in Montreal’s working-class neighbourhoods and the state of dereliction of the existing stock of buildings that provided the bulk of low-income accommodation in the city. Photographs retrieved from local newspapers showed scenes of a city under siege, in which eviction, illegal demolition, and criminal fires affected the daily lives of ordinary people. Obscure forces were at work, forcing the transformation of the central working-class neighbourhoods into a new metropolis. 70

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2.8 Photographer unknown, Dismantled Housing, Montreal, ca. 1975. Estate of Melvin Charney.

But the process of modernization was not restricted to Montreal. In 1974, Charney found in a periodical the image of a small house, which illustrated a short text describing an urban-renewal plan for Trois-Rivières. The artist saw in this image an exemplary illustration of people’s innate knowledge of architecture. Drawing over the image, Charney revealed as in radiography the architectural substance that made of this anonymous construction a heroic building (Fig. 2.9). The image triggered a project: Le trésor de Trois-Rivières.51 At once shed and antique temple, house and sarcophagus, the little house was an incarnation of the archetypal primitive hut, which was the origin of architecture according to the Vitruvian myth. The destruction of such an exemplary case by a blind political apparatus was an act of cultural repression that Charney wished to counterbalance by the creation of a monument intended to preserve the memory of the house and its builder. Built for the Québec 75 exhibition at the MACM, Le trésor de Trois-Rivières, his first installation, was a commemorative substitute for the demolished house. Charney’s story, and its accompanying “built photograph,” gave meaning to an image generally thought to be meaningless. The construction commemorated a repressed architectural idiom. Melvin Charney and Photography

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2.9 Melvin Charney, Une histoire, le trésor de Trois-Rivières, 1975. Coloured pencil and wax crayon over photostat on wove paper, 40.5 x 62 cm. Purchased 1985, National Gallery of Canada (no. 28784). Courtesy of the estate of Melvin Charney.

The method developed with Le trésor de Trois-Rivières inspired Charney to photograph other anonymous structures of the recent past in Montreal and throughout the province. These photos were reworked into projects for construction, as a way to present their “formative devices” through the physicality of an object.52 In this series, Charney drew over his photographs to show the figures of architectural knowledge that lay buried in the images of these anonymous buildings. Working in a quasi-psychoanalytic way, he intended to isolate these figures by means of autonomous constructed fragments, which objectified the innate knowledge sedimented in popular architecture. Grouped under the title “Fragments,” these works included an example found on the island of Montreal, La maison de Rivière-des-Prairies (1977). Although isolated in a former rural area, the frontality of the house was revelatory of an urban tradition. Never realized, this project would have reduced the derelict cubic house to its architectural essence, that of a facade facing the street.

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RUINS PROJECT THE FUTURE OF MONTREAL

At the turn of the 1980s, Charney tried to grasp what he called the “Montrealness” of Montreal. He wrote, “there still exist two cities: that of urban knowledge, a city of quartiers and that of architecture, buried in that other city, that is the metropolis.”53 Photographs taken by his students, who were asked to find examples of “significant architecture,” served to illustrate the confrontation of the two models, which he described in these words: “Two cities now thrive, one within the other. Outside, the remains of an aging, traditional city, charged with signification: the bearer of urban figures, the ‘interior’ of the urban consciousness of people. This traditional city is however in a constant state of disrepair and dismantlement … While inside the bulky, blind superblocks of a new, primitive city, people flounder in the abstraction of streets and squares, lost in the hermetic remains of urban traces that are at best shadows of their former selves.”54 The periphery of the city’s core was where one found the most destruction; this was where “the extensive ruins of the quartier populaire” could be seen.55 The new inner-city superblocks had begun, however, to incorporate an urban configuration and even fragments of existing buildings, and Charney saw in the preservation of these fragments an anticipation of things to come. He wrote: “the campus of the Université du Québec à Montréal has introduced into the formation of the superblock fragments of existing buildings which occupied the site. In contraposition to the new blank walls of the massive building, these fragments appear as nervous, sculptural intrusions, supercharged with connotations. The introduction of textural urban figuration and typologies is soon to follow.”56 Hence, Charney argued: “It could be said that Montreal’s libido, its life, exists still in the city of urban knowledge where ruins project its future.”57 This intuition helps us to understand a line of thought underlying Corridart, the “exhibition in the street” he organized as the cultural manifestation of the 1976 Olympic Games.58 He selected a vacant site at the corner of Sherbrooke and Saint-Urbain streets and used a photographic technique to create a mirror image of the two surviving houses situated on the other side of the street (Fig. 2.10).59 He saw in this mirror image a symbol of the city’s narcissism, which related to great squares in the history of city building, such as the Piazza del Popolo in Rome or the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Here, photography was no longer an objective documentation of reality, but a means to create an alternate view of the world. The installation that resulted was another “built photograph,” which is to say an architectural/sculptural construction based on a photograph. This work would then be transformed into an image again through photography. Yet the

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2.10 Melvin Charney, Les maisons de la rue Sherbrooke, 1976. Coloured pencil and wax crayon on a photostat copy from a photomontage, 43.2 x 57 cm. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, DR1984:1571. Courtesy of the estate of Melvin Charney.

image did not merely interpret the memorial content of a pre-existing structure: it introduced a critical point of view on Montreal and its destiny. The installation reconstructed the physical and social space of the street, which otherwise would have remained shapeless and invisible. In the photograph, the new facades framed the view toward the emerging metropolis beyond, thus making visible “the city within the city.” The material status of this work made of reclaimed plywood was ambiguous: was it a building site or a building in a state of ruination? The installation introduced a fragment of fictitious houses that never existed. As a visual duplication of the real, the new fragment inverted the process of erosion characteristic of the city of urban knowledge; it introduced a new ruin, and thus materialized the idea that ruins could project the future of Montreal. 74

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The ephemeral facade was a reified metonymic trace of Montreal urban architecture. The fragment reduced the whole to its essential characteristic: that of a construction subsumed by the street, that of a backdrop defining the collective space of the street. Yet, the profound significance of Les maisons de la rue Sherbrooke surfaced, not without bitter irony, with its very destruction by order of Mayor Jean Drapeau. The destruction re-enacted, as in a ritual, the demolition of the quartiers populaires. The figurative content of this work, and the images of its destruction acted as a catalyst which brought to collective consciousness the fact that the city was the battleground of a real struggle between a repressive power and a cultural resistance. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Charney’s act of urban activism was the worldwide diffusion of the demolition of his urban installation under the form of a mass-media image. Following Foucault’s logic, the documentary evidence of photography is metamorphosed into a monument of history or, more simply said, the document becomes a monument that preserves the memory of an event, which in this case was a true mise en abyme. Photographs of this particular installation thus acquired a status comparable to the images collected in Charney’s Dictionnaire d’architecture, a monumental archive assembled and reorganized over thirty years, which set out to reveal architecture’s dialectics of liberation and oppression. ALCHEMY

Photography was indeed central in the creation of Charney’s art, and this essay only hints at the various meanings of photographs in his artwork. Remarkably, his early criticism of architecture as a preconceived image, and his understanding of a dichotomy between process and image, was transformed into an awareness of the dichotomy within the image itself – between the image and what is behind the image, between the image and its double. Ultimately, photography was liberated from its documentary role to become an apparatus in the creation of works of art.60 Yet photography also played other roles in Charney’s reflection on Montreal and on architecture’s curious function in society. Foremost, photography helped him to ascribe a universal significance to Montreal’s architecture. For instance, the motif of an inverted staircase placed at a ninety-degree angle over an existing stair, found in a Montreal rooming house, seems to take root in the ageless vernacular architecture of Turkey that Charney photographed in the early 1960s, before being incorporated into the semiological architecture of New York architect Peter Eisenman. Here photography captures the migration of a motif through space and time, but also from popular culture to elite architecture. Melvin Charney and Photography

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Secondly, photography fostered the fusion of images in Charney’s art. For instance, a sculpture in the garden of the Canadian Centre for Architecture hybridizes the shape of a grain elevator and that of a classical temple, creating a dual image, which is anticipated by an early 1960s photograph of a Greek temple in Sicily. In another, a Montreal triplex slices into a typical maison québécoise, as in a photomontage of two photos found in Charney’s archive. It is hard to know if this type of invention was meant to express a confrontation, a collision, or a reconciliation of the dialectics of architecture. Yet, Charney’s uneasy sculptural collages produce a kind of alchemical reaction, in which the meaning of each image exists in an unstable-but-evocative amalgam of ideas. Undoubtedly, photography was essential to the constitution of Charney’s understanding of Montreal. With photography, he preserved images of a disappearing Montreal, but more importantly, he made visible the otherwise invisible social content of Montreal’s architecture, a social content he wanted to celebrate and preserve in creating other kinds of monuments, many of which survive only in the form of a photographic image.

NOTES 1 First published by Millet, “Interview: Melvin Charney, explorateur de la mémoire collective”; English translation in “Explorer of Collective Memory,” in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 419–24. 2 Charney, “Explorer of Collective Memory,” in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 419–24. 3 Charney, “The City and Its Double,” 26. 4 Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 16. 5 Charney, “Explorer of Collective Memory,” 419–24. 6 Charney, “Grain Elevators Revisited,” 328–34. 7 Ibid. 8 A Montrealer of Scottish descent, Stuart A. Wilson (1912–1991), took Charney under his wing when the latter had to stop his studies after he broke his leg in a ski accident in the middle of third year, in December 1954. An artist by temperament and partially self-taught in architecture, Wilson was a demanding teacher and an eccentric character, whose approach was at odds with the Miesian approach then popular at McGill during the 1950s. 9 Le Corbusier published Le voyage en Orient in 1965, but many of his drawings of 1910–11 were published and commented on in Vers une architecture. 10 Charney’s research was of course in synchronicity with the vernacular trend of the period, of which Sybil Moholy-Nagy and Bernard Rudofsky were pre-eminent advocates. See Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, and Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects. Charney, who visited the Greek temples of Sicily, was also inspired by the teaching of Vincent Scully Jr. See Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods. 11 Kahn, “Concluding Remarks to the CIAM Congress, Otterlo, 1959,” 207.

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12 Charney, “A Journal of Istanbul: Notes on Islamic Architecture” (1962), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 62–71. 13 Charney, “Troglai: Rock-Cut Architecture” (1963), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 72–80. 14 Charney’s dichotomy between process and image rephrased Louis Kahn’s distinction between “architecture as realization” and “design as imagery.” See Kahn’s “Concluding Remarks to the CIAM Congress, Otterlo, 1959,” 205–12. 15 Charney, “Place Victoria, Montreal” (1965), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 116–19. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Charney, “The Old Montreal No One Wants to Preserve” (1964), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 88–93. 19 Ibid. 20 Charney, “Corridart: Art as Urban Activism” (1977), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 314–19. 21 Charney, “The Montrealness of Montreal: Formations and Formalities in Urban Architecture” (1980), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 332–41. 22 Charney, “Les photographies,” in Landry, Melvin Charney, 34. 23 Ibid. 24 Charney, “Montreal … More or Less” (1972), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 270–5. 25 The “Groupe d’Action Photographique” (GAP) was created in 1971 by Michel Campeau, Roger Charbonneau, and Serge Laurin, who were quickly joined by Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Pierre Gaudard, and Gabor Szilasi. The latter provided the initial photomontage for Charney’s Les maisons de la rue Sherbrooke of 1976. On GAP, see Rozon, “Apprendre à voir,” 38–42. 26 Charney reproduced a part of Ruscha’s book in his essay “Experimental Strategies: Notes for Environmental Design” (1969), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 202–16. In the same essay, he also used a photograph by Walker Evans, which consolidated the Yale connection. 27 Charney, “Towards a Definition of Architecture in Quebec” (1971), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 246–64. 28 Charney, “On the Liberation of Architecture: Memo Series on an Air Force Memorial,” in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 236–45. 29 Beaulieu, Architecture contemporaine au Canada français. The author of this pamphlet, Claude Beaulieu, was an active promoter of modern architecture during the 1960s. At the time, Beaulieu was an editor of the magazine Vie des Arts, in which he published an article on the house in 1966. See Beaulieu, “À Saint-Sauveur-des-Monts,” 31–41. 30 Charney derived his argument from John A. Kouwenhoven’s Made in America: The Arts in Modern Civilization (1949). Kouwenhoven argued that the vernacular tradition was transformed by industrialization, notably by the invention of balloon framing and prefabrication. According to him, the vernacular tradition was the real driving force of “an architecture indigenous to modern civilization” (95), an idea that Charney internalized and reformulated in his writings. 31 Inspired by the notion of “tacit knowledge” popularized by Michael Polyani, Charney’s concept of people’s innate knowledge of architecture rested on the idea that such a knowledge was acquired in practice and cannot be expressed otherwise. See Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension. 32 Charney, “Towards a Definition of Architecture in Quebec” (1971), 246–64.

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33 Scott Brown and Venturi, “Ugly and Ordinary Architecture or the Decorated Shed,” 64–7. 34 Charney, “Towards a Definition of Architecture in Quebec” (1971), 246–64. 35 Ibid. 36 In October 1970, the Canadian government adopted the War Measures Act after a provincial minister and a British diplomat were kidnapped by the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). In a manifesto read on national television, the FLQ argued that the political elite sold the nation’s riches to foreign interests and enslaved Quebec’s working class; the FLQ incited the workers to cease the means of industrial production. Charney considered the housing problem in Canada to be a national tragedy of equal magnitude. In 1972, he argued that Canadian housing programs guaranteed high returns to the building industry but did not really produce affordable housing and led to popular dissatisfaction. He drew a parallel between the guerrilla activities of the FLQ and the politicization of families in their struggle for affordable housing. Later, in 1976, he denounced the neo-colonial attitude rooted in the ideology of capitalist development imposed by the political caste. A symptom of the possible liberation of architecture, that is the appropriation of the quartiers populaires by their inhabitants, inaugurated a fourth phase in the history of Quebec architecture. See Charney, “Low-Income Housing into the 70s with Sewer Pipes and Subsidized Speculation” (1972) and “Housing in Canada: A Dead-End Choice” (1976), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 264–9 and 281–90. 37 Détournement is one of the ten terms defined in the first issue of the Internationale situationniste, published in June 1958. It designates the integration of prefabricated aesthetic elements, drawn from current or past artistic production, into a superior construction of the environment. There is no situationist art, only a situationist use of these means. Reprinted in Debord, et al., Internationale situationniste, 1958–1969, 13. 38 Charney, “On the Liberation of Architecture: Memo Series on an Air Force Memorial,” 236–45. 39 Ibid. 40 The Memo Series identified numerous scenarios (meetings in abandoned hangars, encounters with the site of a crash, virtual flight, travelling aircraft museum, etc.) in which the participants’ selection of experiences constituted, in Charney’s mind, “an act of design intervention and a deliberate political, social and aesthetic act.” Melvin Charney, “La Libération de l’architecture.” Charney built the concept of Image-Type on Le Corbusier’s famous Object-Type. Also “On the Liberation of Architecture: Memo Series on an Air Force Memorial,” 236–45. 41 Charney, “Learning from the Wire Services” (1976), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 276–80. 42 Charney wrote an interesting essay on Pop Art, which is a key to understand his handling of the images of the everyday. See “The World of Pop” (1964), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 81–7; and “On the Liberation of Architecture: Memo Series on an Air Force Memorial,” 236–45. 43 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. 44 Heroism was a central trope of modern architecture’s revolutionary mythology. While Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi rejected it, Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson promoted it. Yet, they found nothing heroic in America. See Charney, “Modern Movements in French-Canadian Architecture” (1978), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 320–1. 45 Charney, “Other Monuments: Four Works, 1970–1976” (1977), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 291–304.

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46 Ibid. 47 Charney, “Low-Income Housing in the 70s with Sewer Pipes and Subsidized Speculation” (1972), 265–9; and “Low-Income Housing: A Dead-End Choice” (1976), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 281–90. 48 Charney, “Low-Income Housing: A Dead-End Choice.” 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Charney, “Other Monuments: Four Works, 1970–1976” (1977), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 291–304. 52 Charney et al., Melvin Charney: oeuvres, 1970–1979. 53 Charney, “To Whom It May Concern: On Contemporary Architecture in Quebec” (1982), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 342–60. 54 This description was added to the 1992 re-edition of “The Montrealness of Montreal.” See Charney, “The Montrealness of Montreal: Formations and Formalities in Urban Architecture” (1980), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 332–41. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Charney, “To Whom It May Concern: On Contemporary Architecture in Quebec” (1982), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 342–60. 58 Charney, “Corridart: Art as Urban Activism” (1977), in Martin, ed., On Architecture, 314–19. 59 The photograph of the street corner, and the photomontage were realized by Gabor Szilasi. 60 The painted photographs of the 1990s took stock of the visual archive amassed over forty years. In the superimposition of the abstractions of modern art onto photographic memories, Montreal disappears, although its metropolitan neurosis informs most of the work. See Charney et al., The Painted Photographs.

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3.

Through the Lens of Edith Mather: Photographing Demolition and the Transforming City Tanya Southcott

On 30 August 1977, the entertainment section of Montreal’s Gazette opened with a pair of photographs. The first, taken on Gaudry Street in the summer of 1967, pictured a gang of young children perched on the front steps of a building under demolition (Fig. 3.1). Behind the children, two doorways stand flush with the sidewalk. To the right, the front door, still ajar on its hinges, opens to a staircase that leads the eye straight into the building and up toward the open sky. To the left, the empty threshold frames remnants of the building’s destruction – the fragments of a wall and lintel, and piles of debris. As viewers, we are caught between our expectation of a glimpse of the building’s interior and the leafy yard we see beyond the portals. The image is striking because of the intimacy between the children and the building. No physical barriers separate the children from the dangers of the demolition zone; instead, the facade functions as a playground, evidenced by chalk drawings on its still-intact brickwork and the group’s easy, energetic posture. In scuffed shoes, worn trousers, and grubby shirts, the youngsters are every bit as dishevelled as the structure behind them. Playful and distracted, they make faces at each other and the camera, sharing this intimacy with the person behind the lens. In taking their picture in front of the demolition site, the photographer also captures their vulnerability, and the fragility and fleeting nature of carefree youth. The moment in which this photograph was taken marked an important event in Montreal’s emergence as a modern metropolis. The 1960s was a period of dramatic urban change when large-scale redevelopment and renewal transformed the topography of the downtown through the construction of modern architectural

3.1 Cecelia Blanchfield, “Edith’s Eye ‘Rebuilds’ Our Castles in the Air.”

Montreal Gazette, 30 August 1977. Material published with the express permission of Montreal Gazette, a division of Postmedia Inc.

landmarks, mass-transit systems, and planning for international events.1 The scale and speed of construction necessitated equally large-scale demolition, and the city’s aging late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century residential buildings were particularly vulnerable. Gaudry Street, a stub of a working-class residential street that hooked north off Saint-Antoine into Plymouth Grove along the base of the Saint-Jacques Escarpment, was being cleared to accommodate access ramps for the newly constructed Ville-Marie Expressway. The destruction caused by the expressway was unparalleled, and its effects were socially uneven. Plans targeted poorer residential districts to minimize land-acquisition costs and eliminate blight; in the end, 15,000 residents were relocated, and 3,300 homes demolished.2 By August 1977, the children were grown, and Gaudry was long gone. The publication of the photograph a decade after it had been taken presented a reassessment of the consequences of such “progress” and a nostalgic return to a bygone era. In the second photograph, an elegant middle-aged woman sits close to a young boy, identified in the caption as Edith Mather (1925–2017) and her son Geoffrey. In contrast to the first image, these figures fill the frame with their pietà-esque pose; they are dressed in coats and hats, but their outdoor location is ambiguous. Through this image of maternal care, we are introduced to Mather, an amateur photographer who documented Montreal’s historic streetscapes, including the children on Gaudry Street, while walking with her young child. Geoffrey looks inquisitively toward the camera, embraced by Edith, who directs her motherly gaze down at her son. Because of the layout of the two photographs, her gaze extends toward the motley crew in the image below, who, like the building behind them, appear to be in need of a little mothering. The article in the Gazette, entitled “Edith’s Eye ‘Rebuilds’ Our Castles in the Air,” announced the release of the monograph Touches of Fantasy on Montreal’s Streets (Les rues de Montréal, façades et fantaisie), a collection of 160 of Mather’s black and white photographs depicting Montreal’s vernacular buildings (Fig. 3.2). Published by a local house, Tundra Books, the photographs in the slender large-format volume offer a visual array of architectural details, specifically the Victorian-style ornamentation that was adapted by local craftsmen in the nineteenth century to dress the city’s buildings. Crafted out of materials such as iron, wood, and stone, these details – balconies, turrets, sculpture, and latticework, among others – adorned the houses of all classes of citizenry, and, together with the “fanciful” outside staircases celebrated in the volume as “a purely Montreal creation,” lent the city its unique architectural character (Fig. 3.3). Mather’s photographs captured typical views her audience might see every day, walking about the city. Taken from the vantage point of a pedestrian on the sidewalk and captioned according to the buildings’ addresses, they were meant to sensitize and aestheticize the reader’s gaze toward the historic 82

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3.2 Cover of Edith Mather and René Chicoine, Les rues de Montréal, façades et fantaisie/Touches of Fantasy on Montreal Streets, published by Tundra Books, 1977. With permission from Penguin Random House Canada. 3.3 Edith Mather, 2302 rue Moreau. In Mather and Chicoine, Les rues de Montréal, façades et fantaisie/Touches of Fantasy on Montreal Streets, 18.

cityscape and to encourage reflection, if not return, to the sites she documented. A tribute to Montreal’s nineteenth-century vernacular architecture, Touches of Fantasy on Montreal Streets was also an appeal for its preservation. According to the accompanying text by artist and university professor René Chicoine, “the treasures shown in this book are an endangered species. They need our protection.”3 Mather’s photographs made a compelling visual argument about the integrity of the city’s architecture that was politicized by Chicoine’s minimal, bilingual prose. The collection’s final pages, from which the image of Gaudry is drawn, revealed what was at stake in the current development-driven climate – buildings in various stages of destruction, abandoned flats, crumbling facades, and intricately carved stone block strewn hastily in the dirt. Readers were attuned to “the highly paid rash of demolition” that led to the recent high-profile destruction of several notable buildings, and these views aligned with those of “dauntless associations,” such as Save Montreal, as well as with those of tenants and owners of historic properties whose perseverance and continuous efforts helped to foster a sense of visual and historical continuity in the city. When interviewed, May Cutler, then president of Tundra, echoed Chicoine’s sentiments: “We know that these books have the effect of stopping people pulling down buildings. They start to treasure them when they see them through the photographer’s eye.”4 Edith Mather’s photographs were embraced by Montreal’s burgeoning heritage movement largely through the publication of her monograph. Her collection received positive reviews in both Vie des Arts, Quebec’s visual arts magazine, and SOS, the fledgling journal of Save Montreal, where her acute observation of the built environment was recognized for the influence it might have on planning for the city’s future.5 By focusing her camera on late-nineteenth-century vernacular details, she identified an underappreciated corpus of historic buildings that had been overlooked in earlier heritage campaigns.6 Mather’s photographs encouraged a reconsideration of redevelopment projects, and had the potential to sway decisions over whether to demolish existing structures and build anew, or to renovate and thus preserve. Audrey Bean, co-editor of SOS, praised their evocative power, arguing that the images made “a complete and eloquent case for an end to demolition in Montreal.”7 Her co-editor, architect and planner Mark London, aligned Mather’s images with other Save Montreal initiatives, such as walking tours of Montreal’s inner-city areas. According to London, Mather’s photographs encouraged a form of collective action by enticing readers to retrace her footsteps and bear witness to the effects of the city’s transformation through demolition, speculation, and redevelopment.8 Mather’s monograph contributed to a growing body of literature concerning the city as an object of preservation, many taking Montreal’s late-nineteenth-century buildings as their subject.9 In his seminal study Montreal in Evolution, Jean-Claude 84

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Marsan builds a compelling case for architecture as a palimpsest of the past and a visible and tangible record of different forces shaping the city’s evolution. Marsan notes: “Montreal’s identity was deeply marked during [the Victorian period], which remains one of the least known or documented segments of the city’s history.”10 Efforts to understand and appreciate buildings from this era dovetailed with heritage campaigns as an important first step in a building’s defence. Bringing new audiences to Victorian-era architecture also legitimized its position in discussions of Montreal’s unique “sense of place.”11 Photography was not neutral in this process.12 Beyond inventorying individual buildings, photographs helped to shape public perception by focusing on particular views of the city and drawing attention to change over time. Mather’s photographic campaign was also part of a broader reimagining of the city occurring simultaneously in documentary film, photography, and fictional works. Running counter to the modernist agenda set by authorities of the built environment since the Second World War, this repertoire of work celebrated the local, the ordinary, and the everyday.13 The rise in favour of the vernacular in architecture meant the contributions of amateur builders, craftsmen, and common structures were elevated to a form of popular art. This attitude may also have influenced the acceptance of Mather’s photographs, despite their amateur quality. In this climate, Mather was embraced as an empathetic figure by Montreal’s heritage movement. Her lens captured the city on the cusp of le combat du patrimoine, the debate surrounding architectural significance in the wake of the controversial destruction of the Van Horne Mansion (1973), the consolidation of heritage organizations such as Save Montreal (1973) and Heritage Montreal (1975), and the mobilization of public concern against further demolition in the downtown core.14 The concerns that shaped her photographic practice clearly resonated with these collective actions, and her image as a devoted mother and amateur photographer in turn shaped the acceptance of her work. She was opposed to demolition yet drawn to its sites, preferring the city’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings to its new modernist constructions. She understood what was at stake, particularly for those disadvantaged or marginalized by urban renewal. The loss of a home in the midst of a housing crisis could be devastating to a family, and the destruction of the delicate web of social relations that formed communities in and around buildings could not easily be rebuilt, even over time. Her maternal downcast gaze pictured in the photograph of the Gazette made subtle allusions to preservation as a labour of love and encouraged in her audience a compassionate eye toward the historic city as well as fellow citizens affected by its demise. As the heritage movement gained momentum through the 1970s, advocates and activists grew increasingly militant in their language and actions. By contrast, Mather’s experience of the city remained mostly solitary. In many of her photographs, Montreal is eerily empty of people. Through the Lens of Edith Mather

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PERSONAL ENCOUNTERS

I first met Edith Mather through her photographs.15 I sat at an oversized table in the documentation centre at the McCord Museum and sorted through the collection of thirty-one binders assembled by Mather, each contained in its own standard beige archival box. Photograph by photograph, I tracked Mather’s paths through the city. The images are arranged into binders loosely by theme – such as houses and streets, or woodwork, ironwork, and stone – with little chronological or geographic coherence. An index, handwritten by Mather at the back of each binder, fleshes out these details – the date and location for each image, including her orientation, intersecting streets, and proximate building addresses. Although her meticulous annotations facilitate my encounter, this process is complicated, because many of the buildings and streets, like Gaudry, no longer exist. Her most frequented routes along the top and bottom of the escarpment have been significantly reshaped through road widening, highway construction, and various developments that have shifted the scale and density of the streetscape. When I finally met Mather in her living room, where she invited me to come and talk about her life, I had already spent considerable time trying to follow her footsteps through her archive and the city. Her photographs facilitated our conversation, and what she said and left unsaid over our several meetings continues to shape my reading of her project as an act of preservation on a very personal level. Photographs of buildings are often read as indexes of architectural ideas; Mather’s photographs can also be read as an index of her life, held together by the narrative of her individual experience and by a way of navigating the city, as well as by her spatial story.16 The everyday lives of women often leave limited biographical traces in archives, museums, and libraries. Her photographic collection is an overwhelming exception to this rule.17 As material evidence of her walks, her photographs record what she saw, but they are also spatial documents that track her movements and reveal much about how she used space, how she moved through it, and how she positioned herself in the city. This reading of Mather’s photographs draws inspiration from what architectural historian Shelley Hornstein terms the “architecture of the heart,” which understands architecture as a deeply personal construction, propelled by “the emoting memory of a place,” that which connects our idea of a space to its physicality.18 Architectural memory is often understood through collective experience or universal meaning. Mather’s photographs suggest an alternative that is instead individual and embodied. This idea of architectural memory pairs well with the exercise of walking as a critical spatial practice, as described by architectural historian Jane Rendell: “Walking is a way of at once discovering and transforming the city, it is an activity that takes place through the 86

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heart and mind as much as through the feet.”19 Through walking and photographing, Mather discovered her own version of Montreal, and through these practices she crafted a particular version of herself for her audience. When Mather began taking photographs of Montreal’s buildings and streets in the mid-1960s, she was on the cusp of a new beginning in her life. She had recently remarried and moved with her husband, Bryan McCarthy, a published poet, into a two-storey flat in Lower Westmount, a neighbourhood in the largely anglophone City of Westmount, an enclave just west of downtown Montreal. Her photographic project was emboldened by this significant life transition, as well as by the birth of their son. Geoffrey was Mather’s fourth child, but her first and only with McCarthy, and, in her return to married life and motherhood, her daily routine was structured by her domestic duties, and her livelihood revolved around raising her youngest child.20 Each day, she would pack her pram with her son, camera, and supplies and set out from their apartment on long walks around the adjoining city. Most prolific during the years of Geoffrey’s early childhood in the late-1960s, Mather’s walks led her all over Montreal, but were concentrated in areas most affected by urban redevelopment, where the threat of demolition was the greatest. Their apartment overlooked the intersection of Greene Avenue and Sainte-Catherine and the edge of a revitalization zone that stretched south to the edge of the escarpment and east along Dorchester Boulevard toward downtown. This transforming landscape, familiar yet unknown, compelled Mather to document its changes over time. The resulting collection of photographs embodies the memory of her walks and makes more palpable a sense of return to particular sites that resonated with her personal experience. It also represents considerable labour: a collection of 4,293 black and white photographs, shot between 1966 and 1985, which were developed and printed in her home darkroom, then annotated and catalogued in a series of thirty-one binders she donated to the McCord Museum in 2012.21 What became clear to me through my conversations with Mather was that demolition and photography opened the city for her at a critical juncture in her life when making this project was possible – when the freedom to walk and to take time to look closely at the city was available to her as the mother of a young child – and a welcome respite from the monotony of her domestic routines and environment. Mather recalled: “I just liked walking, and I had this urge to take pictures, that’s all. I had to take the baby for walks, and I just kept going. I just found the architecture interesting ... I was looking after my child. Trying to get by.”22 Careful study of her collection reveals several images of Geoffrey as a baby and young child often identified in her annotations simply as “GM.” In a photograph, very similar to the one taken on Gaudry Street, she poses Geoffrey on the steps at the entrance to a building under demolition on Sussex Street just north of Dorchester Through the Lens of Edith Mather

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3.4 Edith Mather, Sussex, E Side, N of Dorchester (GM), 15 February 1969, 1969. From “My City Montreal, Volume 2: Houses and Streets, 1967–1985.” Gelatin silver print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm. McCord Museum M2012.113.1.2.62. Courtesy of the McCord Museum.

Boulevard. Dwarfed by the pile of building debris behind him, Geoffrey echoes the sense of vulnerability Mather found in the other children, but the photograph is more intimate because of the visual connection it documents between mother and son (Fig. 3.4). In this and other photographs of Geoffrey, the evolution of the city’s streets serves as background to her growing child, an increasingly active and curious boy, who is not always obedient before the camera. Photography became a way to mediate their relationship. By asking her son to pose for his picture, Mather could set clear standards of appropriate behaviour for her son. This practice also allowed Geoffrey to test her limitations through his own self-determination as he wandered further from his mother and her camera. Mather received no professional training as a photographer.23 She was given her first camera as a gift from her father for her twelfth birthday, but did not start photographing with purpose until the age of forty, when she bought what she could afford at the time – a thirty-five-dollar Yashica camera. This apparatus has no automatic metering system, and she taught herself to use it through a process of trial and error, by meticulously recording the location, date, time, and setting of each image she took in a small notebook she carried with her in the pram. She made a habit of annotating her photographs in this way, and she relied on these details to organize and index her binders. Eventually, she set up a makeshift darkroom in the spare bathroom of her two-storey apartment, where she honed new skills by reframing and manipulating her negatives through the printing process. She practised these techniques while working part-time in small commercial photography studios, where she also learned to print and develop her own film.24 Mather was drawn to photography as a creative outlet, but also because it encouraged a reflexive process that prompted her to return to specific sites and photographs and to record changes – on her street, in her neighbourhood, and in her city – as she witnessed them over time. She recorded changes by taking more photographs, by writing on the backs of old ones, and by indexing and cataloguing them to make these changes more visible. She integrated this process into her domestic work by making time in her daily routine and space in her home to develop her skills. This practice also prompted her return to university as a mature student in her late fifties, after Geoffrey was grown. She completed a diploma in Library Studies at Concordia University and continued to work in the library’s Collection Services, binding and repairing books for twenty-five years. She returned to her photographic collection in retirement, arranging binders for donation to different archival collections. Besides caring for her son, her peripatetic exploration of the city was propelled by her desire to foster her talent as a photographer. Her return to photography years later, to catalogue and archive her work, was framed by ensuing debates over heritage in the city, as well as more personal memories and reflections. Through the Lens of Edith Mather

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CAPTURING WOMEN’S EXPERIENCE

Beyond the physical transformation of Montreal, an important context in which to consider Mather’s project is the shifting social terrain inhabited by women in the city. Gradual changes in society since the Second World War helped to modify women’s image and self-image. New attitudes and changing lifestyles afforded them more options and more control over the direction of their lives. Women continued to marry, but could now control family planning through contraception.25 In Quebec, more women were entering the workforce because of the postwar industrial boom, the growth of the service sector, and an increasing secularization of health care and educational systems. In addition, they enjoyed greater access to higher education and a visible presence in journalism, literature, and the arts.26 Accounts of women’s history between the late-1960s and mid-1970s often focus on the birth of the women’s liberation movement, when many women mobilized, united by their determination to denounce sexist oppression and discrimination, to promote women’s independence in all facets of social, economic, and political life.27 In Montreal, the onset of second-wave feminism was marked by the formation of the Quebec Federation of Women (Fédération des femmes du Québec, FFQ) in 1966 under the leadership of Thérèse Casgrain (1896–1981). As the first political platform for women since they gained the franchise in 1940, it signalled a new solidarity aimed exclusively toward championing the interests and rights of women. Feminism, as constituted through shared ideology or political positioning, is well documented by the stories of self-proclaimed feminists and through their archives and manifestos.28 The idea of “sisterhood” that emerged at this time, with its emphasis on kinship between women who acted collectively in support of each other, empowered individual women and the movement at large.29 However, it also made obvious a lack of inclusivity in second-wave feminism’s practice and theory, as it generalized from the experiences of particular women (often young, middleclass, white women) to the experience of “women” as a universal category.30 By placing collective mobilization in the foreground, this approach to recording the movement’s history has been criticized for essentializing women’s experience and overlooking how gender intersects with identities of class, race, and sexuality. Ignoring the nuances of women’s experiences within the feminist movement contradicts its foundational causes, namely sensitivity to minority rights and the emancipation of the oppressed.31 This approach also leaves little space for mapping the movement’s popular reach, or how it was experienced and propagated by non-feminists (both men and women) through their everyday lives. One way of exploring the nuances of experience during this catalytic moment in women’s history is through individual spatial stories. Historian Anne Enke 90

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argues that feminist subjectivity came into being “equally as a space-specific construct”; women expressed their solidarity, challenged inequalities in everyday life, and created new ways of understanding themselves and the world around them through their use of space.32 This included grand gestures, such as guerilla activism, in which women challenged gendered urban geographies by protesting sites associated with patriarchal power, but also more subtle inclinations, such as walking alone along a street considered unsafe. Spatial traces of women’s lives can help to satisfy a feminist agenda by countering traditional narratives (often reinforced through textual sources) that describe their experiences through challenges and constraints.33 For instance, a spatial approach to feminist subjectivity can challenge a woman’s perceived isolation by foregrounding her connection to others through her relationships and broader political and professional networks. Mather’s photographic collection allows us to understand Montreal’s transforming urban fabric through the narrative of her personal experience and through her relationships with particular spaces and subjects. Throughout our many conversations, Mather did not describe herself as a feminist. In writing about her photographs from a feminist perspective, my intention is not to privilege my interpretation of her life, or to impose on her a view of the world that she may or may not have identified with. Rather, I see in her photographic work an opportunity to consider the multitudinous avenues for feminist practices, and how they are embedded in everyday life. One of the ways that feminist writer Sara Ahmed describes feminism is the refusal to be displaced.34 She suggests that feminist knowledge grows from the experience of living in a world that is not accommodating, and that by making our own experience into a resource we learn how to find a home in a world where we are not at home. If we accept displacement as a necessary precondition for feminist action, it is not surprising that secondwave feminism flourished in Montreal during this time. Urban displacement through large-scale demolition and redevelopment raised awareness of the social injustices of city planning and created a sense of dislocation experienced by many people in Montreal who lost their homes and communities and the familiarity of buildings and streets that formed the backdrop of their everyday lives. And just as displacement took many forms, so did the response from individuals like Mather who were going about their daily routines, “trying to get by.” Mather lived through a volatile period in the province’s history in which women’s roles in politics, employment, and family life were continually renegotiated, and her project was part of the spirit of this time. Feminists argued that the female body was intrinsically linked to how a woman’s place in society was defined.35 A woman’s presence in public was not uncommon or unwelcome, but her appearance and behaviour could be heavily scrutinized, depending on her adherence to the Through the Lens of Edith Mather

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3.5 Edith Mather, Edith Mather mirrored 3 times! Notre-Dame Street West, 1966. From “My City Montreal, Volume 15: Untitled, 1966–1987.” Gelatin silver print, 19.5 x 24.5 cm. McCord Museum M2012.113.1.15.1. Courtesy of the McCord Museum.

gender status quo.36 As a woman out walking, Mather opened herself up to the objectifying views of others, but also made her domestic work more visible. As a woman out walking with a child, she legitimated her presence there as a caregiver and mother. Through her photographic practice, she questioned her place in the city by reflecting on how she wished to appear to herself and others, and in this sense her photographs can be read as sites of struggle over her own subject-formation. The feminist mantra “the personal is political” gave credence to her process as a way to formulate her own “politics” by reflecting on her personal experiences. By layering herself and her family into images of the transforming city, she crafted a public space in which to work through more private concerns. Mather is an elusive figure in her photographs of the city, with the exception of one image, a self-portrait taken in 1966 at the onset of her project and one of the earliest images included in her archive at the McCord Museum (Fig. 3.5). Inscribed by Mather as Edith Mather mirrored 3 times! the photograph reveals her reflection in a storefront window on Notre-Dame Street West where she stands on the sidewalk outside of a restaurant, warmly dressed in a heavy coat, hat, and gloves, with Geoffrey as a baby in his pram. The photograph is similar to the one in the Gazette at the beginning of the chapter, with one critical difference. In this image Mather records herself in the act of taking the photograph, positioning the apparatus at chest height, looking directly into her own reflection in the window. With this gesture, Mather confirms herself as the photographer and acknowledges her own subjectivity in the project.37 Her decision to engage with her reflection and to return her viewer’s gaze – to picture herself actively looking – can be read as a confrontation with her own vulnerability to a compromising gaze and her unwillingness to be visually consumed. It can also be read as an act of self-knowing, as a confirmation of herself as the subject of her own look and ours, and of her project as a process of her own subject-formation. The importance of this gesture as a moment of self-reflexivity is in what she chooses to reveal about herself in the photograph. She is a mother – the pram confirms her role as caregiver, and her concern for the well-being of her child is communicated by its placement close in front of her on the sidewalk and sheltered by her body from the street. Geoffrey is also sheltered from our view, but because of the orientation of the pram, his gaze, as ours, is likely fixated on Mather. His gaze reminds us that as a mother she is also a role model of appropriate public behaviour for her son. She is a photographer – in capturing this chance encounter with her reflection in the window, she reveals her investment in the city as an aesthetic object. Changing streetscapes propelled her to experiment photographically, and this practice inspired her to find new ways of seeing the city. Her image also denotes a way of walking – her intention to move about the city at a protracted pace and Through the Lens of Edith Mather

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to find places where her ideas about the city were visibly manifest in its physical reality. Her concentrated expression acknowledges the seriousness of her practice. What is not pictured in this image might also guide our understanding of it: her relation to her husband, Bryan McCarthy. Unlike Mather, McCarthy did not fall easily into parenthood, and after Geoffrey was born, he began to isolate himself from family and domestic life. In an impromptu family photograph, dated 5 August 1967, Mather captures McCarthy and Geoffrey in Strathcona Park on the northeast corner of Fort Street and Dorchester Boulevard, a short walk from their home (Fig. 3.6). In the image, Geoffrey, now a teetering toddler, balances himself upright against an adult-sized swing, with his back toward the camera and his mother. Dressed in dark trousers, suspenders, and a light shirt, he is a miniature version of his father, who sits on the adjacent swing with his feet firmly planted in the dirt and grass. McCarthy looks away from his son, beyond his wife and her camera, scratching his head, apparently lost in thought. In contrast to Mather’s self-portrait, this image might be interpreted as an expression of domestic discord and Mather’s response to McCarthy’s estrangement from their family unit. Through these two images, Mather conveys different ways of seeing herself in the city and in her family. The park setting, typically a space of recreation, leisure, and reprieve from urban life, does not set her family at ease, but instead amplifies their disconnection from each other. The wrought-iron fence running across the midline of the photograph, with its double stone pillars and locked gate, adds to this tension by creating a sense of containment and separating Mather from the space of the street. In her self-portrait, however, Mather stands on the edge of the sidewalk, with cars and people passing closely behind her. The pram, here close at hand, increases her mobility, making it easier for her to navigate the street with Geoffrey in tow. Her figure reflected three times across the glass describes a woman in motion, and the window frame that bisects this view, rather than constraining her, appears to propel her forward. Of the two images, this is the likelier vision of personal freedom, what a liberated and independent woman might resemble for Mather. A comparison of these photographs reveals that Mather struggled with questions about her roles as wife and mother. Her concerns were also part of broader public debates, focusing on women’s situation in society, including the shifting social norms of motherhood and marriage, that were spurred by the women’s movement. What responsibilities did a mother have to her children, especially when they were of a young and impressionable age? What did it mean to be a good mother, and where was mothering permitted or encouraged? According to historian Micheline DumontJohnson, until 1970 in Quebec “motherhood was not recognized as a social act.”38 Few community services existed to help women balance between work and their 94

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3.6 Edith Mather, Strathcona Park, Fort and Dorchester, 5 August 1967, 1967. From “My City Montreal, Volume 3: Houses and Streets, 1967–1976.” Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm. McCord Museum M2012.113.1.3.58. Courtesy of the McCord Museum.

children, and social assistance for women who were heads of households, such as divorcees, separated women, single mothers, and widows, encouraged them to stay at home. As a housewife, Mather remained cognizant of her obligation to support her family, even as she stretched her domesticity beyond her home. Through her photographic work, she constituted her motherhood, mediated her son’s behaviour, and fostered skills to help her earn her own livelihood. Photography also afforded her a place to contend with more sensitive issues that were not as easily or openly discussed. Her growing estrangement from her husband and their eventual marital breakdown threatened the stability of her domestic life and affected relations with her son.39 In this instance, what were a woman’s duties as wife and to whom should she be faithful? Although the institution of marriage was the subject of scrutiny, it afforded women social status, even at the risk of the loss of their independence, property rights, economic freedom, and personal safety.40 Divorce meant an equally precarious situation and the possibility of no financial support for herself and her children. Given the alternative, women might ask themselves whether a failed marriage was worth saving and under what circumstances. Through the Lens of Edith Mather

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EMBODIED PRACTICE

Modernization, with its promise of progress, brought a sort of structural forgetting to cities like Montreal.41 The short lifespan of urban architecture, particularly through cycles of demolition and urban renewal, and the loss of walkable city centres were symptomatic of a process that threatened to separate social life from locality and from the human dimensions of space. In Montreal in the early 1970s, proponents of the heritage movement argued that large-scale redevelopment projects disregarded the existing physical context of the city and destabilized the social lives of residents through expropriation and relocation. Those who fought to preserve buildings at the time also demanded an end to demolition and pressed for a downtown plan sympathetic to the needs of the pedestrian.42 They argued that a return to building at human scale would encourage people to return to the city’s streets. In this way, the pedestrian emerged as a central figure, and key to achieving a livable city that was also invested in its history. Further insight into the identity of the pedestrian was of little consequence to these actions. Instead, ideas of a shared built heritage and a common history were reflected in the heritage movement’s construction of a general public, loosely termed “the people of Montreal.”43 Walking the city streets as Mather did, photographing what she saw, can also be understood as a feminist practice. Walking and photographing was one way to intervene in dehumanizing urban processes and helped individuals to resist topographical forgetting and to make sense of the city’s rapid transformation. This practice also helped to flesh out the idea of the pedestrian by documenting the city as an embodied experience. Feminist art historian Marsha Meskimmon describes the pedestrian as a figure who knows space through embodiment, through a sense of her own physicality and locatedness in the city. According to Meskimmon, “The pedestrian’s body and embodiment are themselves a space which permits engaged interaction with the world around her. She is not a disembodied eye like the theoretical flâneur who wanders through the city ‘invisibly’ and untouched, but a sentient participant in the city.”44 In times of rapid urban change, the photographer as pedestrian becomes a crucial figure. When understood as a feminist practice, Mather’s photographic project affords a unique perspective of the city that runs counter to views that celebrated its progress and modernity, and brings nuance to the notion of a collective experience of the city that was perpetuated through heritage activism. Mather’s photographic project documents her personal experience of this volatile time set against an equally volatile landscape – the transformation of Montreal’s built environment through processes of demolition and urban renewal. Her images document a way of seeing and understanding architecture that was informed by an awareness of her own 96

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body and her connection to others as she traversed the space of the city. Walking lent spatial coherence to a fragmented environment and photographing created temporal coherence by freezing changes over time. Mather also wove into this spatial story threads of her personal history by including images of herself, her son, and her husband. She used her photographic practice to reveal qualities of the city through her relation to her family, just as she revealed aspects of these relationships by picturing Montreal. In this way, Mather’s collection makes a convincing case for an architectural memory that is not just inscribed in the surfaces of buildings, but also embodied by the people who live in and around them, and informed by personal experiences and concerns. Montreal’s socio-political and physical transformations during the 1960s and 1970s created a number of opportunities for women in the city. Propelled by a new wave of feminist activism, their increased social presence had spatial implications: by challenging the gender status quo, women secured more public space for themselves and made their concerns more visible within their communities. This pivotal moment in Quebec women’s history also resonated with its histories of architecture and preservation.45 Enthusiasm for urban renewal and large-scale construction projects throughout the 1960s pushed women to the frontier of a watershed moment for the architectural profession. They helped to build Montreal into a modern metropolis by taking on complex urban projects and by becoming architects at an unprecedented rate. Women from both inside and outside the architectural profession also attracted attention through the heritage movement in the early 1970s. As architects, planners, and philanthropists, building owners and tenants, authors, journalists, activists, and artists, they played a vital role in preserving the built environment and in shaping how historic buildings were perceived publicly. Edith Mather’s photographic collection is part of the legacy of this work. Her spatial story makes clear that Montreal’s evolution is entangled with the histories of women, architecture, and the city, and enriched by the diversity of experiences that are revealed through their work.

NOTES 1 See Lortie and Barbieri, The 60s. 2 Poitras, “A City on the Move,” 176–7. 3 Mather and Chicoine, Touches of Fantasy on Montreal Streets, 91. 4 Blanchfield, “Edith’s Eye ‘Rebuilds’ Our Castles in the Air,” 25. Cutler (née Abbott) was a friend and former classmate of Mather’s from McGill University. She had set up the publishing company in the basement of her Westmount home almost a decade earlier, while raising a family of four boys. She is remembered as a trailblazer and the first woman to publish children’s books in Canada.

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5 Roussan, “Les façades de Montréal,” 89; Bean and London, “Livres/Books,” 21. 6 Early campaigns were often organized around monumental buildings like the Van Horne Mansion and Windsor Station. See Gabeline, Lanken, and Pape, Montreal at the Crossroads. 7 Bean’s English-language review, Bean and London, “Livres/Books,” 21. 8 London’s French-language review, Bean and London, “Livres/Books,” 21. 9 See Hatton and Hatton, A Feast of Gingerbread from Our Victorian Past; d’Iberville-Moreau, Lost Montreal. 10 Marsan, Montreal in Evolution, xxiii. 11 Drouin, Le combat du patrimoine, 111–36. 12 Bergera and Oterio-Pailo, “Photography and Preservation,” v. 13 Drouin, “De la démolition des taudis à la sauvegarde du patrimoine bâti,” 30. 14 The fate of individually threatened buildings was an ongoing feature in SOS Montréal as were the efforts of members working with different levels of government to control demolition. 15 See Southcott, “[Re]Claiming Montreal’s Memory: Demolition and the Photography of Edith Mather”; and Southcott, “Architecture, Photography and Memory: The Collection of Edith Mather.” 16 Rendell, Art and Architecture, 188. According to Rendell, a spatial story “acts as a theoretical device that allows us to understand the urban fabric in terms of narrative relationships between spaces, times and subjects.” 17 Mather’s photographs have a large archival footprint. Her photographs can be found in the McCord Museum Archives (Montreal), the Musée des pompiers de Montréal (Montreal), the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative Documentation Centre (Montreal), and Concordia University Library Special Collections (Montreal). 18 Hornstein, Losing Site, 3. 19 Rendell, Art and Architecture, 190. 20 Mather was previously married to Glyn Owen from 1946 to 1961. Together they had three children: Richard, Virginia, and Wendy. 21 Mather’s archive is divided into three separate collections: My City Montreal (sixteen binders), Found Montreal (thirteen binders), and Konkrete Kids (two binders). Most of the corresponding black and white negatives were donated at the same time. The photographs referred to in this chapter are from the first series, My City Montreal, McCord Museum catalogue no. MP2012.113.1.1-16. 22 Mather, interview, 5 March 2013. 23 Mather attended Trafalgar School for Girls, a private secondary school in downtown Montreal, and McGill University, where she graduated in 1947 with a degree in science from Royal Victoria College. In the early 1960s, after separating from her first husband, she took part-time courses in botany at the University of Montreal. 24 Mather worked for local photographer Ken Bowe, whom she credits in her monograph as her “good friend and mentor.” 25 In Canada, divorce rates had risen since the Second World War, especially since 1968, when the liberalization of legislation allowed for “marriage breakdown” as a reason. See Freeman, The Satellite Sex, 133. 26 Linteau, Quebec since 1930, 449.

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27 See Baillargeon, “Quebec Women of the Twentieth Century”; Dumont-Johnson and Clio Collective, Quebec Women: A History, Part 6: The Explosion 1969–1979; and Dumont-Johnson, Kennedy, and Swartz, Feminism à la québécoise, Part 4: The Great Feminist Awakening 1969–80. 28 For example, O’Leary and Toupin, Front de libération des femmes and Centre des femmes, Québécoises deboutte! 29 Pilcher and Whelehan, Fifty Key Concepts in Gender Studies, 17–20. 30 Ibid., 144–7. 31 Hollows, Feminism, Femininity, and Popular Culture, 2–18. 32 Enke, Finding the Movement, 258. 33 Adams, “Encountering Maude Abbott,” 3. 34 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 1–18. 35 Dumont-Johnson and Clio Collective, Quebec Women, 368. 36 Freeman, The Satellite Sex, 77. Freeman notes that, in the media at the time, “feminist” became synonymous with “unfeminine” appearance and behaviours: women who were not perceived as attractive, who dressed in unconventional ways, who openly challenged or defied the gender status quo, who were assertive or aggressive in their body and verbal language, who were judged to be loud, bitter, or angry, who were unmarried, older, or not mothers. 37 Martha Langford describes this technique of including oneself in the frame as “a small act of sabotage.” According to Langford, “it insists on the affective presence of the photographer, it explodes the myth of objectivity.” Langford, Scissors, Paper, Stone, 45–6. 38 Dumont-Johnson and Clio Collective, Quebec Women, 312; Baillargeon, “Quebec Women of the Twentieth Century,” 236. 39 Mather and McCarthy divorced in the early 1970s, when Geoffrey was still a young child. 40 Freeman, The Satellite Sex, 126–8. Freeman notes that cultural attitudes toward women at the time were often based on whether she was married rather than on her worth as an individual. 41 Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, 121. 42 Gabeline, Lanken, and Pape, Montreal at the Crossroads, 197–211. 43 Drouin, Le combat du patrimoine, 138. 44 Meskimmon, Engendering the City, 21. 45 Adams and Tancred, “Designing Women,” 111–24. Hammond, “The Keystone of the Neighbourhood,” 128–34. For a more general overview of women and preservation, see Dubrow and Goodman, Restoring Women’s History through Historic Preservation.

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4.

Returning to the Ninth Floor: An Interview with Selwyn Jacob Johanne Sloan

In 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of the Sir George Williams Affair was commemorated at Concordia University with Protests and Pedagogy, consisting of a multimedia exhibition curated by Christiana Abraham at 4th Space, and a two-day conference featuring an impressive roster of scholars, writers, teachers, artists, and community activists.1 The “affair” in question was the occupation of Sir George Williams University in February 1969, led by Black students protesting institutional racism at the university (Fig. 4.1). The Protests and Pedagogy conference approached the 1969 event “as a lens to reflect upon the unfinished business of decolonization and its relationship to questions of pedagogy, institutional life and culture and ongoing discussions about race and racism.”2 This was not the only commemorative gesture to take place in 2019, moreover: the Tableau D’Hôte Theatre company staged Blackout, a play based on the experience of Black students involved in the protest, while exhibitions at two university art galleries also played a role in this new visibility: at Concordia’s Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Belgian artist Vincent Meessen forged a network connecting the 1969 Sir George events to non-European flare-ups of the Situationist art movement, while across town the Galerie de l’UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal) chose an archival photo related to the protest for the cover of Le soulèvement infini, a publication accompanying the Montreal version of French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman’s exhibition Soulèvements/Uprisings. UQAM’s exhibition introduced visual evidence of protest movements and uprisings that had occurred in Quebec and in Canada.

4.1 Meeting of student protesters, Ninth Floor, National Film Board of Canada, 2015. Director: Mina Shum. Producer: Selwyn Jacob.

Many of the photographs put on display in 2019 had in fact circulated in 1969, because the Sir George affair was widely reported on – locally, nationally, and internationally. The most iconic photographs show a lineup of Black students under arrest, close-ups of the damaged computer lab which the students allegedly set on fire, wider views of police, firefighters, and emergency vehicles in position, or vertically oriented shots of the university’s Hall Building, when the air and streets were dramatically filled with paper launched from the computer centre’s windows (Fig. 4.2). (The protesting students ended up occupying a computer lab on the ninth floor of the Hall Building, referring to it as “this vital nerve center of the university.”3) The significance and reception of such photographs has changed, however, precisely because of cultural productions such as the ones marking the fiftieth anniversary. One of the most important reassessments of the Sir George Williams Affair had already appeared, however: the 2015 documentary film Ninth Floor, directed by Mina Shum and produced by Selwyn Jacob under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada. Ninth Floor changed the terms of the debate, because the filmmakers uncovered and presented a trove of forgotten moving-image footage shot by the students themselves, documenting the protest as it unfolded. Whereas the best-known photos of the event show exterior street views, the film transports viewers inside the building during the protest, bringing us up close to the students, so that we see and hear them. Thus, the film opens with a young Black woman addressing her peers, clearly identifying and defining “institutional racism” as the galvanizing issue (Fig. 4.3). The protesters (who were in fact a multiracial group, including many women in positions of leadership) are seen in meetings and assemblies – discussing, debating, and strategizing. By bringing to light these passionate and articulate voices, and An Interview with Selwyn Jacob

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4.2 Photographic contact sheet, showing students demonstrating outside the Hall Building, Sir George Williams University; smoke emerging from ninth-floor windows of the Hall Building, February 1969. Concordia University Records Management and Archives, 1074-02-150. 4.3 Student speaker. Montage of images in Ninth Floor, National Film Board of Canada, 2015. Director: Mina Shum. Producer: Selwyn Jacob.

4.4 Issue of student newspaper The Georgian, guest-edited by the Black Students’ Association, 28 January 1969. Concordia University Records Management and Archives. 4.5 Senator Anne Cools being interviewed, Ninth Floor, National Film Board of Canada, 2015. Director: Mina Shum. Producer: Selwyn Jacob.

unearthing traces of embodied presence, Ninth Floor does far more than merely complement the predictable sequence of photographs, as it redefines the archival record in profound ways. These moving images also complement the positions articulated in a special issue of the student newspaper The Georgian, guest-edited by the Black Student Association and published on 28 January 1969 (Fig. 4.4). Ninth Floor producer Selwyn Jacob, originally from Trinidad, was studying in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1968–69, but he had friends in Montreal, and the unfolding event had a great impact on him. Jacob says that he always wanted to make a film about the Sir George events, but he got busy with other documentary films over the years; his directorial credits include We Remember Amber Valley (1984), which is about Black immigrants from Oklahoma who settled in Alberta, and The Road Taken (1996), about Black railway porters, many of whom lived in Montreal’s Little Burgundy neighbourhood. He eventually became a producer at the National Film Board (NFB), and it was in that capacity that he initiated Ninth Floor. Mina Shum, a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker, was brought on board to direct the film, and her contribution ensured that the project became intergenerational and intersectional in its approach. Jacob and Shum’s Ninth Floor shows students who were committed to social justice while demonstrating extraordinary leadership. Several participants in the protest would indeed go on to occupy positions of political power and influence: Anne Cools became Canada’s first Black senator (Fig. 4.5), while the young lawyer who defended the students, Juanita Westmoreland, became Quebec’s first Black judge; Rosie (Roosevelt) Douglas would eventually return to his birthplace, Dominica, and become prime minister of the country. LeRoi Butcher, who was chair of the Black Student Association at Sir George in 1968, would comment that the protest served as a “training ground” for a forward-looking “Black politics … the means by which black people gain control over themselves as a people, and the institutions that affect them.”4 The film reinforces what scholars have increasingly called attention to – that Montreal became a flashpoint of Black activism and intellectual life in the late 1960s. Civil rights activist and Black Panther member Stokely Carmichael delivered a public lecture at Sir George Williams in February 1967 to “one of the largest audiences that has ever jammed the Hall auditorium.”5 Held in October 1968, only a few months prior to the Sir George conflagration, the Congress of Black Writers was an extraordinary event, which brought together writers, historians, and activists from Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, Britain, and Canada. And then, in November/December 1968, as later reported by Black activist and scholar Dennis Forsythe, members of the Black Panther movement were once again in Montreal, attending the Hemispheric Conference to End the Vietnam War.6 David Austin, in his book Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal 104

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4.6 Students demonstrating in front of Hall Building, 11 February 1969. Photo: Montreal Gazette.

(2013), describes “homegrown Black militancy that was internationalist in scope,” and this succinctly points to the political implications of the SGW Affair.7 The student protesters were rooted in Montreal, while their community was connected in multiple ways to Pan-Africanism, Caribbean radicalism, and the Black Power struggles of the United States. As sensational as the Sir George Williams Affair was at the time, it would be pushed out of public memory in the coming years, after the student protesters were criminally prosecuted and vilified, and some of them jailed. Today Concordia University (formed in 1974 when Sir George merged with Loyola College) vaunts its multi-ethnic and international student population; fifty years on, these former students are finally honoured by the institution they challenged for their courageous battle against racism. So too is it necessary to reinsert this explosive episode of anti-racist activism into the cultural and political history of Montreal (Fig. 4.6). My initial interview with Selwyn Jacob took place in Vancouver on 19 July 2016, while our conversation would later resume by phone and email. JS: I understand that when the Sir George Williams protest erupted in early ’69,

you had recently arrived in Edmonton, from Trinidad, to begin your studies. SJ: I came up fall of ’68, to do an education degree at the University of Alberta. I had considered going to Sir George Williams University, because at that time, it was a fairly popular university amongst students of the Caribbean. Prior to that, because of colonial history, a lot of people went to England, and people who were lucky and probably had financial resources would go to the United States. All of a sudden, Canada came into the mix; I came from a place called Point Fortin and there were two of my very close friends heading up to Sir George. So even though I didn’t go there, I knew about the university. How did you hear about the “Sir George Williams Affair” as it was sometimes known at the time? I was wondering, partly because today we take for granted that everyone is immediately informed about something like this through social media. SJ: I was living in a co-op house at the time, and watching television wasn’t part of my routine as a student. But it was of such significance in the West Indian community, I heard about it from people (through the grapevine) the next day. I learned that this computer centre had been destroyed and that a number of the students arrested were from Trinidad. So that got me on edge. JS:

JS: In what sense? SJ: Because the Montreal students had all been branded as troublemakers, and

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the headlines were written in such a way to make you feel as though these students were just irresponsible. You know, I get very emotional when I talk about that because I myself (initially) bought into the propaganda, that the students destroyed the Computer Centre for absolutely no reason. But then I started thinking, well, this doesn’t make sense. Why would these people accuse this professor of failing them on the basis of their race? Because I couldn’t see these students failing a Biology 100 course. JS: You mean, because to study abroad you all had to be top students? SJ: Of course. Our exams at the time were corrected in England, that’s how

colonial it was. So – back then all I knew was that students destroyed the Computer Centre, they were arrested, and they were ultimately deported. I got that information over the next six months, or however long it took for the trial to happen. But something had already been embedded in my head that I would pursue this event. From the time it happened, there was that initial spark, and I thought: I am going to make a film about this event, to try to sort it out for myself. JS: It’s pretty extraordinary that the compulsion to make this film stayed with

you over the years! But also, that despite some recent scholarly interest, the event is not exactly well known. SJ: That’s exactly the point, you know – whether it’s a Black audience or a white audience, or whether it’s a mixed audience. There might have been deliberate attempts to suppress it. On the one hand many of the students didn’t want to publicize it, because they had been stigmatized for their participation. And then the university was embarrassed, right? But as soon as word got out that I’m a filmmaker trying to make this film, people started responding. And what makes the film so interesting, in my opinion, is that the students were never given an opportunity to tell their side of the story. And so I got to know some of the people who were arrested, and found out what happened to them afterwards. JS: You mention the students being stigmatized and their behavior criminalized,

and as you say, some went to jail and were subsequently deported. But what struck me about the film that you and Mina made is that it allows us to look at this event in a very different way. One of the young students who went to jail, Anne Cools, became Canada’s first black senator, and Rosie Douglas, who was eventually deported, would become prime minister of Dominica. So these are examples of leadership, of collective action, of – An Interview with Selwyn Jacob

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SJ: Courage. Standing up for your right, standing up for justice. As I’ve said

before when talking about the film, we didn’t set out to try Perry Anderson, but to vindicate the people who had the courage to stand up for their convictions.8 There is a quote from Rosie Douglas: “Concordia should be proud that there were students here who wanted to work for change and take risks to make things better.” That could be the message in the film. JS: As a professor at Concordia, that really resonates for me. It does seem that,

finally, this piece of history is flaring up, and resonating powerfully. David Austin [in his book Fear of the Black Nation] writes about the Sir George Affair alongside a discussion of the Congress of Black Writers that took place in Montreal only months before, and he suggests that the events are interwoven. What is your perception of that? SJ: In hindsight, I would say the Congress of Black Writers might have been the impetus. Because you had people like the writer and Pan-Africanist C.L.R. James, people like Stokely Carmichael, who was born in Trinidad, who came up with the term “Black Power.” There was Walter Rodney from Guyana, and other big names. And the thing is, it’s the only place in North America where it could have happened, because Stokely was persona non grata, in the USA.9 JS: Montreal also had a visit from militant Black Americans that fall, when

Bobby Seale and a delegation of Black Panthers attended the Hemispheric Conference to End the Vietnam War, held in November 1968. I happen to have a personal connection to this event, as my late father, Edward Sloan, was one of its main organizers. SJ: Yeah, this was all coming together in Montreal … that’s a lot of radical people. The RCMP was probably bugging all of them. But there also remains a film to be done about the Black community in Montreal at this time. A lot of women got involved in certain aspects of this story; the Coloured Women’s Club used to have fundraisers to support the students. So this was also a time of community building. JS: What also becomes clear through the archival material you re-present is that

many young Black women got involved in the protest and stayed committed to the end. That’s quite wonderful to see (Fig. 4.7). SJ: Yes, and there was also Juanita Westmoreland, who was then a young lawyer defending the accused students.

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4.7 Students assembled. Ninth Floor, National Film Board of Canada, 2015. Director: Mina Shum. Producer: Selwyn Jacob.

JS: I’d like to turn to the question of archives – what you found and how you

used it. If we look at media coverage from the time, there are a few iconic photographs that appear again and again, showing the streets around the Hall Building covered with computer cards, police cars and fire trucks ready for action, or students lined up against a wall, being arrested. But the material you found opens the story up, visually speaking, by taking viewers inside the building, and up close to the students as the protest unfolded. SJ: When I first conceived of this idea of doing the film, I knew archival material would play a significant role. I immediately hired a visual researcher by the name of Elizabeth Klinck, who has worked with me before. We started with newspapers and television stations – Radio-Canada, the local CBC, CFCF – and came up with the same photographs and film footage, used to tell the same story: the students went up there, they destroyed the computer centre, we see the computer cards falling. But to go beyond that, we had to interview the students themselves, and we wanted to know if there was footage of them anywhere. That’s when we started doing a different type of research. I went to Concordia University, into their archive, and discovered they had a box of videotapes filmed by the students themselves, because in the late sixties, something called a Portapak was invented. JS: The Sony Portapak was a brand-new piece of technology at the time, wasn’t it? SJ: Yeah, the students had acquired one that they used as a videotape recorder

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for their meetings. Someone installed it at the back of the room, and if the meeting went for three hours, you had three hours of footage. And sometimes you literally get a high when you find footage of people you’ve been interviewing. Sometimes we actually found the exact scene that a person we interviewed had been describing! I mean, what are the odds that you’re going to find something like that in the archives more than forty years after the fact? JS: I know that the protest ended in the Computer labs on the ninth floor of the

Hall Building, but can you say something about the title, why you chose it? SJ: There is this magical line in in the film where the students have been gathered on the second floor of Concordia for some time, and then someone says, “All of you who are interested in justice, come with me. We’re going to the ninth floor.”

NOTES 1 Christiana Abraham is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. For a full list of institutional partners, organizers, and funders, see “Partners,” Protests and Pedagogy website, accessed 31 May 2020, https://protestsandpedagogy.ca/. 2 Protests and Pedagogy Committee, Protests and Pedagogy conference booklet, 2. 3 “Black Student Statement,” 3. 4 Butcher, “The Anderson Affair,” 105–6. 5 Forrest, “Carmichael,” 1. 6 The Hemispheric conference “was attended by 2,000 people, including White radicals, the Black Panthers, Quebecois, Columbian revolutionaries, Third World fighters, Puertoricanos, Mexican student leaders, Chilean Progressives and Canadian Pacifists.” Forsythe, “The Black Writers Conference: Days to Remember,” 68. Also in attendance were members of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front. 7 Austin, Fear of a Black Nation, see Chapter 8: “Fear of a Black Planet.” 8 The protest had its origins in accusations of racist bias against a biology professor, Perry Anderson, in May 1968, but grew into a large-scale protest against systemic racism. 9 C.L.R. James (1901–1989) was a committed Marxist and anti-colonial activist. Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998), was a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and of the Black Panther Party. Walter Rodney (1942–1980) was a historian and activist, who lost his job at the University of the West Indies after attending the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal.

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5.

Is the Artist an Unreliable Archivist? Reflections on the Photographic Preservation of a Montreal Neighbourhood Clara Gutsche

In the early 1970s, Milton Park (Milton-Parc), a Montreal neighbourhood of prime downtown real estate near McGill University,1 found itself at the nexus of antagonistic and mutually exclusive visions of urban planning: renovation by residents for residents versus demolition by corporate developers for profit. The Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee fought to preserve the single-family homes, duplexes, and triplexes that had been built between 1875 and 1900; Concordia Estates Limited (no connection to Concordia University) planned to raze these buildings. Although Concordia Estates won Phase One of the battle, demolishing 255 houses in 1972 and building La Cité, a five-tower complex of cement high rises, the Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee won Phase Two. Between 1973 and 1987, the involvement of a dizzying number of individuals, the support of Save Montreal2 and Heritage Montreal,3 and fortuitous political conditions, brought to fruition the project of the Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee to renovate all the houses on six city blocks and form the Communauté Milton-Parc non-profit cooperative that sits on a land trust.4 I am an accidental archivist of the Milton Park buildings lost and saved between 1970 and 1973 (Figs 5.1 and 5.2). The force of circumstances – personal decisions intersecting with political events – led photographer David Miller (b. 1949) and me (b. 1949) to collaborate on a project to document the Milton Park neighbourhood where we lived. We were fascinated by photography, involved in 1960s and 1970s social activism, and committed to protecting our Montreal home and community. While the Milton Park series was not defined by any methodical planning, we did have an urgent goal that focused our intent and provided aesthetic structure: to save

5.1 Clara Gutsche, Jeanne-Mance Street, 1972. Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. © Clara Gutsche / SOCAN. 5.2 David Miller, Jeanne-Mance Street, between Prince Arthur St. and Pine Ave, January 1972, 1972. Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. Courtesy of the artist.

the threatened buildings and therefore save the community. The photographs have endured the test of time as factual records and subjective interpretations of the early struggle to protect the area from the wrecking ball of the “developer” Concordia Estates. Looking back on this archive, after fifty years of photographic practice, I question what our photographs have preserved and what they have omitted. I had been entranced by Montreal’s bilingualism and its residential greystone architecture when I visited Expo 67, three years before I joined David to share an apartment on Sainte-Famille Street from 1970 to 1973. David and I were outsiders in Montreal who had already been politicized. We had recently left the United States in protest over the Vietnam War, settling in Quebec at a time of heightened political tension between the English and French, when social and political upheaval seemed to be the norm in both our native and adoptive countries. As soon as David arrived in Montreal in the fall of 1967 to attend McGill University, he became the designated demonstration photographer for its student newspaper, the McGill Daily. In October 1967, he travelled with the McGill delegation to the anti-war March in Washington, DC. His photographs recorded the brutal methods of the US military who confronted the demonstrators.5 I immigrated to Canada in April 1970 and six months later witnessed the October Crisis. This was the federal government’s imposition of the War Measures Act to deal with the kidnappings of a British diplomat and Quebec minister by two cells of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). David and I, along with our friend Nicholas Deichmann (b. 1949), took photographs of soldiers brandishing machine guns and published them in the newsmagazine Last Post with the byline “Photocell,” a photography collective that we formed as a gesture of sympathy with everyone opposed to the military occupation of Quebec.6 David and I brought to Montreal our experience with the anti–Vietnam War movement, our counter-culture commitment to seeking social justice, and our belief that collective effort could create a better society. Our political activism, along with our desire to put down roots, converged with the Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee mobilization to rescue the core buildings of the area from so-called “urban renewal” by Concordia Estates, which planned to erect a complex of generic high rises.7 Concordia Estates had boarded up the nineteenth-century Victorian row houses at the centre of Milton Park, along Park Avenue and Prince Arthur Street, and had left them to deteriorate. Even after several years of this neglect, the Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee called for the renovation of these solid two- and three-storey buildings that were still in good condition. Many generations had lived in the still-occupied homes (Phase Two) and the boarded-up homes (Phase One), which had architectural integrity and aesthetic appeal. The human-scaled row houses, tree-lined streets, and small shops provided the kind of physical web that creates a vibrant and stable urban community.8 Is the Artist an Unreliable Archivist?

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The Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee had been formed in 1968, two years before David and I made our permanent home together in Montreal. Sheila Arnopoulos’s feature article “Concordia’s Plan for the Milton-Park Area: Where Citizen Activity Is Highlighting the Confusion,” published by the Montreal Star on Monday, 26 May 1969, provides a concise and comprehensive summary of the residents’ concerns and actions, and offers insightful analyses of the developer’s plans and duplicitous strategies. She states that “The Milton-Park Committee has conducted a survey in the area which showed that 97 per cent of the people like their low-rent homes and do not want to move,” and that “The citizens, many of whom have lived there for years, are fond of their community which has a turn-of-the-century charm to it.”9 She wonders why different backers of the project – some of them surprising – were facilitating the destruction of the neighbourhood: “It is amazing to find so many groups involved in the project: the city, the Ford Foundation, the University of Montreal, the Montreal council of Social Agencies, may seem to give with the right hand and take with the left.”10 Jane Jacobs’s opinion that it was imperative to save the Milton Park neighbourhood was captured in a short interview published by the Montreal Star alongside Arnopoulos’s column. In Jacobs’s words, “I came to Montreal and walked every block of the area. It’s another case of real estate developers grabbing onto an area which is doing all right and has a real urban quality to it and vandalizing it.”11 Curiously, she ventured, “I’ve heard that the citizens group in Milton-Park is namby-pamby,”12 a perception that was contradicted by the well-publicized Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee march on Montreal City Hall with a petition of eight hundred signatures on Friday, 23 May 1969.13 The photographs published in the Montreal Star on 24 May 1969, and reproduced in Claire Helman’s The Milton Park Affair, likewise show a substantial demonstration, with many protestors carrying placards and spokesman David Williams brandishing the envelope that contains the petition.14 My notion of a “great city” was set in Chicago during countless childhood visits in the 1950s and 1960s. I was impressed by the buildings in the Chicago Loop and loved my grandparents’ Hyde Park apartment on Dorchester Street. The city became a source of aesthetic inspiration, a place for dynamic and imaginative living. Years later, I perceived a similarity between Montreal and Chicago urban social complexities. My response to the Milton Park interiors was rooted in my memory of the spacious and high-ceilinged rooms with bay windows, intricate plaster details, and hardwood floors in the Chicago apartment. I had arrived in Montreal with a pent-up desire to photograph. I felt liberated from my tongue-tied verbal communications and released into the fluency of image-making. Photography was an exuberant tool for expressing my reactions to

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5.3 Clara Gutsche, Mrs Roach, 3615 Jeanne-Mance Street, 1972. Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. © Clara Gutsche / SOCAN. 5.4 David Miller, Hutchison Street, April 1972, 1972. Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. Courtesy of the artist.

and interpretations of my surroundings. I explored my adoptive culture first with a 35mm camera, then with a 4x5 view camera. My instinct was to ask permission to go inside the historically layered Milton Park homes to discover the dignified proportions of the high-ceilinged rooms. I wanted to photograph how light and architectural structures delineated the interiors. I was also captivated by the people who lived in the neighbourhood, by their relationships with each other, and by their relationships to their homes. I made environmental portraits that explored how the domestic spaces reflected the individuals’ personalities through the material evidence of their possessions (Fig. 5.3). David and I thought our photos could contribute to the community goal of renovating these two- and three-storey residential and commercial buildings. David made vertical frontal compositions of the Victorian homes that appear to be posing for the formal occasion of his view camera portrait (Fig. 5.4). The 4x5 format photographs present the details of windows and doors in the context of the facades anchored to the sidewalk. The personified buildings evoke the presence of past inhabitants and current residents going inside and looking out. David recalls that “We had these skills we were developing, and we used them with that goal in mind. We made and exhibited our photographs to get people talking and thinking. We presented the buildings we liked and wanted to save in a positive light and showed the high-rise buildings we opposed in a negative way. With the view camera, you get the buildings straight. You take them more seriously. Buildings that look like they are falling backwards are hardly presented to best effect.”15 My own sense of how we might contribute to the Citizens’ Committee fight was also influenced by my commitment to second-wave feminism. In 1969, while living in Boston, I had participated in an early consciousness-raising group. In 1970, I joined discussion groups organized by the Women’s Centre on Sainte-Famille (Fig. 5.5). “The Personal Is Political” was a compelling feminist political argument that provided a motivation to photograph my own neighbourhood. Our perspective had the authenticity of first-hand lived experience. We wished to protect our home and define our identity in relation to this community. As we spent more time living on Sainte-Famille Street and participated in more Citizens’ Committee actions, we met established couples, families, and older residents, all of whom had a deep sense of belonging to the neighbourhood. David and I thought our photographs could show the residents of Milton Park what they had before they lost it, that by raising consciousness of the value of the neighbourhood, more people would be inspired to oppose the demolition. We exhibited our photographs at the University Settlement Centre on SaintUrbain in 1971, along with Nicholas Deichmann, before he moved to Switzerland in May 1971. This first exhibition comprised an eclectic mix of 35mm candid photos of 116

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5.5 Clara Gutsche, Sainte-Famille Women’s Centre, 3694 Sainte-Famille Street, 1971. Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. © Clara Gutsche / SOCAN.

people standing in doorways or sitting on front steps and medium format formalist compositions of street views and architectural details. Our emerging personal themes and formal visual language could be seen in David’s attraction to house facades and my initial forays into home interiors. Later in 1971 and through May 1973, David and I produced the photographs that have most often been published. We installed our photographs on makeshift panels at Milton Park street festivals, exhibited them in community venues such as the Community Design Workshop created by McGill School of Architecture professor Joe Baker, and published several in the local newspaper Milton Park Community Press. Politicized residents and professionals with expertise in many fields, such as social work, architecture, and economic feasibility, collaborated to mount a multi-faceted opposition. The exuberant energy provided by students living in the area contributed to the broad-base alliance to save Milton Park. The Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee was a model for participatory democracy. It nurtured an open circle of participation that welcomed our initiative to use photographs as a political tool. Many of us shared the optimistic belief that our collective contributions could preserve the neighbourhood of Milton Park for future generations. Is the Artist an Unreliable Archivist?

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David and I also joined many demonstrations. We felt a total commitment to the urgency of saving the area from the wrecking ball of Concordia Estates. Throughout the three years, David used the 35mm action candid approach he had honed at the McGill Daily to photograph the demonstrations organized by the Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee (Fig. 5.6). David placed himself in the front lines of the action, risking equipment and personal safety. When photographing demonstrations, David had the ulterior motive of making records should they prove necessary to use in court.16 On 26 May 1972, he photographed our peaceful demonstration in front of the Concordia Estates office on Park Avenue, shortly before all fifty-nine of us were arrested, crammed into a police wagon, and taken to jail. We were held overnight and charged with an indictable offence. As landed immigrants, David and I were deportable. Eventually, the charges against the thirteen Americans were dropped. The forty-six Canadians were taken to court on the lesser charge of “Mischief” and acquitted in February 1973.17 The year 1973 was one of seismic change. When we lost the buildings of Phase One in 1972, the foundation of our identification with the neighbourhood had been razed. We moved to the nearby Mile End area. If such a choice were possible, we would have kept the buildings, and not the images of what was gone. The title of a 1973 article for the Gazette by Dane Lanken, “Milton Park: House Today, History Tomorrow,” encapsulates the impact of the Phase One demolition and the consequent transformation of our photographs from political tool to artifact.18 That same year, 1973, we exhibited our Milton Park photographs at two very different cultural institutions. The first exhibition, organized by the curator of the Notman Photographic Archives, Stanley G. Triggs, was held at the McCord Museum and acquired for the permanent collection. The second, organized by William (Bill) A. Ewing, took place at The Centaur Gallery (now the artist-run centre Optica). A spiral-bound exhibition catalogue was published under the title “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’Til It’s Gone”: The Destruction of Milton-Park.19 Centaur Gallery had been founded by Ewing to show photography in Montreal; as Optica, it would become a key centre for contemporary photographic art.20 In 1973, the coincident launches of our Milton Park photographs into a social history museum and an art space seemed like a radical alteration of purpose and audience. We had been working flat out to save our home, and had hit a wall. The new status of our photographs, as both history and art, seemed only to emphasize the loss of the Phase One buildings. In retrospect, it is obvious that we explored personal themes and the artistic potential of photography throughout the three years when we were ostensibly creating a factual record of buildings and their residents. David and I stumbled into using documentary photography to both observe objective reality and express 118

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5.6 David Miller, Occupation on Prince Arthur Street, 23 May, 1972, 1972. Poster: “Avis: Ces maisons ont été occupées par les citoyens de Milton-Parc. Venez nous visiter. Concordia est arrêté.” Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. Courtesy of the artist.

our personal aesthetics. We were drawing on the published and exhibited canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century documentary photography, and were aware of the artistic characteristics of the photo medium that we could manipulate to give form to ideas and emotions.21 From 1972 on, we both used the 4x5 view camera that David purchased. This further accentuated our formalist aesthetic, which stems from the history of view camera photography, painting, and sculpture. David made “portraits” of exterior facades and photographed street scenes that expressed his attachment to physical and emotional stability. In the context of our activism, my photographs of the Sainte-Famille Women’s Centre and my portraits of women and children situated in everyday, domestic environments resonated with the feminist insight that “the personal is political” (Fig. 5.7). We had received some institutional attention before the 1973 exhibitions. In retracing the journey of our Milton Park photographs from neighbourhood exhibitions to art venues, and eventually to museum collections, David and I recalled that in 1971 John Phillips (co-founder, with Laura Jones, of Baldwin Street Gallery, Toronto) called us out of the blue. He had seen our photographs at the Is the Artist an Unreliable Archivist?

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5.7 Clara Gutsche, Janet Symmers, 3703 Hutchison Street, 1972. Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. © Clara Gutsche / SOCAN.

University Settlement Community Centre and suggested that we take our work to Ottawa to show photo editor Ron Solomon at the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada. Ron would become a significant mentor of my early artistic career. He included a selection of my photographs in two group exhibitions: Canada C’est Quoi? (1972) and At Home (1973). Laura and John invited us to exhibit our Milton Park photographs at the Baldwin Street Gallery in 1972. My work was included in Laura’s large group exhibition Photographs of Women by Women, with a special issue of image nation, which originated at the Baldwin Street Gallery, then travelled to the Centaur in 1972. The photographic scene in Montreal was slowly expanding. Ralph Lachance had opened his Perception Gallery and mounted exhibitions of American landscape photographer Minor White (1908–1976), as well as fellow Montrealers Jennifer Harper (1946–1997) and Brian Merrett (b. 1945). Unbeknownst to us in 1971, Jennifer Harper and Brian Merrett were photographing the buildings and street life of Selby Street in lower Westmount to support the Westmount Action Committee’s campaign (unsuccessful) to save that neighbourhood from demolition to make 120

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way for the Ville-Marie Expressway.22 In 1971, Nicholas Deichmann had invited the prominent street photographer and portraitist Sam Tata (1911–2005) to visit our University Settlement exhibition. Sam came and charmed us with his stories about French street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), whom he met in Shanghai in 1949 when they photographed the city together. In 1972, the Gazette used one of my Milton Park photographs to accompany Michael White’s article “Photography’s New Role on the Art Scene.”23 Later that same year, White developed a Local Initiatives Program proposal for the Photo Montreal project in 1972, which brought together approximately sixteen photographers, including Gabor Szilasi (b. 1928), Michel Campeau (b. 1948), and Claire Beaugrand-Champagne (b. 1948).24 It strikes me now as somewhat contradictory that, despite the immediacy of our political goals for the Milton Park photographs, we made archivally processed and selenium-toned black and white prints with an eye on a future that would extend beyond our lifespans. If stored correctly, David’s and my gelatin silver black and white fibre-base prints from the Milton Park series will outlive all of us. The perpetual impulse to make the present permanent reveals its flipside, an uncomfortable awareness of impermanence. From the heritage perspective, the intended preservation of the prints does produce permanent physical memories of Milton Park from 1970 to 1973, which are stored in museum collections. However, the Milton Park neighbourhood has outlived our photographs. My photographs of workers dismantling apartment interiors and David’s photographs of the demolition of Park Avenue buildings function to freeze the Milton Park timeline in 1973, as does a recounting of the political story of making the Milton Park photos. Our photographs create the visual memory of buildings lost to the Concordia Estates Phase One destruction of the neighbourhood (Fig. 5.8). This photographic history of images, exhibitions, and publications overshadows the important next chapter of political, social, and diplomatic mobilization from 1973 to 1987: the story of saving the second set of threatened buildings, their ultimate preservation, the community relationships, and community stability that continues to the present day. The ongoing vitality of the Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee perpetuates the tradition of innumerable individuals donating their time and expertise to the collective, including young adults in their twenties who are involved with community activism. The Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee celebrated fifty years of active membership in 2018 with an event at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.25 My current photographic project to make posed environmental portraits in outdoor settings took me back to Milton Park in 2015 to photograph Lucia Kowaluk and Dimitri Roussopoulos in front of the Jeanne-Mance Street apartment they had inhabited since 1971 (Fig. 5.9). This environmental portrait serves as a pretext to bring David’s and my photographs forward from the remote Is the Artist an Unreliable Archivist?

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5.8 David Miller, 3581/3 Hutchison Street, 14 June 1972, 1972. Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. Courtesy of the artist. 5.9 Clara Gutsche, Dimitri and Lucia, Montreal, 2015. Chromogenic colour print. © Clara Gutsche / SOCAN.

past and reposition them in the present-day dynamism of Milton Park. I see this essay as an opportunity to place our photographs in the larger context of Milton Park’s history. Whoever publishes the history creates the memory. Phase Two of the Milton Park story ends in triumph. Lucia Kowaluk, who was awarded the Order of Quebec and Order of Canada for her lifelong community activism, and Dimitri Roussopoulos, who was the principal advocate of the Montreal Charter of Rights and Responsibilities and the founder of the Urban Ecology Centre, were central to Phase One of the battle to defend the Milton Park neighbourhood; they were indispensable to rescuing the buildings that had been slated for Phase Two demolition.26 The architect and urban activist Phyllis Lambert, founder of Heritage Montreal, and later the Canadian Centre for Architecture, also played an essential role in the creation of the largest non-profit cooperative housing project in North America, a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) subsidized federation of twenty-two cooperative and non-profit corporations. Dimitri declared that the “originality” of the Communauté Milton-Parc (CMP) is that all twenty-two organizations sit on a land trust. “Therefore, we have succeeded in taking six downtown city blocks off the capitalist market place.”27 Lucia said, “It was the work of a lifetime,” which took almost twenty years, from 1968 when the Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee realized that Concordia Estates had boarded up all the houses at the centre of Milton Park to the final legal step for formalizing the cooperative in 1987.28 I asked Lucia to summarize the crucial contributions that Phyllis Lambert made to saving the Phase Two buildings: “Phyllis got involved and convinced Mendelsohn [the developer] to sell to CMHC. And through her father’s contacts with important people in the P.E. Trudeau government, the CMHC negotiations resulted in major funding for the project to form cooperatives and renovate the buildings. To this day, Phyllis is ready to meet with people in power if the Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee cannot reach them.”29 The Phase Two success could not have been accomplished without the heavy lifting done by the Phase One individuals who cared about the preservation of the neighbourhood. When interviewed by journalist Adam Bemma, Dimitri said, “We did everything that we learned in the sixties. We went door-to-door talking to people, we signed petitions, we had demonstrations, we had public information meetings, we presented alternatives.”30 David’s and my purpose for taking and exhibiting our photographs between 1970 and 1973 was not to make a conservation record of the buildings, but to work with the Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee to safeguard the social fabric of the neighbourhood. People and relationships were the primary concerns. Furthermore, our photographs may have had some impact during Phase Two, after David and I left Milton Park. During the “Talking Pictures, a Circuit” panel discussion led by Francesca Ammon at the Canadian Centre for Is the Artist an Unreliable Archivist?

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5.10 David Miller, Lane between JeanneMance and Sainte-Famille, looking “N” from Milton Street, January 1990, 1990. Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. Courtesy of the artist. 5.11 David Miller, Hutchison Street, looking “N” from Milton Street, July 1971, 1971. Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. Courtesy of the artist.

Architecture on 14 October 2017, Phyllis Lambert recollected seeing our photographs at the McCord Museum in 1973 and talked about the extensive publicity that our photographs had attracted.31 David updated his connection to Milton Park in 1990 when he took a few photographs of the cooperatively owned lanes and backyards. The physical fabric of buildings that weaves together neighbourhood relationships is protected in perpetuity by the cooperative legal structure (Fig. 5.10). The annual street party, now called La Fête des Voisins, is staged in the cooperatively owned lane between Prince Arthur and Milton, Jeanne-Mance and Sainte-Famille. While David’s 1990 photograph represents stability, his 1971 photograph of Hutchison Street shows instability. Over the past fifty years, there have been physical changes to the streets, buildings, and inhabitants. This view of Hutchison Street, looking north from Milton Street, could not be replicated in 2020 (Fig. 5.11). The buildings on the left side of the street are intact; however, were this photograph to be taken now, the Cité Concordia towers would be seen on the right. The visible impact of passing time on people is captured in portraits. Especially when children are the subjects, the intimation of transience is palpable (Fig. 5.12). I feel that they radiate potential and imminent transformation in their progression toward adulthood. Both the 1970s Milton Park portraits of children and my recent portraits represent my desire to hold time through the material object of the photograph. The children of 1970s Milton Park are now in their fifties. The juxtaposition of the Milton Park and recent photographs marks the interval between 1973 and 2020. While the contrast between then and now anchors the two timeframes that I address in this essay, it also precipitates questions about the impact of time on the public reception of David’s and my Milton Park photographs. Our work has in the intervening years been subject to shifting responses and interpretations. Reflecting on the fifty-year interval invites a discussion about the permeability of documentary definitions at different moments in recent history. Time passing equals recontextualization. Rarely do I try to control the message of my photographs once they have entered the public domain. (Bemused astonishment is my private reaction to the present-day public attention given to the 1970s photographs taken in my remote youth.) The contemporary value of the Milton Park photographs is found in the variety of ways they are used by artists, historians, or activists, as art or as historical artifacts. Some people have become aware of the Milton Park Phase Two success story through seeing our photographs published or exhibited in an art context. The longevity of the 1970s work is sustained through the art world uses that recognize the aesthetic force of the work. Correspondingly, the renowned success of the Communauté Milton-Parc non-profit cooperative brings attention to our 1970–73 Milton Park Is the Artist an Unreliable Archivist?

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5.12 Clara Gutsche, Hannah, Montreal, 2015. Chromogenic colour print. © Clara Gutsche / SOCAN.

photographs. Audiences keep the work active. If my photographs have cultural, social, or feminist impact, it is because social activists, curators, and academic researchers bring different uses and perspectives to the Milton Park series. The invitation to write this essay has presented the opportunity to perform the textual narration of my own work. As with all my artist talks presented since 1980, I choose to place my work on the shifting ground of any attempt to define documentary photography. I assert that achieving any general consensus in understanding the category is impossible. The term is elastic and mobile. David and I recognize the documentary dimension of our work and accept the use of the label as a classification. Our photos are the result of our response to the external world, and they do show things as objective material evidence. We undermine any fixed meaning for the subject matter through formal control of framing, lighting, and composition. Ambiguity prevails. The question of whether our photographs should be considered historical documents does not have a straightforward answer. The question is complicated by the

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5.13 Clara Gutsche, Hélène Brisebois, First Communion Portrait with Aunt and Uncle, 1972. Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. © Clara Gutsche / SOCAN. 5.14 David Miller, 3585 Hutchison Street, May 1972, 1972. Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. Courtesy of the artist.

whimsical nature of our choice of subject matter and the emotional content of our photographs. The latent drive that produces my images must be seen as personal curiosity linked to delight in the formal force of photographs. The complementarity of David’s outside and my inside photographs was unplanned, the serendipitous outcome of our independently pursued aesthetic tendencies (Figs. 5.13 and 5.14). Furthermore, the similarities between my past and current posed portraits support my contention that personal fascinations govern my projects, and not documentary objectivity. My current project involves the return to making portraits in Montreal settings. People and relationship are the themes of the past and recent work. I photograph children, with thoughts of their adulthood, an imagined future; I photograph families to portray successive generations in the flow of time; and I now photograph my contemporaries, senior citizens who mirror my place on the human timeline. An awareness of perpetual change induces the impulse to stop time with photographs. The recording of ephemerality is an act of conservation that coincides with archivist priorities. Documentary can be seen as the making of factual records of the “reality” before-the-lens; alternately, documentary can be understood as the creative interpretation of events, people, and things that has been shaped by the photographer’s political and personal priorities. The debate over different and opposing methods of documentary construction and interpretation has been extensively explored in cinema theory and history. As photography and cinema theorist André Bazin famously wrote, “But realism in art can only be achieved in one way – through artifice.”32 While based on real life, documentary photographs are not factual. How many viewers are aware that even the most emotionally detached, window-on-theworld styles of documentary photography are shaped by the photographer’s bias? The intent of the documentary photographer is encrypted. Subject matter has always been a central component of my aesthetic. Equally central is the realist style. That I consciously pursue formal and subjective manipulation in my photographs may be overlooked. I love the inextricable mingling of the artist’s subjectivity with fragments of external reality. The resulting multiple layers of content and message allow the work to embody dual or even contradictory meanings. The strength of realist photographs is the almost imperceptible alteration of reality by the photographer’s vision, an abstraction that the passage of time makes more evident. Our Milton Park photographs have formal coherence that gives authority to the content portrayed. Herein lies an irony: the images have survived the test of time because they have artistic impact for viewers.

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NOTES 1 The neighbourhood has as its geographical centre the intersection of Milton Street and Park Avenue. It is bordered by University Street, Saint-Laurent Boulevard, Sherbrooke Street, and Pine Avenue. 2 In the author’s interview with Lucia Kowaluk and Dimitri Roussopoulos, 14 December 2016, Kowaluk listed the 1973 members of Save Montreal’s first board of directors as “Michael Fish, Lonnie Echenberg, Denise Faille, Peter Lanken, Diana Chaplin, and myself.” For additional information about Save Montreal, see Perrin, “‘It’s Your City, Only You Can Save It!’” 3 In the author’s interview with Lucia Kowaluk and Dimitri Roussopoulos, 14 December 2016, Kowaluk stated that Phyllis Lambert attended the first meeting of Save Montreal in 1973, and then came to their house in 1975 to share the idea of creating Heritage Montreal as a fundraising arm of Save Montreal. “A mission and a board of directors were created. Over the years Save Montreal faded, and HM developed into an organization in its own right, and became dominant.” See Heritage Montreal, accessed 28 May 2020, http://www.heritagemontreal.org/en/site/ milton-parc-neighbourhood/. 4

For additional information about the Communauté Milton-Parc and the history of the MiltonParc Citizens’ Committee, see: “About Us,” La Communauté Milton-Parc website, accessed 28 May 2020. http://www.miltonparc.org/about-us/. The Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee archives are held by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, and La Communauté Milton-Parc. 5 David Miller, “Washington, October 21: ‘Confront the Warmakers,’” McGill Daily, 24 October 1967. 6 See the nine photographs in “Photocell,” Last Post. Last Post proclaimed itself “a radical Canadian newsmagazine.” The photographers Nicholas Deichmann, Clara Gutsche, and David Miller were listed on the masthead as part of the editorial cooperative (Deichmann later went to Switzerland and pursued a career as a seismologist. See “Dr. Nicholas Deichmann,” Employees, Swiss Seismological Service, accessed 28 May 2020, http://www.seismo.ethz.ch/en/about-us/ all-employees/nicholas-deichmann/). Thus was born Photocell. Photocell was disbanded in 1973; future projects, whether individual or collaborative, would be produced under the photographers’ own names. 7 For more on the history of Milton Park from 1968 to 1983, see Helman, The Milton Park Affair. 8 These ideas resonate with Jane Jacobs’s work that I read only after leaving Milton Park for another Montreal neighbourhood, Mile End. Jacobs’s The Life and Death of Great American Cities was a revelation, as she articulated and synthesized all of my observations while living in Milton Park. I was particularly interested in the notion that “eyes on the street” keep a neighbourhood safe. As a woman photographer, I was aware of my vulnerability to assault. The safety I felt on the streets of Montreal was a primary motivation for immigrating here. The book also influenced our personal decision to “save” a run-down row house on Jeanne-Mance Street that David and I purchased in 1975. 9 Arnopoulos, “Concordia’s Plan for the Milton-Park Area,” n.p. 10 Arnopoulos also notes the distortions circulated by Concordia Estates, which reported to the Ford Foundation that “Buildings are in disrepair. Sanitary facilities are below standard, rear yard conditions are not conducive to good health.” Arnopoulos writes: “According to the 1961 census and the city housing department which recently conducted an independent study, this is not true.” Arnopoulos, “Concordia’s Plan for the Milton-Park Area,” n.p.

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11 On Jane Jacobs: “Predators and Vandals: Plans ‘Outrageous’ Says Urban Expert,” Montreal Star, n.p. 12 Ibid. 13 Arnopoulos, “Concordia’s Plan for the Milton-Park Area,” n.p. 14 See photographs by George Bird, reproduced in Helman, The Milton Park Affair, 41, 47. 15 Conversation with David Miller on 6 September 2016, Lac Wapizagonke, Quebec. 16 Ibid. David had an earlier experience of making a sequence of photographs of a demonstration from the second storey of the McGill administration building that students had broken into and were occupying. The cops charged into a crowd, grabbed a targeted demonstrator, hit him, and then charged him with assault. David’s photographs proved absolutely that the cops were lying, and the judge threw the case out of court. 17 On 26 May 1972, fifty-nine protestors were arrested while demonstrating in front of the office of Concordia Estates at 3553 Park Avenue. The twenty-three citizens who pleaded not guilty were represented by Michel Leclair and acquitted by jury trial in February 1973. See “Arrested Citizens to Face Trial for ‘Mischief,’” Milton Park Community Press, n.p. 18 Lanken, “Milton Park,” n.p. 19 Photocell (Gutsche and Miller), ”You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone.” 20 Our curiosity to see art guided us inexorably to seek out people and make connections in the Montreal art scene. We had attended Bill Ewing’s 1972 inaugural exhibition at the Centaur (now Optica) Gallery. 21 In 1971, seeing a remaindered book at Classics Bookstore, Portrait of a Period: A Collection of Notman Photographs, 1856–1915, and our fascination with nineteenth-century photography prompted us to phone Stanley Triggs, curator of the Notman Photographic Archives at the McCord Museum in 1971; see Triggs and Harper, Portrait of a Period. 22 Breslaw, “Turcot Interchange Today and Ville Marie Expressway in 60’s,” 12. 23 White, “Photography’s New Role on the Art Scene,” 34. 24 The Local Initiatives Programme (LIP) was an economy-stimulating, job-creation, grant-giving program administered by the Department of the Secretary of State, Government of Canada, which funded innumerable cultural start-ups. 25 ”Milton-Parc: How We Did It,” special event, Paul Desmarais Theatre, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 28 September 2018, accessed 8 October 2020, https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/ events/61887/milton-parc-how-we-did-it. 26 Lucia Kowaluk has been praised by many people since she passed away in 2019. See Roussopoulos, “Tribute to Lucia Kowaluk from Riel Roussopoulos.” Lucia and her young son Riel in a stroller were present at the 1972 arrest of fifty-nine demonstrators, but were given the opportunity to leave by the police. 27 Author’s interview with Lucia Kowaluk and Dimitri Roussopoulos, Montreal, 14 December 2016. 28 For more on saving the Milton Park neighbourhood, see Kowaluk and Piché-Burton, eds., Communauté Milton-Parc. 29 Author’s interview with Lucia Kowaluk and Dimitri Roussopoulos, Montreal, 14 December 2016. 30 Bemma, “The Milton Park Affair.” 31 Ammon, “In Conversation with Clara Gutsche, David Miller, and Phyllis Lambert.” 32 Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 26.

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6.

Post-industrialist Passions: Urban Exploration, Photography, and the Spirit of Place Suzanne Paquet

That some of the recent focus on Detroit ruins is exploitative in its depiction of Detroit’s impoverishment bears repeating, but more compelling are the reasons for our contemporary fascination with images of first-world urban decline, and not just in the Motor City. Ruin websites, photography collections, and urban exploration blogs chronicle industrial ruins across North America and Europe, from Youngstown, Ohio, to Bucharest, Romania. John Patrick Leary, “Detroitism”1

Over the past few years, urban exploration (or urbex) has become a highly popular activity in the West, accompanied more often than not by the taking of large numbers of photographs. Montreal, located literally between Youngstown and Bucharest, has enthusiastically embraced the trend, and this chapter focuses specifically on the photographic production generated by Montreal urbex. It seems apposite, as an opener, to describe the activity that has given rise to this photographic flurry. Urban exploration is generally defined as the infiltration of neglected or restricted sites and networks, or the illegal accessing of decaying spaces, post-industrial ruins, and abandoned infrastructures. Urban explorers (urbexers) – typically male rather than female, since far fewer women indulge in the pastime2 – are aficionados of unusual places and risky expeditions. They are particularly drawn to disused factories, condemned mining facilities, abandoned hotels, churches, and houses, sewer and storm-drain systems, unused railway and subway tunnels, and all other forms of urban “cave.”3 Such explorers could be classed with the intrepid explorateurs du réticulaire included by Jean-Didier Urbain in his typology of tourists, whom he describes as having “a taste for chasms, depths, mysteries” that is accompanied by “a desire to burrow, to penetrate the city’s shadowed areas, its physical and human

secrets.”4 Parallels have been drawn between this urban activity and so-called dark tourism,5 a bizarre type of travel aimed at visiting sites of catastrophe (Ground Zero, Chernobyl), war, or macabre happenings. Bradley L. Garrett has coined the term “dereliction tourism.”6 To describe urbex as “tourism” may seem inappropriate or excessive, since it is a form of exploration generally practised only by initiates. But when it occurs on the scale seen in Detroit – a city particularly hard hit by the successive economic crises triggered by Western deindustrialization and now a must-see destination for amateur photographers of urban decay, who can even take part in guided tours – then tourism is certainly the right word.7 In Detroit, taking photographs is the main goal of all the tours of abandoned industrial buildings, and the Web is flooded with the images they produce, each more gloomy or melodramatic than the next. In light of this quite amazing enthusiasm, urbex has clearly to be seen as a form of tourism: a voyage into the interior, since it involves the emergence, from behind one’s city, of another city entirely; or a voyage in time, since the objects of exploration are vestiges of the past. And as with all forms of tourism, however unusual, photography is both essential and central. A good number of urban explorers are extremely prolific and painstaking amateur photographers (some seem to fall into the odd category of “semi-professional”). They form themselves into interest-driven communities by means of social networks, such as Flickr and 500px,8 or websites, like the Canadian sites Urban Exploration Resource (UER)9 and Urbex playground.10 Several of these sites are generally accessible, so despite the fact that their activities are clandestine and you have to prove your credentials before being granted membership, some of the photographs taken by urban explorers can be viewed on the Web. Within explorer communities, sharing images is extremely important. For example, the “So you want to become a full member” section of the UER website (which according to Garrett is the largest Web forum of its kind)11 explains that explorers are not obliged to take photographs, but things will go much more easily for them if they do. In the advice on how to speed up the (lengthy) process of becoming a full member, the response to the question “I’m a really really good photographer. Do I receive special treatment?” is enlightening: “You really shouldn’t, but yes, you probably will get more positive recommendations from people you don’t know if you post some really good photos.”12 As scholars such as Michelle Bélanger13 and Garrett14 have shown, digital photography and the Web have been major unifying factors for explorer groups, providing their activities and exchanges with vital support. It is therefore logical to infer that urbexer groups are brought together by photography as much as by the act of exploration itself. There even exist photographic treatises aimed directly at 132

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explorers, like Todd Sipes’s Urban Exploration Photography: A Guide to Creating and Editing Images of Abandoned Places.15 Theorist of the built environment Luke Bennett has explained that it is essential to see explorers as committed amateurs, motivated both by their love of photography and by a taste for recreational trespass.16 Yet the studies that focus on this dual activity are not really concerned with the images: although all the writers cited here mention the supreme importance of photography to urbexers, it is usually only examined as a means of documenting or providing evidence, rarely as a practice or an aesthetic genre. By focusing on several abandoned industrial buildings in Montreal, I plan to look at the work of these amateur photographers in order to elucidate two specific questions. First, I wish to establish if the photography practised by urban explorers can be seen as an extension (although a delayed one) of documentary photography – a form that has been considered both (or successively) engagé and artistic17 – or a universalizing project. As Olivier Lugon has written: No one knows exactly what is covered by the term “documentary” in photography, and the broad scope of its use has depended on this vagueness of meaning. The only element common to its countless definitions is a very general insistence on respect for the object shown, a desire to portray “things as they are” and to provide reliable and authentic information about them, avoiding any enhancement that might alter the integrity of reality. Aside from this, positions have diverged considerably on key issues: the strategies to be employed to accurately represent reality, the subjects worth recording, and the use to which the documents obtained should be put. Three main approaches can nonetheless be discerned: the encyclopaedic and didactic, the heritage, and the social.18 Despite the apparent ambiguity of the term he is discussing, Lugon reiterates the generally accepted categories of “documentary” photography: the “encyclopaedic,” which can be associated with the universalizing impulse; the “didactic”; and the “social,” or committed; to these he adds the notion of “heritage” – a notion that will prove fundamental to the type of images of concern to me here. The second question, arising from the heritage option mentioned by Lugon, concerns the rendering visible of generally inaccessible (and therefore unseen) places by the explorers’ photographs and, as a consequence, the possible impact these images could have on the memory (or spirit) of places – on their survival over time. The goal is to discover if the photographs might have any kind of heritage dimension, or if they might potentially contribute to the “heritagization” of post-industrial sites. These two aspects – the link to documentary photography and the heritage Urban Exploration, Photography, and the Spirit of Place

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potential – will be examined though the online activity of certain photographers and their communities (through observation of the activities of websites and social networks like Flickr; an interview with an explorer, Jarold Dumouchel, webmaster for the urbexplayground.com site, for whom “a good exploration is one from which I return with good photos”19), as well as by analysis of the pictures themselves. Looking at how the images circulate may also throw light on the phenomenon. A few documentary photographs (or series) will be cited by way of comparison. DOCUMENTS

Urban exploration photography is evidently a response to the need for documentation, first of the expeditions themselves, serving as a proof of the intervention or a souvenir of the place visited – the “I was there!” dimension of the amateur snapshot.20 But for some of its proponents, urbex also seems to represent a veritable historical quest aimed at recording the vestiges of (a particular state of) the place visited. Luke Bennett speaks of documenting the history and form of the structure explored,21 while Michelle Bélanger maintains that “abandoned places are genuine witnesses to past epochs, and exploration is a way of discovering the history of a place using a direct approach.”22 According to Bélanger, explorers acquire in-depth knowledge of the places they infiltrate. Some, including a number of habitués of urbexplayground. com and urbexers who use Flickr, present their photos accompanied by written descriptions – often extremely detailed – of the places portrayed. Documentary photographs have also been traditionally accompanied by texts. From the early decades of the twentieth century, documentary photography’s principal vehicle was the print medium, combining text and images. The idea was to illustrate or explain particular phenomena (often social) by means of sequences juxtaposing pictures and the written word.23 Documentary photography was intended to be descriptive and, for certain practitioners, neutral. This did not preclude the use of techniques that were anything but neutral and that eventually established a style, which, while pretending to be art-free,24 effectively provoked reactions that were both emotional (or humanist) and aesthetic. The overall objective was to document reality – the city, the human condition, urban life, certain social facts or determinisms – in impeccably composed, discerning, and sometimes ironic or amusing photographs. This fusion of documentation and formalism could lend considerable power to a critique of society or the denunciation of a particular situation. Photographers of Montreal’s urban ruins whose activity takes place on the Web may possibly be heirs to the documentary photographers who, during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, focused their attention on Montreal’s neighbourhoods, its heritage buildings and the damage to its urban and social fabric “resulting from 134

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6.1 Clara Gutsche, Redpath Sugar, 1990, from the series The Lachine Canal / Le canal de Lachine, 1985–1990. Gelatin silver, selenium-toned, archivally processed print. © Clara Gutsche / SOCAN. 6.2 Jarold Dumouchel, Ray of Light, n.d., from the series The Old Canada Malting Plant. Urbexplayground.com.

the transformations and modernization of the city that began in the 1960s.”25 Parallels could be drawn, for example, between the Lachine Canal series (1985–1990) and recent photographs of the Canada Malting plant, located on this same canal. Clara Gutsche’s photographs for the 1985–1990 project, which she executed jointly with David Miller, are of particular interest; Gutsche photographed the interiors of the buildings (Fig. 6.1), while Miller took the outside shots. Commissioned by Montreal’s Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Gutsche and Miller were given the mission of “documenting this changing landscape” fifteen years after the canal’s closure in 1970.26 Needless to say, the comparison holds principally for the documentary dimension, which will be examined in greater detail below. A major difference – which nonetheless supports the notion of an enduring “documentary style” – concerns the sites where the images are presented. In executing their photographs, Gutsche and Miller were fulfilling a commission from the CCA, a major Montreal institution, which also has international stature, and their photographs have been widely exhibited in museums and public galleries. An image’s presence in a prestigious institution automatically gives it status. Things are evidently very different on the Web, although the wide circulation it affords urbex pictures can enhance their visibility and, as a consequence, their popularity. The Canada Malting plant (Fig. 6.2) was abandoned in 1989, after train service to the sector ceased entirely. Since then, although it has been the site of a few art events, it has served mainly as a top destination for Montreal urbexers, described on urbexplayground.com as “highly visited.”27 The area surrounding the Lachine Canal is now considered a heritage zone, and a linear national park runs along its banks. The old factory, which stands with its grain elevators a short distance from the canal, is privately owned. The silos, covered in clay tiles, are something of a historical curiosity. It is the building’s imposing size and labyrinthine character that have made it a favourite among urban explorers and graffitists. TEMPORALITY

In general, dedicated urbexers respect a basic set of rules, the most important of which – “leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but photographs”28 – Garrett sees as echoing the social expectations of contemporary eco-tourism and Bennett recognizes as the maxim of nature-lovers: “With urbex, there generally appears to be a reverence for objects – whether as art objects or nostalgic points of connection with the ghosts of place. There is also a sense of physically connecting with ‘the past’ and of the authenticity of ‘the real.’”29 The respect for objects from the past and the quest for authenticity that Bennett notes suggest that temporal relations are an important component of 136

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urban exploration and the photographic activity that accompanies it. This is borne out by the interest and nostalgia aroused by the (historic) value of what is disappearing, something displayed by photographers from the medium’s earliest days and particularly evident in certain images: Paris as portrayed by Marville or Atget, for example. The act of photographing in the present is rooted in a desire to record evidence of the past for the future – a common motivation of (documentary) photography. In the case of urbex, this seizing of a bygone time, in order to remember it, is accomplished in two phases. The first occurs during infiltration: “As you penetrate the envelope of the building, you are plunged into another world, where life has stopped.”30 It is as though time had ceased, stuck on an image that Bennett describes as a “frozen snapshot.”31 This moment is a unique experience, never to be repeated – the instant of a quasi-photographic but irreproducible freezeframe. The second phase is the photograph taken by the explorer, which is like a copy, possibly inaccurate but at least durable, of that first deeply felt but ephemeral moment, one that fixes for eternity what seems at first to be immutable but isn’t: dust continues to settle, objects continue quietly to deteriorate. Could this be why “empty buildings … seem more suited to still rather than moving images”?32 Are we talking about the quest for a kind of decisive moment that must be captured and preserved forever?33 In any case, between the fixing of the moment and its indefinite perpetuation, photography of the documentary type has always been infused with this singular desire to keep what cannot be kept, and, as a consequence, is conducive to melancholy. Some urbexers’ photographs seem impregnated with a similar melancholy. But is it perhaps just a question of style? STYLE

Urbex photography is generally very polished and sometimes even manipulated, reflecting (or aiming at) a common aesthetic approach that involves such techniques as angled viewpoints, the use of filters, High Dynamic Range (HDR) shots (which display a chroma and a degree of detail that give a slightly surreal look),34 highly saturated colours, dramatization, and the use of wide-angle and fish-eye lenses. While some of its visual and formal features have little in common with documentary photography (those resulting from the use of HDR and filters, for example, and the prefabricated effects included in applications and software like Instagram and PhotoShop), others (such as the use of black and white) can be directly related to the documentary tradition. If the former techniques are exploited, photographs taken by urbexers clearly eschew the “style” – direct, neutral, frontal, or distanced – adopted by documentary photographers. One thinks here of Lynne Cohen’s impeccably framed photographs of enigmatic and deserted places, or of Gabor Szilasi’s series of neon Urban Exploration, Photography, and the Spirit of Place

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6.3 Gabor Szilasi, Orange Julep, from the series LUX , Enseignes lumineuses, 1983–1984. Courtesy of the artist.

signs and facades (Fig. 6.3), where all sorts of decorative components, reflections, and ephemeral presences are interwoven and superimposed to create compositions that are simultaneously mysterious and astonishingly realist. Some of the pictures produced by explorers seem closer to this approach, however, since a good number of their digital photographs have been “desaturated” to produce black and white images that recall the work of certain documentary artists (Fig. 6.4). Are such explorer-photographers consciously adopting a pre-existing style, one that might give their images an artistic quality and thereby greater legitimacy in the already-overloaded realm of (digital) photography? Or is it simply that the documentary style has become such a part of our visual culture that those who seriously “document” things and people have been marked by it and imitate it? The urbexer Jarold Dumouchel admits to a particular admiration for the Drugs series by the photographer Boogie,35 which is highly reminiscent of Larry Clark’s Tulsa (published in 1971) and some of the photographs of Nan Goldin. High-contrast light effects (chiaroscuro) that dramatize the site represented are relatively common in urbex pictures, as they are in certain forms of documentary photography, particularly those focusing on urban and industrial ruins. Two of the 138

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6.4 Vincent Brillant, Je…GOD, Canada Malting Plant, 2011. ©VincentBrillant.

examples already cited, Clara Gutsche’s Lachine Canal works and urbex images of the Canada Malting plant, offer illustrations. But aren’t such effects inevitable in these types of building, where the windows are smashed and the walls themselves broken by time or vandalism, creating gloomy shells into which daylight penetrates through any opening it can find, sometimes as sunbeams? See, for example, Figures 6.1, 6.2, and 6.6. The light that is diffused or concentrated through the various gaps and holes, the dusty atmosphere, the debris indicating the absence of the people who once occupied the space, the use of black and white – everything conjures the sense of nostalgia or authenticity common to photographs that seem to have captured phantoms of the past. One of the compositional forms recurrent in documentary photography that is also used by urbexers is the habit of combining unusual elements, indicative of a slightly sardonic gaze, that Leary describes as the “compositional tactic of ironic juxtaposition”36 (see Figs. 6.4 and 6.5). According to him, this has been “an old standby of documentary city photography since at least the days of Robert Frank and Helen Levitt.”37 Long before Levitt and Frank, in fact, the technique had been popular with European humanist photographers like Brassaï, Robert Doisneau, and Urban Exploration, Photography, and the Spirit of Place

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6.5 Jarold Dumouchel, Window, n.d., from the series The Old Canada Malting Plant. Urbexplayground.com.

André Kertész, as well as being used widely in the United States, notably during the Depression by Margaret Bourke-White and photographers working for the Farm Security Administration. It is a visual strategy still employed in many remarkable contemporary photographs, moreover, as seen in different series by Lynne Cohen, Clara Gutsche, and Gabor Szilasi. Many urbex images exploit the tactic, including some by Dumouchel. One example is the photograph he took from the interior of an abandoned industrial complex, which shows a window, completely useless but somehow still in place, overlooking an area that, like so many post-industrial neighbourhoods, is likely destined for imminent gentrification. In some ways, then, the digital photography practised by accomplished amateurs as part of their urban exploration activities is not so very different from analogue photography: the visual strategies employed by urbexers in their images and the types of composition they choose are comparable to those of documentary photographers who used analogue techniques. Certainly, “the power of the photograph to document is not diminished due to digital technology.”38 140

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THE SPIRIT OF PLACE?

Even if they make every effort to leave no traces in the places they infiltrate, urban explorers do leave, in the visible world, the photographs that capture these places, effectively for eternity. One might assume, then, that one of the aims of urbex photographers is conservation: they bring to light – out of the shadows and depths that lie behind and beneath the visible city – another city, unknown and yet enduringly present in images disseminated on the Web. Many urbexers seem to feel a mnemonic responsibility that goes beyond a simple “I was there.” Preserving and perpetuating evidence represents an engagement, a form of activism that is paralleled or shared by the acts of documenting and of urban exploration. Photography has sometimes been used to denounce and prevent the destruction of specific built areas,39 but urbex is apparently not preoccupied with protection, despite the fact that it has given rise to a corpus of meticulously produced documents that reflect an evident affection and respect for the buildings and things photographed. But while claiming not to be “necessarily involved in the preservation of these places,” Dumouchel is careful not to damage them and gathers all the information he can about them. He is also critical of fellow explorers who “have no qualms about leaving evidence of their visit (graffiti, stickers, vandalism, etc.) or about taking souvenirs.”40 Incidentally, many graffiti artists who are drawn to and frequent the same places as urbexers display similar photographic behaviour: they photograph their creations and post them online to ensure their perpetuity, and these pictures lead to the formation of communities of street art enthusiasts.41 So, like the documentary photographer, the explorer selects subjects and “visually fixes them in time as part of the collective memory.”42 Urbex photography can actually be seen as an interface via which what is concealed (and therefore invisible) can be brought to light, revealing previously hidden temporal, physical, and social realities. It occupies the narrow zone that separates the fundamentally private experience of a hidden place and the ordinary visible world, functioning as an “agent of liaison or transfer.”43 Clara Gutsche’s photographs express “the human dimension through its absence. The quality of light in her works and her attention to space reveal the emotion of these empty expanses.”44 Writing about the Lachine Canal series, Pierre Dessureault asserts that “for her, these constructs are merely empty shells haunted by the absence of those who once inhabited them and busied themselves there.”45 Explorers are also drawn to the sketchy vestiges of human presence in abandoned industrial buildings, driven by a sense of the presence of absence (as fundamental to photography46 as it is to urban exploration): “The power to access these forgotten

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places, time capsules from another era, is a major motivation behind infiltration.”47 According to Garrett, “ruins are never really empty in the strictest sense; an imagined presence always creates a tangible hauntology.”48 Furthermore, as noted by DeSilvey and Edensor, “in the ‘experiential ruin’ the bodies of absent others – the people who once inhabited the now derelict and deserted structures – are made present through an imaginative ‘embodied exchange’ with history.”49 Urban exploration is seen by some authors as a heritage activity, in the sense that it represents an experience of places that, though out-of-bounds and destined to disappear, are still in a sense inhabited. This position tallies with the notion of “heritage as experience,”50 further developed by Laurajane Smith. According to her, it is not simply objects and buildings that are important in heritage, but the experience they offer, and it is by analyzing the uses that places and processes of heritage are put to, including memorializing and identification interventions at the site, that we can come to better understand this complex notion.51 In the case that concerns us, however, these experiences are lived only by the explorers themselves and cannot be widely shared or transmitted. Photographs of post-industrial ruins are therefore particularly important, since they represent a communication tool capable of making the invisible visible, of revealing what is normally inaccessible. In heritage terms, Pablo Arboleda divides urbexers into two basic types – performative explorers and communicative explorers (who can be further divided into various subgroups).52 Performative explorers focus on the experience itself and do not see it as their role to interfere with the destiny of the places they visit.53 As he writes: “Far from being perceived as a negative condition, for the majority of urban explorers the progressive and natural decay is a cultural asset which deserves to be passively maintained – or, preserved by not being preserved – in order to make visible how our society does not escape from the passing of time.”54 This laissez-faire approach can be related to a certain idea of authenticity, according to which any attempt to prevent the ravages of time is seen as artificial. On the other hand, to avoid accelerating deterioration, many urbexers refrain from giving the exact location of sites they have infiltrated, and their photographs are not generally accessible.55 Communicative explorers, on the other hand, while appreciating the experience (or the performance) for itself, believe in identifying the buildings and circulating their images, which can result in the “touristification” of certain sites and swifter ruination. This has in fact been the fate of the Canada Malting plant on the Lachine Canal, which, as mentioned earlier, has become one of the destinations most visited by explorers, specialist and non-specialist. As a result, a certain segment of the communicative-explorer community avoids giving the buildings’ exact locations.56 Some communicative explorers perceive the imminent loss of the sites they visit as a “cultural tragedy,” which drives them 142

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to take photographs almost compulsively,57 a photographic hyperactivity that can actually encourage the physical preservation of certain sites. In such cases, both the photographers and their photographs would serve as heritage agents or mediators, helping to prevent the loss of memories of place. But according to Arboleda, it is the photographs produced that possess real intrinsic value.58 Interestingly, these categories recall those proposed in the early-twentieth century by Alois Riegl,59 who, in an effort to establish guidelines for the conservation of monuments, identified three types of commemorative value, including “age-value,” which recognizes gradual deterioration as necessary and natural, and “intentional commemorative value,” whose purpose is to keep “human deeds or events … alive in the minds of future generations.”60 These two values correspond well to the categories defined by Arboleda, with photography ensuring the preservation of the sites for posterity. The buildings that are the focus of urbexers’ explorations and photographs can certainly be seen as monuments to the Western industrial era, or as symbols of its demise: the failure of a certain form of capitalism, experienced by many workers as a defeat, has rarely been acknowledged in photographs of post-industrial ruins, which some authors consider excessively aestheticized.61 Images of abandoned industrial buildings circulate widely on the Web, and the path taken by a single photograph can easily be tracked across different sites, social media, and blogs. This demonstrates, on the one hand, the desire of its creator to give it visibility and, on the other, the widespread penchant for images of modern ruins, since it is simple and commonplace to “borrow” other people’s images in order to repost them on different sites for different purposes. On the Flickr website, pictures are published in groups, according to different themes, which increases their range of circulation even further.62 Vincent Brillant’s photograph of the Canada Malting plant entitled Décrépitude totale (Fig. 6.6), for example, is included in sixty-three Flickr groups, whose names alone are illustrative of what motivates (or legitimizes) the photographic activity of urban explorers: “Decayed Yet Hauntingly Beautiful,” “Beautiful Capture,” “Abandoned Beauties,” “Abandoned Canada,” “I LOVE DARK PHOTOS,” “Art of Urbex,” “UER on Flickr,” “Flickr Montreal,” “Friches et lieux oubliés,” “HDR,” etc. The love of ruins and the sense of beauty that are naturally integral to a major interest in exploring abandoned places are evidently also part of the form of the aspirationally artistic photography that often accompanies it. Dedicated practitioners of urbex photography post their pictures on a wide range of web groups and sites, have profiles on various social media, including Flickr and Facebook, and sometimes have their own websites. Their photographs exist in a veritable “plurality of copies,”63 for the pictures are omnipresent (or, better, omnivisible) on the Web, part of the digital dynamic that allows any digital image, any cluster of pixels, to Urban Exploration, Photography, and the Spirit of Place

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6.6 Vincent Brillant, Décrépitude totale, Canada Malting Plant, 2010. ©VincentBrillant.

be reproduced and circulated ad infinitum. As a result, the places and buildings they represent are familiar to people who will never actually visit them, and the viewing of such images has become a pastime as popular as armchair travel was during the nineteenth century. In this context, the photograph serves as both a tool of knowledge and a commemorative object confined to a particular spatio-temporality formed by the intersection of the abandoned and fast-disintegrating sites, the photographs of them, and the network on which the photographs circulate. While some explorers may approach the activity from a historical or heritage perspective, in fact the real impact comes from their widely disseminated photographs. THE SPIRIT OF PHOTOGRAPHS (CONCLUSION)

Since its emergence (which coincided roughly with that of the train), photography has been both the cause and the object of considerable mobility. It was as a result of seeing pictures of places all over the world, which soon began to circulate, that people developed the urge to visit them. During the 1980s, no one was inspired 144

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to follow in Gutsche and Miller’s footsteps along the banks of the Lachine Canal. Today, though, photographs like those of the Canada Malting plant seem to encourage expeditions, and this incitement to travel is certainly one of the ways in which urban exploration can be likened to tourism. Is it an indication that (photographic) authenticity can now only be found in places that are decaying? The quest for authenticity, particularly important to Bennett, is reflected in both the desire to halt time and in a particular photographic “style” borrowed from documentary photography, which combines a use of black and white, a meditative or ironic distancing, and a penchant for odd juxtapositions, and which continues to permeate a now-globalized visual culture. This permeation illustrates how documentary photographs circulated over a lengthy period, leaving their indelible trace in the form of a particular approach. The intense dissemination of images that is now the norm, made possible by the tools and platforms of the digital era, has resulted in an entirely new regime of visibility and temporality, according to which photographs are amassed and replace one another at an extraordinary rate.64 There is little likelihood that any of them will become iconic, as earlier photographs (few in number and constantly reproduced) did,65 for now it seems to be the subjects photographed, the places, that are destined to become exemplars of our culture, through the accumulation rather than the singularity of the images portraying them. The popularity of buildings like the Canada Malting plant – which even has its own Wikipedia page – can be attributed to their huge photographic visibility on easily accessible networks and the impulse it provokes to visit them in order to add new pictures to a continually growing collection. Both the documentary “style” and certain buildings (or types of building), by being endlessly reused and reproduced, may become omnipresent and timeless, creating a heightened presence that resembles the present of the image constantly renewed, “a coexistence or contemporaneous state in which all photos occur to us at the same time … In a paradoxical way, the temporal image becomes atemporal. And as images become ‘timeless’ (or better, time-thickened), we are all in the same times together.”66 Although exploration images seem to be constantly revolving and constantly revolving around the same subjects, they play a major role in creating communities and collaborative memory- and story-sharing experiences.67 According to Garrett, “the fascination with industrial ruin exploration is nothing less than an interest in trying to get back to what we have lost in late capitalism: a sense of place, a sense of community and a sense of self.”68 The unifying focus of these communities is a common inclination that is acted out69 in exploration and photography practices and, subsequently, in the publication and sharing of the images produced. Explorers act through both their exploratory and their photographic activity; afterwards, Urban Exploration, Photography, and the Spirit of Place

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the images circulate, becoming the true mediators, capable of transforming the reception of the subjects they represent and of instilling them with meaning or poetry. Thus do they assume the status of places of memory, “entirely consumed by their commemorative function.”70 As they propagate, the images – those of artists and amateurs alike – become part of a collectively shared spatio-temporality, establishing a new view of the notion of duration and ensuring the survival, if not of the abandoned industrial buildings, then at least of a form of spirit of place. For is it not the photograph, having captured the memory of a place, that will remain in our memories?

TrAnSlATiOn by JUdiTH Terry.

NOTES 1 Leary, “Detroitism,” n.p. 2 Mott and Roberts, “Not Everyone Has (the) Balls,” 229–45. 3 These latter sites are of particular interest to the members of Cave Clans. This group, dedicated to underground exploration, was founded in Australia during the 1980s; today, there are Cave Clans all over the world. See Cave-Clan (website), accessed 30 May 2020, https://www.caveclan.org/, and Nadal, “Heading Underground,” n.p. 4 Urbain, L’idiot du voyage, 148. 5 Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism. 6 Garrett, “Undertaking Recreational Trespass,” 2. 7 Semuels, “Detroit’s Abandoned Buildings Draw Tourists Instead of Developers,” n.p.; AbbeyLambertz, “Detroit Abandoned Ruins Are Captivating, but Are They Bad for Neighborhoods?,” n.p.; Leary, “Detroitism,” n.p. 8 Primarily interested in photography, Flickr users create groups focused on particular objects – in the case that concerns us, abandoned buildings and facilities – or even themes, such as decay. 500px also brings together “photography enthusiasts,” but in addition offers a platform where they can sell their pictures. See Flickr, accessed 30 May 2020, www.flickr.com; and 500px, accessed 11 October 2020, https://web.500px.com/. 9 Urban Exploration Resource (website), accessed 30 May 2020, http://www.uer.ca. 10 “Urbex,” Urbex Playground, accessed 30 May 2020, http://www.urbexplayground.com/Urbex. 11 Garrett, “Undertaking Recreational Trespass,” 5. 12 “UER Forum,” Urban Exploration Resource, accessed 30 May 2020, http://www.uer.ca/forum_ showthread.asp?fid=1&threadid=102351. 13 Bélanger, “Vestiges industriels montréalais,” 48. 14 Garrett, “Undertaking Recreational Trespass,” 5. 15 Sipes, Urban Exploration Photography. 16 Bennett, “Bunkerology,” 432. 17 Allaire, Une tradition documentaire?

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18 Lugon, “L’esthétique du document, 1890–2000,” 358. 19 Email exchange, December 2016. 20 Batchen, “Snapshots,” 121–42. 21 Bennett, “Bunkerology,” 425. 22 Bélanger, “Vestiges industriels montréalais,” 51. 23 Chéroux, “Un regard à échelle humaine,” 171–3. 24 Lugon, Le Style documentaire; Jenkins, New Topographics. 25 Allaire, Une tradition documentaire? n.p. 26 Canadian Centre for Architecture, “Observing the Lachine Canal. Photographs by Clara Gutsche and David Miller.” 27 “The Old Canada Malting Plant: Photos by Jarold Dumouchel,” Urbex Playground, accessed 16 March 2021, http://www.urbexplayground.com/urbex/old-canada-malting-plant. 28 Bennett, “Bunkerology,” 427; Bélanger, “Vestiges industriels montréalais,” 56; Garrett, “Undertaking Recreational Trespass,” 3. 29 Bennett, “Bunkerology,” 431. 30 Bélanger, “Vestiges industriels montréalais,” 60–1. 31 Bennett, “Bunkerology,” 431. 32 Leary, “Detroitism,” n.p. 33 An English version of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 book, Images à la sauvette, was published the same year under the title The Decisive Moment. This expression has since been reused countless times in the realm of photography. 34 A High-Dynamic-Range Imaging (HDRI) function is included in all the most recent digital cameras. It involves the capturing of multiple standard-exposure images that are then merged into a single HDR image. The technique can be likened to “exposure bracketing” in analogue photography. This combining of images results in pictures in which the colours and luminosity are enhanced and slightly “unreal” looking. 35 Boogie, “Drugs,” Projects, Art Coup (website), accessed 30 May 2020, http://www.artcoup.com/ drugs/. 36 Leary, “Detroitism,” n.p. 37 Ibid. 38 Rubinstein and Sluis, “A Life More Photographic,” 10. 39 The Milton Park series, executed by Clara Gutsche and David Miller, and discussed in this volume, is one example: “From 1970 to 1973, Gutsche and Miller used photography to help save the neighbourhood of Milton Park, making images to preserve for posterity a multi-ethnic urban community whose configuration was changing radically.” Dessureault, “Clara Gutsche/David Miller dialogue,” 28. 40 Email exchange with Jarold Dumouchel, December 2016. 41 For more on this, see Baddeley, “Street Art Photography,” in which she draws an interesting parallel between the photography of street art and “street photography,” which is also a form of documentary photography. 42 Dessureault, “Clara Gutsche/David Miller dialogue,” 29. 43 Poissant, “Interfaces et sensorialité,” 3.

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44 Canadian Centre for Architecture, “Observing the Lachine Canal. Photographs by Clara Gutsche and David Miller.” 45 Dessureault, “Clara Gutsche/David Miller dialogue,” 31. 46 Barthes, Camera Lucida. 47 Bélanger, “Vestiges industriels montréalais,” 51. 48 Garrett, “Urban Exploration as Heritage Place-Making,” 83. 49 DeSilvey and Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins,” 472. 50 Arboleda, “Heritage Views through Urban Exploration” (2016); Bélanger, “Vestiges industriels montréalais.” 51 Smith, Uses of Heritage, 45, 308. 52 Arboleda, “Heritage Views through Urban Exploration,” 368–81. 53 Ibid., 371. 54 Ibid., 372. 55 Most sections of the uer.ca website are reserved for members only, and this is quite common with websites devoted to urbex. 56 Rojon, “Images numériques et pratiques amateurs dans la révélation des friches industrielles,” 32. “Instagram accounts are also a nuisance,” says Dumouchel. “Many users are just trying to accumulate ‘likes,’ and have no problem revealing addresses simply to increase their own following” (email exchange with the author, December 2016). 57 Arboleda, “Heritage Views through Urban Exploration,” 374. 58 Ibid., 375. 59 Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” 21–51. 60 Ibid., 21. 61 Leary, “Detroitism,” n.p.; Rojon, “Images numériques et pratiques amateurs dans la révélation des friches industrielles.” 62 “An important part of Flickr’s social appeal was built into the ‘group’ button, a default stimulating users to join groups to discuss their common interest in pictures.” See Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity, 91. 63 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), 221. 64 Augé, Pour une anthropologie de la mobilité, 57. 65 Hariman and Lucaitis, No Caption Needed. 66 Hochman and Manovich, “Zooming into an Instagram City,” n.p. 67 Murray, “New Media and Vernacular Photography,” 165. 68 Garrett, “Urban Exploration as Heritage Place-Making,” 86. 69 Hennion, “D’une sociologie de la médiation à une pragmatique des attachements,” n.p. 70 Nora, “Entre Mémoire et Histoire,” xli.

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Picturing The Old Architecture of Quebec: Ramsay Traquair and Cultural Conservatism, 1913–39 Annmarie Adams

INTRODUCTION

High up on the wall of the charming faculty meeting room of McGill University’s School of Architecture hangs a curious oil portrait. The subject is Scottish-born architect Ramsay Traquair (1874–1952), Macdonald Professor and director of the school from 1913 to 1939 (Fig. 7.1). We at the school, as well as those who run the university’s Visual Arts Collection, have no information on how McGill University acquired the 55.9 x 43.2 cm (22 x 17 inch), three-quarter view, half-length portrait, which shows Traquair in front of an ivy-covered brick archway and landscape, giving on to greenery, a seascape, and sky. We do know, however, that it was painted by John Colin Forbes (1826–1945), a prominent Toronto-born, London-educated artist, who also depicted Canadian prime ministers John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier, British prime minister William Gladstone, and King Edward VII and his queen-empress, Alexandra. That Traquair sat for Forbes is an indication of Traquair’s huge cultural capital. That the portrait’s exact date and provenance are unknown is equally significant, as much remains mysterious about this major figure in the history of Quebec architecture. Today Traquair is known mostly not as the subject of art but for his measured drawings of early churches and houses, showcased in his magnum opus, The Old Architecture of Quebec: A Study of the Buildings Erected in New France from the Earliest Explorers to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1947 by the

7.1 John Colin Forbes, Portrait of Ramsay Traquair, n.d. Oil on canvas, 56 x 45 cm. McGill University Visual Arts Collection, 1973-263.

Macmillan Company of Canada. The 324-page tome features historical analysis, photographs, and measured drawings done by McGill architecture students under Traquair’s guidance over fifteen years (1924–39). This documentary work earned him a reputation as the discoverer of Quebec architecture and material culture. This discovery was in the context of Traquair’s transformative work as the head of one of Canada’s first architectural schools. When he arrived in 1913, the school consisted of two students and one full-time instructor.1 When he retired, the school was expanded and had a completely revised curriculum, but remained staunchly antimodern. Prominent Toronto architect Andrew Mathers (of Mathers and Haldenby) described Traquair’s discovering role in theatrical terms in his book review for the Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada: “Prof. Traquair has drawn the curtain aside and has revealed New France,”2 suggesting that the buildings included in the book had been invisible and unknown before Traquair’s pioneering research. Surprisingly, Traquair himself has remained almost invisible to scholars, 152

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attracting only one book-length study by Nicola Spasoff, who wrote an unpublished PhD dissertation in art history on him and his friend and colleague Professor Percy Nobbs at Queen’s University in 2002.3 To increase the book’s visibility, the School of Architecture published a facsimile edition of The Old Architecture of Quebec in 1996 to mark its centennial. How was photography implicated in Traquair’s project to “reveal” Quebec architecture? Traquair and students produced about twelve hundred measured drawings of just over a hundred Quebec buildings during Traquair’s time at McGill University. His extraordinary archival legacy also includes about nine thousand architectural photographic slides, prints, and negatives.4 Although Traquair took many of these photos himself (sometimes identified with R.T.), many are anonymous, and almost as many are by professional photographers. Further confusing the matter is that Traquair brought slides with him when he arrived from Edinburgh in September 1913. As he packed up to leave Scotland, he wrote to his friend Percy Nobbs, who had been at McGill since 1903, and had helped arrange his position at McGill, about the importance of his slides: “As to lantern slides I have my own collection which I will bring out. There are about 1250, of which about 400 are British mediaeval. If there is any line in which your set is weak I can get some more, but it might be better to wait and see how far those I have will fill the gaps.”5 Also unstudied is Traquair’s vehement opposition to four significant forces in twentieth-century society: Modernism, Americanization, the increasing power of women, and racial diversity. Traquair used the architecture of New France to repudiate modernism, which he cast as “ungeographical,”6 and as evidence of the corruption of contemporary society. Always quick to suggest the superiority of Europe over North America, he saw the skyscraper as America’s greatest architectural feat, but he dismissed it as a form of marketing: “The Woolworth building in New York is the counterpart of the Beauvais Cathedral in France … Beauvais Cathedral was built in sheer pride to be the biggest cathedral in France, the Woolworth is an advertisement.”7 He produced architectural knowledge in a male bastion, explicitly protecting it from female “contamination” by excluding women from both the school and the profession. He engaged a similar contamination analogy in his views on race: “But no matter how like a white man he may look, a Negro remains a Negro. He belongs to an inferior caste, contact with which contaminates,” he insisted in 1923.8 How did Traquair’s architectural documentation project relate to his anti-modernism, anti-Americanization, anti-women, and anti-Black racist positions? How did he use his photo collections, and how did specific images function in the documentation of historic buildings? What did they accomplish, and what do we see in them today? We can also ask: what role did Montreal play in the history of Quebec architecture he constructs? Ramsay Traquair and Cultural Conservatism

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PHOTOGRAPHY AS FIELDWORK

From 1924 to 1930, Traquair took McGill students to historic sites as part of a course known as “Historic Drawing.” It is clear by the way Traquair describes the coursework that he saw photography’s role as complementary to measured drawings, completing its cultural work: It is largely based on a series of architectural surveys of important buildings made between 1924 and 1930. Each survey consists of complete measured drawings of the building, with the important decorative features, their mouldings and ornament, drawn to a scale large enough to allow of comparison with other examples. Such measured surveys are the first essential to any understanding of the architecture; they were done by myself or by students working under my supervision … In addition, the buildings were fully photographed, both in general appearance and in detail, so as to form, with the drawings, as complete a record as possible of the structure and its decoration.9 Surveys like Traquair’s were not uncommon during the early twentieth century, though not many were undertaken by architecture students. American architectural historian Dell Upton has written about dozens of similar projects in the United States, intended to record regional architecture in the 1920s and 1930s. Like Traquair, these American-based researchers believed that the historic sites they were recording held “clues to a country’s character.”10 As Spasoff has noted, Traquair’s and Nobbs’s anti-modernism leanings “predisposed them to look for folk culture and, once they believed that they had found it, to use it in a particular way,” which was also the mandate of the American authors.11 The implicit lesson of this genre of literature was twofold: that historic architecture was superior to modern buildings; and that such architecture could assist in the search for national identity or character. For Traquair and like-minded researchers, fieldwork was essential. He wanted students to see, touch, measure, draw, and photograph actual historic buildings as part of their professional architectural education, in addition to classroom learning. This belief in experiencing real buildings aligned with Traquair’s general conviction that “learning to be an architect required actual practice, not simulations.”12 For both Traquair and his American colleagues, then, rural architecture was the focus. This aligned with his Arts and Crafts–based conviction that good architecture was local and regional. The precise role of the cosmopolitan city of Montreal in Traquair’s documentation project is thus complex. Although he lived and worked in the city for twenty-six years, the focus of his research was on small-town churches and extant 154

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institutions of New France in Quebec City. The Île d’Orléans, an island in the St Lawrence River near Quebec City, is arguably his richest research site. Traquair refers to it often in The Old Architecture of Quebec, using the shortened form “I.O.” Traquair’s work on Île d’Orléans showcases his close working relationships with francophone colleagues. In the summer of 1925, he visited the island on the invitation of Marius Barbeau, pioneering anthropologist and folklorist.13 Barbeau and Traquair became frequent collaborators, relying on each other for expert advice from their respective fields. Spasoff describes how Barbeau would look at archival documents, while Traquair would examine a building.14 Between 1926 and 1932, they co-authored four articles on churches on Île d’Orléans, published in the Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Their collaboration resulted in sole-authored publications too. Spasoff argues that Barbeau’s book Québec: Where Ancient France Lingers was enriched by Traquair’s architectural knowledge and their travels together.15 In regular correspondence, Traquair advised Barbeau on the authenticity of sculpture, furniture, and other artisanal objects that interested Barbeau for museum collections. This correspondence is evidence of Traquair’s involvement and influence in francophone intellectual circles, where he openly shared his work and ideas. His collaboration and close friendship with bilingual Gordon Antoine Neilson, who was raised in French, may also have eased his entrée into francophone circles. Traquair was also linked to other major Quebec thinkers. In a 1941 review of Gérard Morisset’s book Coup d’oeil sur les arts en Nouvelle-France, Jean-Marie Gauvreau groups the renowned Quebec art historian with “the excellent books of Marius Barbeau, the professor Ramsay Traquair, de Pierre-Georges and Antoine Roy.”16 That same year, Barbeau notes in Le Canada Français that Traquair is advising Parks Canada architect Kenneth D. Harris on the architectural value of the habitations de Champlain, in Nova Scotia.17 Traquair’s work gets frequent mention in La Revue Trimestrielle, especially his research on historic religious buildings and artistic traditions of Quebec. Additionally, Traquair co-authored an article in La Revue Trimestrielle with Antoine Gordon Neilson and Olivier Maurault on the conservation of historic monuments in Quebec.18 Beyond Île d’Orléans, the city of Montreal occupies a significant role in the formation of Traquair’s theories. He asserts that a unique house type emerged from Montreal. “Especially round the city of Montreal we get an interesting type with heavy end gables and double chimneys” he scrawls on the final page of notes for a lecture on “Old Houses in the Province of Quebec” to the Art Association in 1921. In a typed manuscript in the same folder, entitled “Why We Admire Our Old Buildings,” Traquair elaborates and engages a language of strength and manliness: “This type must have originated in the city. It is very attractive in a strong, vigorous way.”19 Ramsay Traquair and Cultural Conservatism

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Montreal plays a second important role in Traquair’s architectural history of Quebec, as a negative influence on architectural progress. Urban, industrializing forces, he insists, have threatened the “old” and beloved historic buildings of New France. In the book he even uses the city’s monuments as illustrations of America’s corrupting influence: “In 1824 Notre Dame de Montréal was rebuilt in a bastard American Gothic,” he says. “This was the first great blow to the old French tradition.”20 This chapter, then, starts to explore the complex role of Montreal photographs in Traquair’s oeuvre. With an eye to assessing the function of measured drawings and photography in Traquair’s political positioning, we now turn to three case studies undertaken by Traquair: one published essay and two historic sites. All three are complicit in the overarching argument of The Old Architecture of Quebec, which included nearly 250 photographs, of which only ten showed buildings or artifacts in Montreal.21 DRAWINGS VS PHOTOS

In a book on photographic representation, it might be worthwhile to review the purpose of measured drawings. Measured drawings typically comprise a full set of plans, elevations, sections, and details documenting the state of an extant building at a particular time. Often undertaken for the purpose of architectural conservation or heritage to record a building in precise detail, they are usually done by architects or other specially trained heritage professionals, and are supported by state or national governments as a kind of inventory of a country’s historic architecture. The work of today’s National Trust in the United Kingdom, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, the Historic American Building Survey in the United States, and others find their roots in eighteenth-century projects such as James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens (1762), which served as a reference book to architects shaping neoclassical architecture in Europe. Traquair arrived in Montreal directly from years of training in measured drawings. He had a scholarship from the National Art Survey of Scotland, measuring and drawing “medieval buildings in Scotland.”22 During the summer of 1905, he was a student at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, working with Alexander Van Millingen on Byzantine churches in Greece and Constantinople; five years later he returned to the British School in Athens, but this time to study medieval antiquities. He was thus well versed in the culture of measuring buildings.23 The deep cultural value of measured drawings is that they are drafted to scale. As Traquair himself notes, the use of scale allows for easy comparison of buildings. In the modern period, measurements are recorded in standardized field notes, which also become part of the official record. While eighteenth-century architects had no 156

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cameras to complement their drawings and paintings of historic sites, they produced large-scale drawings and even paintings showing what they had seen. Interestingly, some paintings even showed the architects visiting the sites, as a form of evidence that they had actually been there. Unfortunately, there are no equivalents to this type of record in the Traquair archive, which would presumably be photographs showing the professor and his students out in the field measuring buildings. There are, nonetheless, dozens of sets of field notes undertaken by McGill students, which are signed and dated, showing where and when they undertook the work for Traquair (Fig. 7.2). And interestingly, the archives include records of the same building drawn by multiple students on the same date, as well as photographs, so we know that teams were on site together simultaneously, or in close proximity. For Traquair, the measured drawings were the primary and most valued output of his work with the students. They were highly prized because they were accurate and precise – they were almost considered “scientific” – a long tradition dating back to the Renaissance and booming after 1750.24 The apparent objectivity of measured drawings comes from the fact that they are orthographic projections drawn from actual measurements, and thus have no perspectival distortion. They are also scientific, in that they include all the dimensions of a building, its total massing. Traquair’s measured drawings typically include: a site plan, showing a building’s location with regard to property lines, roads, and major natural features; floor plans; cross-sections; exterior and interior elevations; and large-scale, interior details, from roofs, fireplaces, doors, and mouldings. The drawings of buildings reproduced in the book are mostly in the architectural scale of one-eighth inch equals one foot. Such scientific precision, as Upton has noted, gave the works “a pleasing sense of the immediacy of history.”25 The first known measured drawings of an American house were for the Hancock house in Boston, done in 1863;26 measured drawings appeared in professional journals in the United States in the 1880s.27 In the 1920s, however, roads and cars made it possible to undertake surveys of large areas outside cities, at the same time that roads and cars threatened historic buildings.28 To date, the role of photography in surveys of historic architecture has not been studied. Upton notes, however, that photography was a way to guarantee precision.29 I suggest that Traquair’s photographs had three important functions. Firstly, his photographs probably functioned like the previously mentioned paintings, which showed teams of architects measuring buildings: they proved that the visits had occurred. Secondly, as authenticating evidence, they also capture the way the building looked on the day the fieldwork was done. Some of Traquair’s photographs, for example, show evidence of such occupation, such as ladders leaning up against walls and cars parked on the road or driveway. They thus granted a degree Ramsay Traquair and Cultural Conservatism

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7.2 Student field notes from the Ferme Saint-Gabriel. Ramsay Traquair Fonds, John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection, McGill University Library.

of authenticity to the measured drawings, like graphic witnesses to the measuring process. Thirdly, photographs enhanced the final publication of Traquair’s measured drawings, by communicating to a wide audience with no need of architectural training. Everybody can understand a photograph of a house, while fewer people may understand its floor plan or cross-section. Photographs also often include the non-architectural context (sky, road, trees, etc.) and thus look more realistic and less abstract than a set of measured drawings. Photographs of buildings may have thus helped amateur readers comprehend the architectural drawings published in the book. In Traquair’s The Old Architecture of Quebec, photographs and drawings are presented separately. That was not the case for some of his American counterparts. J. Frederick Kelly’s drawings from Early Connecticut Architecture (1931) are “centrefold” style, across two pages, with black and white photos actually designed into the overall layout of the drawn page. Kelly is careful to state on the cover of the book that the drawings are “supplemented by photographs.” In Kelly’s case, the photo almost always shows what is depicted above or adjacent in the measured drawing. John Mead Howells’s Lost Examples of Colonial Architecture (1931) includes no measured drawings at all: only photographs. Traquair’s juxtaposition of drawings and photos thus amounted to a moderate privileging of photographs in a wide range of possible layout styles for architecture books. Beyond the use of photographs for documenting historic sites, photographs were in general essential tools in architectural education, allowing instructors like Traquair to expose students to a large number of buildings and concepts, while remaining in a university classroom. The most common use of photographs in architectural education, throughout the twentieth century, was the use of projected slides in order to teach architectural history. We know such slides were significant to Traquair from his earlier letter that year to Nobbs, and indeed he referred lovingly to the lantern slides he planned to bring with him: “I should feel frightfully stranded without my pet slides.”30 And even after he settled in Montreal, Traquair’s use of his own photos during lectures was a source of pride. In the 1929 yearbook report from The Architectural Society, for example, it was noted that Prof. Traquair used his own photographs for a lecture on “The Old Church Architecture of Quebec.”31 In the postwar period, architectural educators used 35 mm slides, and often made copies of old lantern slides in the new format.32 Showing pairs of slides became a common practice following the influence of Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History in 1915, in which the Swiss art historian famously explained historical change through contrasting pairs. Interestingly, Traquair’s lecture notes and photographic archives give no suggestion that he followed this tradition of projecting pairs of images. His lecture notes, typically written in longhand on lined paper and Ramsay Traquair and Cultural Conservatism

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numbered on folded pages (into a booklet form), suggest he showed only one photo at a time (singular images are named in the margin or underlined in the notes). CASE STUDIES: ONE ESSAY, TWO BUILDINGS

Although measured drawings were considered relatively “scientific,” as we have noted, Traquair’s scheme to have students “interact” with the buildings was in reality highly politicized. His careful documentation of Quebec’s disappearing historic architecture, that is, was more subjective than it may have seemed at first glance. This political message was communicated most blatantly in the texts that accompanied the drawings and photos. For example, he begins his article “The Cottages of Quebec” (1926) in what today would be considered highly patronizing tones: “The first settlers of French Canada were a simple people. The remote colony, with its severe winters and its unknown dangers, did not attract the wealthy or the noble and it was a peasant folk who came out to colonise New France.” Similar rhetoric can be found in tomes of measured drawings published in the United States. For example, consider architect Charles Morse Stotz, in his The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania (1936): “The simple construction of the early log dwellings in western Pennsylvania demanded little technical knowledge, and in the pressing need for shelter and protection architectural expression could receive scant attention.”33 Presumably speaking to English Canada in the popular magazine Canadian Homes and Gardens, Traquair took every opportunity to assess his beloved buildings as the fruit of honest work, and thereby superior to modern architecture: These old cottages of Quebec are one of the few genuine vernacular styles of North America. Their first inspiration was derived from old France and their structure still retains the imprint of this tradition. But during the many years of isolation from their Motherland, which has been the lot of French Canada, this original type has been moulded and adapted to Canadian life and climate. They are not, like so many of our modern houses, merely copies of European styles. They form a true style, simple and lacking perhaps in the graces of skilled ornamentation, but none the less well built, well adapted to their purpose and with the charm which always accompanies direct and honest work.34 Even though The Old Architecture of Quebec attracted wide coverage when it first appeared, it is rarely included in studies of the era. In what is surely proof of its influence at the time, art historian (and Soviet spy) Anthony Blunt reviewed it for Burlington Magazine in July 1949.35 Like others, Blunt picked up on Traquair’s 160

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finding that although the churches of Quebec are French “in feeling,” they share little with churches in Paris. Blunt explains this by saying that architects who immigrated to New France had been trained in the provinces, rather than Paris, and that such architects or their descendants were dependent on publications for information on French churches, with little real experience of the actual buildings of France. As a case-study essay, “The Cottages of Quebec” is typical of Traquair’s writing for a popular audience. It has seven pages of text, one page of measured drawings, and four pages of photographs. The four photo pages each have two photos, for a total of eight, showing seven house exteriors and one interior. Without exception, all seven exterior house photos document the buildings at an angle of approximately forty-five degrees, ensuring that both the front and side elevations of the house show nearly equally. Traquair’s photos almost always showcase houses in the middle ground of the pictorial space, framed by sky, ground cover, trees, fences, and sometimes adjacent houses or barns. No credit is given to the photographers and no date is indicated in captions. Such magazine pages are similar to photo pages in The Old Architecture of Quebec, but in the book, photographs appear as “Plates” and showcase separate images of four houses. Again, surprising to our contemporary graphic standards is the fact that the reader is required to rotate the book to see them properly. A superb case study from Traquair’s student documentation project, which also appeared in The Old Architecture of Quebec, is the Ferme Saint-Gabriel, in Pointe-Saint-Charles (commonly referred to today as the Maison Saint-Gabriel), the farm originally established to feed the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, which famously accommodated the filles du roi. Built in 1698, the Ferme Saint-Gabriel is, according to Traquair, one of two oldest houses in Quebec (the other being the 1696 presbytery at Batiscan). By the time Traquair and his students descended on this building, the city had expanded far beyond this site, and the Pointe itself was an industrially based, working-class neighbourhood. The site rates four and a half pages in the book, including: a photographic copy, credited to Notman, of a painting by Henry Richard S. Bunnett, The Saint-Gabriel Farmhouse (1886); two pages of measured drawings; and one plate with two interior photographs (Figs. 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, and 7.6). The Bunnett painting is noteworthy as part of a major commission offered by David Ross McCord to document the architectural heritage of the city. Traquair says with confidence that, although there has been some updating of the woodwork, the Ferme Saint-Gabriel structure, beams, and floors, and the “general form” of the house are all original. He describes it as a typical small manor house: 52' x 30', with rubble-stone walls two feet thick, following a typical plan of two asymmetrical rooms (community room and kitchen). A detailed description of the house construction follows, in which he compares the Ferme Saint-Gabriel to Batiscan and the Hôpital général de Québec in Quebec City. Ramsay Traquair and Cultural Conservatism

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7.3 Plate XII. “The Ferme Saint-Gabriel, from a painting by H. Bunnett in the McCord Museum.” Photo: Notman, Montreal. Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec, 36. 7.4 Henry Richard S. Bunnett, The Saint-Gabriel Farmhouse, 1886. Oil on canvas. 31 x 41 cm. Gift of David Ross McCord. M733. © McCord Museum. 7.5 Measured drawings of the Ferme Saint-Gabriel. Represented in Plate XV, Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec, 40. Ramsay Traquair Fonds, John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection, McGill University Library. 7.6 Plate XIV. “The Ferme St. Gabriel, Montreal. Two views in the Community Room.” Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec, 39.

The Traquair archive at the John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection contains about seventy-six drawings and fifty photographs of the Ferme SaintGabriel. Some archival documents identify Traquair as the photographer and others have no photographer listed; many are undated, and some are dated 1915, 1929, and 1931, perhaps suggesting that the students undertook separate measuring exercises in those three years. The drawings, however, range in dates from 1928 to 1936, and also include some undated sheets. Two photos, dated 1925 (possibly misdated), of the “second granary” and the chapel credit professional photographer Edgar Gariépy.36 As noted in the archival finding aid, there is some chance that the Gariépy and other photos may have come later, thanks to the later director of the school, John Bland, and simply ended up with the Traquair material. There is also some question about the whereabouts of the archives during Traquair’s retirement in Nova Scotia and the fate of some documents upon his death in 1952. Researchers should be cautious, therefore, about presuming that extant photographs and/or drawings represent the complete collection. We can be sure, however, that Traquair obtained major collections of photos in 1918 (Hart collection, dating from 1880) and in 1920 (A.C. Hutchison donated fifteen hundred lantern slides).37 Among the photos of the Ferme Saint-Gabriel, those photos of house interiors that are identified as his are particularly poignant. Photographing architectural interiors allowed Traquair to focus on and record furniture, silver, and other artifacts that particularly interested him. Many of the photos feature views into corners, and many show an emphasis on architectural details. Unfortunately, it is difficult to know exactly when the image was captured. Photograph 102000 is variously dated from 1929 and 1939. It is one of the two images reproduced as Plate XIV in his book (Fig. 7.6). The photograph is a view into the corner of the “community room,” one of two major rooms in the Ferme Saint-Gabriel, including two windows with open shutters, tables and chairs, a wall cupboard, deep wooden beams and framing of ceiling, two framed prints on the wall, and shiny hardwood floor. Particularly remarkable in this photo is the inclusion of a wall telephone, a clear sign of modernity. The shuttered window and thick wall of Ferme Saint-Gabriel is also showcased in Photograph 102002, which features flowerpots in the sink and a wire hanging from a beam (Fig. 7.7). This photograph is identified in another file with the initials RT, is entitled “Window and Stone Sink,” and was published as a comparative image in his paper on the Batiscan presbytery. Field notes from the students’ work at Ferme Saint-Gabriel are extensive, including plans and elevations. Happily, the dates coincide with the photo collections, especially 1929 and 1931. From September 1929, we have a complete fieldwork notebook by Campbell Merrett and Wilfred Onions, who focused on measuring

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7.7 Ramsay Traquair, Interiors of the Hôpital Général (left) and of the Ferme Saint-Gabriel (right). Ramsay Traquair Fonds, John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection, McGill University Library. 7.8 Adrien Hébert, Le Château Ramezay, Montréal, c. 1930. Etching, first state. 48.1 x 31.5 cm (sheet); 33.3 x 27.1 cm (image). Collection: Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Gift of Bernard Desroches. (1983.18.01.) Photographer: MNBAQ, Patrick Altman.

the roof and cornice and window details. Jean J. Thibodeau, on 20 September 1929, documented the Ferme’s ironwork, including grills, hooks for logs, and stove shovels. Harold J. Doran did very distinctive large-scale drawings of the hinges on the sideboard and the edges of doors, a wooden candlestick, and a shutter lock. Measured drawings of hinges, utensils, and so on, by John Kendall Wholever, are likely from 1929, since he graduated in 1930. The McGill yearbook, Old McGill, describes “Cap” Wholever as a football player, theatre director, rower, and wrestler.38 The students whose names emerge from the Ferme Saint-Gabriel fieldwork archives are an extraordinary group. Campbell Merrett went on to lead one of the major modernist firms of the city, Barott, Marshall, Montgomery, and Merrett, designing bold additions to the Royal Victoria Hospital and the interiors of Central Station. Wilfred Onions became “Bermuda’s best-known and most influential architect of the 20th century.”39 Jean J. Thibodeau designed many houses in the Town of Mount Royal with his brother Marc, under the firm name Thibodeau & Thibodeau. Harold Doran specialized in apartment buildings, and designed the Benny Farm Housing project in 1947–48, a model project for returning Second World War veterans. Future celebrated painter and architect Harry Mayerovitch produced a vertical page of three plans, four elevations, and a section. Montreal’s Château de Ramezay is Traquair’s example of what he defines as “the urban type,” a “gabled house of the Montreal district.”40 Unlike the Ferme Saint-Gabriel, which was and still is surrounded by green space, this building is thoroughly embedded in the urban structure of the old city, as can be seen in a contemporaneous etching by Montreal artist Adrien Hébert (1890–1967) (Fig. 7.8). The building’s fabric had been largely replaced by the time the Scottish architect and McGill students measured and drew it over the years from 1922 to 1935, during which time they produced no fewer than sixty-eight drawings. Traquair’s explication of the type is purely functionalist: “This type, which originated in the needs of a street house, came to be used in free-standing houses, particularly in the district round Montreal,” he says in the book.41 According to Traquair’s theory, the masonry gable walls served as “fire gables” along densely packed city streets. Traquair’s speculation, however, is that this street-house type eventually evolved into a detached country house, despite the fact that country houses were at less risk of catching fire from a close neighbour. The Château de Ramezay is represented in a single plate of measured drawings in The Old Architecture of Quebec, showing changes made to the plan, as well as the house’s vaulted basement in section.42

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CULTURAL CONSERVATISM

Ramsay Traquair’s measured drawings project was closely linked to his cultural conservatism. Interestingly, his magazine articles that articulated his conservative views never included photographs, only text. His love of military tactics and Scottish dress is captured in a photograph taken by Campbell Merrett that shows Traquair with a bayonet, attacking a potato sack, possibly stuffed with straw, which appears tied to an overturned stool with a counterweight between its legs, all meant to simulate the height and mass of an enemy soldier. When he retired to Guysborough, Nova Scotia, in 1939, he fished, drank tea, and wore a kilt every day.43 Traquair excluded women from architecture by using language associated with manliness to describe his beloved buildings: virile, pure, and honest. His active exclusion of women from the architectural profession is also evident in yearbook photos. As I have explained in a co-authored book published in 2000 on Canadian women architects, including women was a significant way to modernize a school or office.44 Women architects were part of the apparatus of modern architecture, and so it is perhaps not surprising that he wanted nothing to do with them. In two articles published in the 1920s in the Atlantic, Traquair surveys what he sees as women’s negligible contributions to the fine arts, science, philosophy, and religion, and then blames the influence of mothers and women teachers for what he describes as the inevitable “intellectual death” of contemporary society.45 “Woman takes but she never gives back, for, as we have seen, what woman takes becomes womanly and therefore forbidden to men,” he warned in 1929.46 Photographs of Traquair in McGill’s yearbooks show him surrounded by male students (Fig. 7.9). A typical example is the group portrait from 1931, which includes several students whose names appear in the Ferme Saint-Gabriel fieldwork (see Doran, Mayerovitch). Traquair occupies the centre of the photo and sits on a wooden armchair, while two students stand and two others are in armless chairs, a nod to his status, age, and position of authority. The first woman was admitted to the school only in 1939, following Traquair’s retirement and move to Guysborough. Not surprisingly, Traquair remained unmarried, always preferring the company of men. His closest friend was likely Gordon Antoine Neilson, with whom he worked from 1928 to 1937. Neilson served as an assistant to Traquair, who warmly dedicated The Old Architecture of Quebec to him. In his book on silver, Traquair refers to Neilson as both his “companion and assistant.”47 Neilson died prematurely in 1942; Lucie K. Morisset sees Neilson as a major player in Quebec and Canadian heritage studies.48 Traquair’s position on the superiority of men was echoed in his views on race. In language that is offensive to us today, he denigrates Indigenous peoples and 166

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7.9 Photographer unknown, Group Portrait of Traquair and Male Students. In Students’ Society of McGill University, Old McGill (1931), 34. Courtesy of McGill University Libraries.

African-Americans. Asians (“Orientals”), Eastern Europeans, and Jews, whom he calls “aliens,” were also targets of his racism. He argued against assimilation through intermarriage. Traquair’s racism was informed by his understanding of the international Arts and Crafts movement and its relation to preserving Quebec folk culture. In Traquair’s view, Quebec “folk” were charmingly traditional and resistant to modernity, perhaps unchanged since the day they colonized Indigenous land. This unflinching view of French-Canadians as “pure” provided a racist backdrop against which he described other groups. In his article “The Caste System of North America,” he speaks directly to Jewish readers: “The Jews at present constitute more than a quarter of the population of New York. They are segregating themselves in all the great cities. They neither convert nor are converted. If you are a Jew, you remain one, with all the great traditions of your race. If you are not – you can never be one.”49 He then revisits his beloved French-Canadians of Quebec, who he describes as virile and flourishing, whose culture is preserved by “strict segregation.” Ramsay Traquair and Cultural Conservatism

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ANTI-MODERNISM

Returning to the not-unrelated architectural argument, it might have seemed to Traquair that having McGill students interact with unique, genuine, natural, charming, and honest buildings out in the Quebec landscape positioned them against the advancing tide of modern architecture, especially in Europe. Quebec architecture attracted Traquair because it connected New France to Europe. For him, documenting such buildings was the next-best thing to a trip to France. Traquair’s Quebec, that is, was not an exotic, othered land but rather a North American sequel to the French Renaissance, in addition to an era of racial “purity.” Traquair notes the French-ness of the churches, in the style of carving, shape of wood panels, mouldings, and methods of framing. Nevertheless, and as a significant piece of his colonializing, anti-modernist stance, Traquair assessed Quebec churches, like the cottages, as distinct from those of France. Of Quebec churches he remarks: “Every feature is French but one would search France vainly for a Quebec parish church.”50 Indeed, his position on regionalist architecture is one of cultural adaptation: “Architecture is a living art; like all living things it moulds itself naturally to its environment … in this way each country develops its own architecture, if allowed to do so without the interference of the stylist or the pedant, and the modernist pedant is quite as dangerous as his archaeological brother.”51 “Each country developing its own architecture” – or regionalism – was a major theme at the turn of the twentieth century. Regionalism flourished everywhere in Europe, and was often tied to strong nationalist ideologies. We need only think of, for example, the development of the heimatkunst movement in Germany. In England, architects William Lethaby, Norman Shaw, and William Eden Nesfield sketched old English cottages, inspired by William Morris. Hermann Muthesius’s Das Englishe Haus appeared in 1904, with a recuperative tone very similar to Traquair’s. Note that, as a German in England, Muthesius was an interloper, like Traquair, a stranger in a strange land. Regionalist vernacular architecture writing argues for buildings as both rooting and essentializing. Authors like Traquair see the house as growing out of its locale. A young John Ruskin, for example, linked the Swiss cottage to “sturdy peasant virtues.”52 What differentiated Traquair, however, from many European architects who went on to build using “local” idioms, was that he used the architecture of New France to repudiate modernism. Traquair’s regionalism was paternalistic rather than nationalistic: he saw himself as the custodian of “local” civilization, until the colonists, whom he was educating, were sufficiently “educated” to maintain it themselves. Of special interest is his conceptualization of the architecture as natural: growing, rooting, moulding, evolving, and changing with climate. Traquair didn’t mean by 168

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7.10 Houses with bell-cast roofs. Plate XXVII: “House at Sault au Récollet. Houses at Oka.” Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec, 62.

this that the house actually grew without forethought, or that the shape of the house was determined by the weather. What he did mean, instead, is that architecture changed over time. His precise idea is well illustrated by the famous Quebec bell-cast roof (Fig. 7.10). Traquair insisted that this signature feature of Quebec roofs appeared only after a certain time period, in other words that they were absent early on. His explanation is thus based on social, rather than environmental, determinism. “The curving roof tends to hold the snow and to form icicles: it is not a good winter roof,” he pointed out. He instead says it was based on veneration: “it was apparently admired since all but the earliest houses have the bellcast,” he explains.53 Traquair saw modernism as a destructive force in the preservation of his beloved New France. He never missed an opportunity to condemn the architecture produced by many architects of his own generation. Note that several of the students who did his measured drawings – Harry Mayerovitch, Campbell Merrett, and John Bland, to name only a few – went on to become pioneers of modernism in Montreal, despite (and perhaps even because of) Traquair’s conservative curriculum. In an extraordinarily frank memoir by Campbell Merrett, written about 1984, for example, it is clear that students had been aware of Traquair’s hindering effect on the school: “We wrote a critique of the McGill School of Architecture, still far behind the times, which resulted in preventing its being closed and instead given new life. (At a dinner we gave for poor old Traquair on his retirement he complimented us on our report even though it laid on him indirectly much of the blame for the School’s decline).”54 It is possible that The Old Architecture of Quebec may have had the opposite effect to that intended by Traquair. Hazen Sise, for example, who had left the school in 1927 in reaction to its backward curriculum,55 reviewed Traquair’s book for Canadian Art in 1948, completely missing the point about architecture as evolutionary and adaptive. He interprets The Old Architecture of Quebec as an assurance that Quebec will adapt to modernism, as he notes had already happened in Brazil and America: “Thus today, when we are again beginning to import a new architectural manner, we should have no fear of it as an alien importation irritating to our self-esteem or to its new surroundings. We will soon fashion it to our own uses and in doing so it will become ours.”56 He also declares in his review – likely to Traquair’s horror – that the style of New France is now “dead,” describing it thus: “the Laurentian hillsides are breaking into a rash of colourful little houses with bell-cast roofs whose ancestry can be more accurately traced to Christmas cards than to the genuine article.”

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CONCLUSION

Traquair revealed the architecture of New France in measured drawings and photographs produced from 1924 to 1939. Although measuring buildings was considered pseudo-scientific, Traquair linked what he claimed was a natural and evolutionary architecture to arguments for a number of culturally conservative positions, against modernism, Americanization, the increasing visibility of women, and cultural diversity. His assessment of the Quebec rural house as functional and connected to the soil was proof, according to Traquair, that modernism was senseless. He understood American culture and architecture as a threat to Canadian and Quebec values, especially the typology which would indeed come to dominate the twentieth century, the skyscraper. As a university administrator and architect, Traquair fought vehemently to keep women out of the profession, and he was equally averse to racial diversity. Architectural photography served as a tool to Traquair in constructing his own legacy, as an influential educator and researcher, but also toward his cultural conservatism. Its positive outcome, however, was that Traquair’s drawing and photography project provided young architects (and readers) with real, hands-on experience of buildings.

NOTES 1 Spasoff, “Building on Social Power,” 11. 2 Mathers, review of Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec, 335. 3 Spasoff, “Building on Social Power.” On Nobbs and Traquair, see Adams, “‘Glad of Your Help.’” 4 Murray et al., Ramsay Traquair: The Architectural Heritage of Quebec, accessed 31 May 2020, http:// cac.mcgill.ca/traquair/index.htm. Note that many photos in the Traquair fonds are by other photographers, and some were acquired after his death. See John Bland, “Introduction to the Traquair Archive,” in Blackader-Lauterman Library of Architecture and Art, Ramsay Traquair and His Successors, 3–4. 5 Ramsay Traquair to Percy Nobbs, 21 May 1913, John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection, McGill University. 6 Traquair, “Architecture and Geography,” 162. 7 Ibid, 12. 8 Traquair, “The Caste System of North America,” 419. 9 Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec, xvii. 10 Upton, “The Story of the Book,” xi. 11 Spasoff, Building on Social Power, 42. 12 Blackader-Lauterman Library of Architecture and Art, Ramsay Traquair: Guide to the Archive, 13. 13 Spasoff, “Marius Barbeau and Ramsay Traquair,” 97. 14 Ibid.

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15 Ibid, 99. 16 Gauvreau, “Coup d’oeil sur les Arts en Nouvelle-France: Un ouvrage de grand mérite,” 8. 17 Barbeau, “Types de maisons canadiennes,” 36. 18 Traquair, Maurault, and Neilson, “La conservation des monuments historiques dans la province de Québec,” 1–23. 19 See Folder 35/14/160 in the Ramsay Traquair Fonds, John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection, McGill University Library. 20 Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec, 2. 21 This is a rough estimate given that some communities depicted might today be considered part of Montreal. 22 Blackader-Lauterman Library of Architecture and Art, Ramsay Traquair and His Successors, 8. 23 Gournay, “The First Leaders of McGill’s School of Architecture: Stewart Henbest Capper, Percy Nobbs, and Ramsay Traquair,” 60. 24 Upton, “The Story of the Book,” xviii. 25 Ibid., xxi. 26 Ibid., xix. 27 Ibid., xx. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., xxi. 30 Ramsay Traquair to Percy Nobbs, 1 July 1913, Ramsay Traquair Fonds, John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection, McGill University Library. 31 Old McGill (1929), 189. https://yearbooks.mcgill.ca 32 On the development of McGill’s slide collection, see Adams, “‘With Precision Appropriate,’” 18–19. 33 Stotz, The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania, 19. 34 Traquair, “The Cottages of Quebec,” 14. 35 Blunt, review of The Old Architecture of Quebec, 208. 36 It is possible that many more of the photos in this file are by Gariépy, as some match those in the Archives de Montréal. Indeed, Traquair collected photographs from several well-known photographers during his career, including M.E. Massicotte, Livernois Ltd, and the Notman Studio. His friend and colleague Gordon Antoine Neilson also took photos that are in the collection. 37 Blackader-Lauterman Library of Architecture and Art, Ramsay Traquair and His Successors, 112. 38 Old McGill (1930), 159. 39 “Wilfred Richmond ‘Wil’ Onions,” Bermuda Bios. 40 Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec, 51. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 49. 43 Schoenauer, “History by Norbert Schoenaur,” 14. 44 Adams and Tancred, ‘Designing Women.’ 45 Traquair, “Women and Civilization,” 296. 46 Traquair, “A Regiment of Women,” 350.

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47 See Traquair’s acknowledgments, The Old Silver of Quebec, n.p. On Neilson, see Noppen and Morisset, Les églises du Québec, 145–8. 48 Morisset, “But What Are We Really Talking About?” 13, 42, 43. 49 Traquair, “The Caste System of North America,” 422. 50 Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec, 135. 51 Traquair, “The Old Architecture of French Canada,” 608. 52 Giberti, “The Chalet as Archetype,” 58. 53 Traquair, “The Cottages of Quebec,” 11. See n28. 54 Private diary entry of Campbell Merrett, “1934–1977 Profession,” 61, sent by email from Brian Merrett on 20 September 2016. 55 Valen, “Hazen Edward Sise and the History of Modern Architecture at McGill, 1949–1957,” 34. 56 Sise, “New Books on the Arts,” 147–50.

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8.

A Heuristic Archive: Jean-Paul Gill’s Red Light Photographs Philippe Guillaume

In 1957, a photographer named Jean-Paul Gill (1928–2015) was instructed by his employer, the City of Montreal, to document the old Red Light District (in French, Quartier du Red Light), as it was about to be demolished. This was a densely populated area at the city centre, where narrow streets linked two- to three-storey tenement buildings, old houses, warehouses, and neighbourhood stores of various sorts. Gill’s photos show this part of town as it was being prepared for a new utopian, government-run housing project known as Les Habitations Jeanne-Mance. Working with a city employee from the Buildings section, Gill photographed the area for three months, producing over one thousand black and white negatives, which are held by the Archives of the City of Montreal.1 For decades, this substantial corpus was preserved, but mostly forgotten. Gill’s photos of the Red Light have resurfaced in recent articles and publications looking at demolition and urban renewal projects, and as interest rekindled in Montreal’s built-landscape eradication during the 1950s and 1960s. Having initially served as visual testimony to the demolition of the famous area at the heart of the city, they now illustrate what was lost. The photographs have yet to be examined from a photo-historical perspective. As I shall argue, situating this series of images in the photographic history of commissions or projects produced in times of urban reform reframes Gill’s photos as more than the factual documentation of a bygone era.

A THING OF THE PAST

In the 1950s, Montreal was forecast as a city of the future. A municipal government report produced a strategic plan that would result in the elimination of the slum area along Saint-Laurent Boulevard that included part of the old Red Light neighbourhood. On 8 October 1954, the Plan Dozois was approved by the City of Montreal’s executive committee; a subsidy from the provincial government for the project was also agreed to in principle by then-Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis. The plan, officially titled “Projet de rénovation d’une zone d’habitat défectueux et de construction d’habitation à loyer modique,” had the twofold objective of eliminating old run-down zones in Montreal, while at the same time providing new, affordable housing (Fig. 8.1). Urban design historian Marc H. Choko points out that this part of the city was also a prime real-estate zone, meaning the main interest in this urban renewal plan was economically motivated.2 Above all, the construction of modern housing in this prime zone was seen as a viable strategy toward gentrification, positively influencing economic development, while directly benefiting municipal tax revenues; this was also supposed to provide a positive model for other slum or low-income neighbourhoods in the city. The report makes no mention of the history of the neighbourhood – its seedy reputation as a hotspot of red-light activity. Indeed, red-light districts are those areas “containing many brothels, strip clubs, etc.”3 – the term evokes the old red lanterns on the doors of bordellos. Montreal’s Red Light District was historically concentrated along a few city blocks east of the intersection of Saint-Laurent and Saint-Catherine. Situated in the eastern part of the old Faubourg Saint-Laurent (which became the Quartier Saint-Louis in 1845 and Quartier Crémazie in 1921),4 it was never an official district, although it was the epicentre of prostitution during the first half of the twentieth century. The earliest printed record for the term “red light” as a designation for sexual commerce dates from 1879, in a paper by the American Public Health association.5 The term was well known at Montreal City Hall when the Coderre Commission during the mid-twenties6 officially revealed their findings: three hundred brothels, and two thousand women and young girls were servicing the sex trade in Montreal’s Red Light District.7 But by the time Gill was conducting his photographic macrosurvey of the area, the prostitutes were mostly gone and the area’s brothels had been closed down for well over a decade. The economic life in the area had strongly declined, and since the neighbourhood was on the brink of demolition, many people had already moved away, even if their homes had not been expropriated. By the 1950s, Montreal’s Red Light neighbourhood had been around for over a century. Its perimeter varied over time, stretching during its most expansive

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8.1 Jean-Paul Gill, Red Light Demolition, 1957. Digital reproduction from original black and white negative. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM94-40_3-240.

period, the early decades of the twentieth century, between Sherbrooke and Craig8 to the north and south on the northern fringe of Old Montreal, and Saint-Denis and Bleury to the east and west. At the turn of the twentieth century, Montreal was the country’s nucleus for maritime and rail transportation, as well as its principal financial centre. This was also a period of demographic inflation, as the city’s population more than doubled; in the working-class district of Sainte-Marie alone, the population rose from 13,695 to 54,910 inhabitants between 1871 and 1911.9 Montreal had established itself as the country’s metropolis, and French-Canadians were moving to the city from the countryside to work in factories alongside immigrants, freshly arrived from overseas. The Second World War marked a period of economic prosperity for Montreal businesses, as well as for the underground economy; the war industry created jobs 176

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in the city’s factories, and unemployment was altogether non-existent, all of which meant increased incomes for Montrealers, which in turn benefited illicit forms of commercial activity. But a major sector of activity in the Red Light faced a serious obstacle. In the early months of 1944, following an ultimatum delivered by the Canadian Armed Forces, civil authorities took radical measures in an attempt to halt prostitution in the city. The army claimed that a significant number of their men were already handicapped with venereal diseases before they even reached the front. Army statistics showed that over three-quarters of the infections that had contaminated 4,007 men were transmitted in the Red Light.10 As Daniel Proulx recounts, “In January 1944, Major-General E.-J. Renaud delivered an ultimatum to Montreal authorities: if prostitution was not wiped out in the Red Light, the metropolis would be declared off-limits for the military.”11 It was at this point that the bawdy houses were closed down, although prostitution was not eliminated, and the “girls” continued their activity in the area, working from rented spaces and on the street.12 Proulx describes the scene: Nous sommes au milieu des années 1950, le Red Light est maintenant chose du passé. Il n’y a plus, aux fenêtres des lupanars, des filles qui font des signes aux passants, et les croupiers des tripots ont été mis hors de circulation. Les barons des bas-fonds ont dû s’adapter aux circonstances. Leurs protégés ont jeté leur dévolu sur les boîtes de nuit tandis que l’on joue gros dans ces clubs privés dits « à charte » où la discrétion est à l’ordre du jour.13 (We are in the middle of the 1950s, the Red Light is now a thing of the past. There are no longer girls signalling passersby from the brothel windows, and the croupiers working the dives have been put out of circulation. The barons of the squalid area have had to adapt to circumstances. Their proteges have turned toward night clubs, while the stakes are high in these private clubs with their own codes where discretion is the order of the day.) The social historian Danielle Lacasse notes that not much had changed for the working girls and brothels, who were privy to police protection.14 Her study of female prostitution in Montreal also shows that, between 1945 and 1957, 20 per cent or less of the women arrested for prostitution in the city tested positive for syphilis, at the time the most prevalent form of venereal disease among prostitutes; by the time Gill was documenting the Red Light the number had decreased significantly to 5 per cent.15 Jean-Paul Gill’s Red Light Photographs

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In fact, while the First World War had contributed to the expansion and prosperity of the sex trade in this part of the city, the final years of the Second World War brought on its collapse. The army’s ultimatum was only one in a multiplicity of causes and circumstances. Starting in 1944, La Ligue de vigilance sociale (Social Vigilance League), led by lawyer Jean Penverne, initiated a large-scale campaign, with popular citizen support, to set the city back on a virtuous path.16 The election of young lawyer Jean Drapeau (1916–1999) as mayor in 1954 was the political culmination of this righteous thrust for reform that would rapidly change the city’s social and built environments, in the name of a modernist urban credo. Camilien Houde (1889–1958) was ending his third mandate as city mayor when the Plan Dozois was published in 1954; he had been at the helm for a decade. Drapeau took over until the fall of 1957, when he was replaced for three years by Sarto Fournier. While the demolition of the Red Light area is often associated with Drapeau’s grand plans for the city, the plan came from previous administrations, and Drapeau was in fact adamantly opposed to the project. The year of the neighbourhood demolition, he published Main Arguments against Field-Dozois Plan, his own rebuttal of the Dozois recommendation in seven arguments; the document was co-signed by the chairman of the city’s executive committee, Pierre DesMarais, and published by the Civic Action League. Their attack on the plan includes a critique of its photographic representation: “The Dozois Plan with its colored relief plan, its green-painted lawns, its plastic trees, and its push-button sun, offers an easy transition from the scenes of misery which the photographer carefully selects for dramatic effects. Nothing more is needed to evoke heartfelt sentiments. That is the classical example of what Sir Wilfrid Laurier said: ‘The people do not have opinions; they have only feelings.’”17 Many of the photos Gill took of the area are replete with social documentary’s “dramatic effects” (Fig. 8.2), and in fact the mayor was not against the idea of low-cost rental housing itself. Drapeau condemned the plan for its “abhorrent and dangerous concentration of low income people,”18 and he also disputed the choice of location – a zone at the centre of town that he instead wanted to promote as a dynamic connecting zone for business between the eastern and western parts of the city. While he also criticized the cost of expropriation involved and the choice of high-rise apartments as a solution to the density of population, he summarized this point, saying: “People will be crowded one upon the other instead of alongside one another. Therefore, the social problem remains the same: vertical promiscuity is as iniquitous as horizontal promiscuity.”19 Drapeau also refers to slum-clearing projects in New York and Toronto, and he includes the voices of experts, offering solutions in matters of public housing. His point was that “when communism has become a political philosophy against which all right-minded people should fight,”20 the solution should be left to private investment. 178

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8.2 Jean-Paul Gill, Red Light, 1957. Digital reproduction from original black and white negative. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM94-40_3-020.

The photographs Gill took while the bulldozers were preparing to demolish the area and Drapeau was still ranting over Dozois’s plan may be read as anthropological data from a period when Montreal was a booming Canadian metropolis that aspired to be a second-to-none world-class city, while paranoia about the threat of communism was omnipresent at all levels of provincial and municipal governments. But the resurrection of Gill’s photographs, and their interpretation as evidence of heritage over half a century after they were taken, reveal binary mindsets, each with its own Zeitgeist. Gill’s photographs can be thought of as a heuristic heritage that complicates not only the temporal status of a neighbourhood but also this archive’s photographic historicism; these photographs can continue to impact our interpretations of a long-gone neighbourhood. An article by Martin Drouin, in which the urban scholar examines the prevailing beliefs that defined Jean-Paul Gill’s Red Light Photographs

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attitudes toward slums and heritage in Montreal between 1954 and 1973, also detects biases – including those of Mayor Drapeau – in the photos taken of the Red Light: En apposant une étiquette aussi dévalorisante à un secteur dont les problèmes étaient de différentes natures – et pas seulement liés au cadre bâti –, la logique voulait qu’en éliminant les édifices touchés, la solution soit en partie trouvée. Ces représentations sont perceptibles dans les images utilisées pour parler des taudis. Nous prendrons à témoin celles véhiculées dans les médias et dans les documents officiels. Les prises de vue se faisaient généralement dans l’arrière-cour. On y voyait principalement des structures en bois : hangars, balcons et clôtures dont le poids des âges était plus que visible. Les cours en terre battue ajoutaient à l’atmosphère insalubre des bâtiments. Il est toutefois surprenant de découvrir d’autres images des édifices dénoncés. Le Service d’urbanisme de la Ville de Montréal a en effet réalisé des reportages photographiques dans le cadre des études préliminaires aux opérations de rénovation urbaine. Les bâtiments étaient alors photographiés de la rue. Des façades en brique ou en revêtement de pierre s’alignent les unes après les autres. À peu près rien ne signale le caractère vétuste des édifices. Le choix des images, comme celui des mots, n’était pas innocent. Au contraire, il renforça les représentations que l’on se faisait des zones de taudis.21 (Affixing such a debasing label to a sector where problems were of a varied nature – and not only linked to the built environment – the logical solution seemed to be to eliminate the buildings in question. This form of reasoning is evident in the images used to discuss the slums. Most telling are those transmitted in the media and in official documents. The pictures were usually taken from the backyard. One saw mostly wooden structures: hangars, balconies, and fences, where the weight of time was more than visible. The earth-covered yards added to the insalubrious atmosphere of the buildings. It is nonetheless surprising to discover other images of the denounced buildings. The City of Montreal’s urbanism service did in fact produce photographic documents in the context of preliminary studies for their urban renovation project. Buildings were then photographed from the street. Brick or stone covered facades follow one another. Barely anything signals the decrepit state of the buildings. The choice of images, as that of words, was not innocent. On the contrary, these reinforced the perception that was formed of these slum zones.)

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A closer examination of Gill’s photographs reveals an ambiguous methodology, as the aesthetic capital throughout this body of images fluctuates from careless composition to controlled arrangement, while certain images evoke the social documentary approach associated with street photography. But whatever the organization and framework of the photographs individually, the overall corpus of images is clearly made to signify a slum environment. While ultimately little is known about Jean-Paul Gill, attention to the photographer’s employment history up to the period he was assigned to photograph the Red Light provides significant details toward understanding the photos he took of the neighbourhood in 1957.22 A PHOTOGRAPHER PREPARES

While he was employed by the City for the better part of his professional career, his employee record shows that Gill started with photography doing general darkroom tasks working for La Photo Mobile on Sainte-Catherine Street East in Montreal and Studio Sauvageau in Drummondville. His first job with the City was with the police department, where in 1951 he was hired as “Photographe grade 1.” According to the “Civil Service Commission” questionnaire he completed for the City in 1952, his primary task was photographing taxi drivers. For this he used a Graflex Identification Unit Camera. He also handled all general darkroom interventions up to the dry mounting of the photographs onto special cards he would seal with acetate sheets using a Carver Laminating Press. The equipment he listed as composing the principal tools of his trade were: the Graflex Identification Unit that included a camera; Kodak dry-mounting press, 11x14 dry cab model 1; Kodak tacking iron; Carver laminating press; drying rack; special large-character typewriter; standard typewriter; Pako print washer; and Pako drum dryer. For an administrative questionnaire describing the classification of his position, Gill described his work:

SALLE DE POSE PHOTOGRAPHIQUE

Je photographie les chauffeurs de taxis avec un appareil “Graflex Indentification [sic] Unit Camera,” ayant soin de prendre note du nom du chauffeur, sa qualité, son adresse, son numéro de poche et son numéro de photo.

TRAVAIL DE LABORATOIRE

Préparation de solution chimiques: Chaque ingrédient est pesé et mis en quantité nécessaire pour chaque solution voulue. Tel que: Elon, Sodium sulphite et sulfite, Hydroquinone, potassium bromide, sodium carbonate, potassium alum etc.

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TRAVAIL DE CHAMBRE NOIRE

Je fais tout le travail général de chambre noire: Développement et impression du film, soit en grandeur nature ou en projection.

PHOTO FINISHING ou Procédé final:

Une fois la photo terminée, celle-ci est “drymounted” ou collée sur une carte spéciale à cet effet, pour ensuite être cuite ou scellée entre deux feuilles d’acétate au moyen de la “Carver Laminating Press.”23

(PHOTOGRAPHIC POSE ROOM

I photograph taxi drivers with a Graflex Indentification [sic] Unit camera, with care to note the driver’s name, his qualities, his address, his bag number, and his photo number.

LABORATORY WORK

Chemical solution preparation: Each ingredient is weighed and added in the necessary quantity for the desired solution. Such as: elon, sodium sulfite, hydroquinone, potassium bromide, sodium carbonate, potassium alum, etc.

DARKROOM WORK

I do all general darkroom work: development and printing of film, in fullsize or for projection.

PHOTOFINISHING or final process:

Once the photo is finished, it is “drymounted” [sic] or glued onto a special card made for this, and then cooked or sealed between two acetate sheets with the Carver Laminating Press.)

His account describes with confidence his knowledge and application of the various components involved in the photographic process that he controlled, which go beyond merely taking photographs. Gill mastered all steps in the process, from the release of the shutter to the dry-mounting of the photographic print, along with mixing the photographic chemicals for developing the film and printing. While this early form of DIY was not uncommon for serious amateur and professional photographers, it suggests that the efficiency and dexterity Gill brought to his work were not acquired at the police academy but rather that he possessed the skills usually expected of a professional photographer. 182

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8.3 Jean-Paul Gill, Chanteuse Édith Piaf et chanteur Jacques Pills: Hôte Jean Drapeau, 10 mai 1955, 1955. Digital reproduction from original black and white negative. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM94-Z1822-01.

To describe his work documenting cabbies, Gill notes his methodology, listing each phase in the process in an orderly fashion. He employs the term “care” (“ayant soin”) to indicate he is in control of his actions, aiming for the best possible result. The Graflex Identification Unit used for the task is also well known for its use in making employee-identification cards, but it is its association with mug shots for which it is notorious. In this controlled setting, there is no room for compositional variety. The person photographed is expected to co-operate by standing still, facing the camera, while the operator ensures the subject is centred before taking the photo. Gill’s employment with the police department and his related occupation producing mug shots connects his work with the tradition of Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), a French photographer with the Paris police for the better part of his life, who initiated the use of full-face and profile portraits for the purpose of identification. One of the striking characteristics of biometric photography is the inclusion of a distinct reference number for identification within the picture. The numbering of specific places in Gill’s Red Light photos relates to an established tradition of using Jean-Paul Gill’s Red Light Photographs

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photographs as a scientific means of identification that was already established before Bertillon’s arrival at the Paris police department and a century before Gill’s Red Light assignment. If biometric photography’s development results from the desire to create a scientific categorizing system, above all, the mug shot is meant for the official identification of criminals and is recognized as a means of establishing police authority. As a photographer working for and within an institutional setting of power – the police department and the city – this badge of authority was with Gill when he visited the Red Light. Moreover, his experience with anthropometric photography provided him with a methodology that was more structured than intuitive. Gill had an acute eye that, well before the Red Light assignment, had him taking pictures of a more select clientele than taxi drivers. A search through the city’s archives uncovers other photographs attributed to Gill. They show he was also called upon to photograph official ceremonies, such as the signing of the City’s Golden Book by French musical icon Édith Piaf with Mayor Drapeau (Fig. 8.3) or an official dinner for political notables or the local baseball team, Les Royaux de Montréal, at the upscale restaurant Hélène de Champlain. MUG SHOTS OF HOUSES

The photographs Gill took around the Red Light include many images that show his command of portraiture, yet it is not for his sensibility with people that this work is known. The photos of the area were made primarily to connote the decay of the area – to visually legitimize its demolition. A century earlier in Paris, as photography itself was barely entering early adulthood, another photographic project associated with a radical urban modernization program had been undertaken. Charles Marville (1816–1879) was commissioned by the city of Paris to produce a photographic record of the old streets of Paris, in service of Baron Haussmann’s vast public-works project under Emperor Napoléon III. In his capacity as official photographer for the city, Marville photographed the oldest quarters, and especially the narrow, winding streets slated for demolition. While the Montreal urban renewal venture lacks the panache associated with the Second Empire, it does show a similar enterprising motivation. Maria Morris Hambourg describes the transformation of Paris that Marville photographed as “from the dark, dirty, unhealthy, unnavigable, ungovernable, quasi-medieval city … into the airy, beautiful, healthy, orderly capital.”24 This type of makeover is also what the Plan Dozois aspired to accomplish for Montreal a century later. While Gill’s photographs of a neighbourhood headed for demolition may be read for their subtext of social critique, Marville’s photos are a celebration of an imperial project in which the photographer is also attentive to the past.25 184

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Photography’s history provides yet another antecedent to the work Gill undertook at the heart of Montreal in 1957. Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was a Danish-born American photographer, who in 1873 started to work as a police reporter with New York dailies. Riis is best known for his “slum pictures,” with characters straight out of Dickens, taken to document the effects of industrialization and urbanization on the working class in New York on the cusp of the twentieth century. His work was critical in bringing the need for housing and labour reform to the attention of legislators and the public.26 Hence, as Mary Warner Marien notes, toward the end of the nineteenth century, social reform photographs became part of “statistical reports and emotional pleas for urban improvement.”27 The Dozois proposal, published in 1954, did not have any pictures, but did provide ample statistical data in the form of charts and maps, alongside deprecatory descriptions, to explain the unfavourable conditions of the site. Here, the high density of houses is criticized for causing “des effets indésirables, dont une diminution déplorable d’éclairage naturel, d’aération et de ventilation” (undesirable effects, such as a deplorable reduction of natural light, of aeration and ventilation).28 These are the very urban conditions that Riis aimed to show with the photos in his 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, to advocate for demolition of the New York slums. In early twentieth-century Toronto, another photographer and civil employee, Arthur Goss (1881–1940), was performing a similar task in working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods, notably The Ward. As art historian Sarah Bassnett explains, Goss’s Toronto pictures “explore connections between instrumental and artistic photography and their association with urban modernity.”29 Like Riis’s and Goss’s, Gill’s pictures are intended to show decrepit living conditions. The pictures of old brick houses and woodsheds do provide a compelling impression of hovels. But the neatly dressed human figures in Gill’s pictures are just as revealing. As in Riis’s photographs, the persons are often aware of the photographer’s presence. But what is telling is that those in the Montreal photos are not the unwashed individuals in rags associated with the vision of a skid row. In fact, most of the individuals in the photos represent quite the opposite, appearing at times to be dressed in their Sunday best. In other words, while Riis’s photos are all about the poor social conditions of the people in the tenements, Gill’s show people living in a neighbourhood. In several photographs, especially because of his treatment of the figures, the photographs become about the people in the pictures; in fact, Gill’s pictures are paradoxically akin to snapshots straight out of a family photograph album (Fig. 8.4). On Gagnon Street, the presence of three children transforms a rudimentary composition of a two-storey brick building along a dead-end street into a playful and intimate photographic moment. According to the Expropriation Map (Fig. 8.5), figure 100 on the numbered placard placed for the camera on the front doorstep corresponds to the houses along the north side Jean-Paul Gill’s Red Light Photographs

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8.4 Jean-Paul Gill, Boy Posing for the Camera, Red Light, 1957. Digital reproduction from original black and white negative. Archives de la Ville de Montréal, VM94-40_2-100a.

of Gagnon Street, just off the corner of Sanguinet Street.30 For the photographic theorist Roland Barthes, the image of a building photographed on a sunny day with its exterior wooden window blinds mostly pulled shut becomes the “target” that the “operator” has framed.31 In a photograph by Gill, three young boys, cleanly dressed, figure in the lower-right side of the image showing a chance occurrence that reminds one of a youthful dare: the smirkiest of the group has placed himself proudly in the shot; at the front edge of the receding view, Gill has included his companions’ attentive contemplation of the hero’s daring. The solemn uncertainty of the moment is further formulated by the child’s arms that are outstretched along his body to tightly join at the belt – a formal posture evocative of an altar boy. In her study of the photographic album, Martha Langford acknowledges the sociological argument that studies of snapshot albums can present an opportunity for detailed statistics, but suggests that “compositions of characters and scenes should be logical within a functional, situational construct.”32 Gill’s inclusion of the opportune actors situates what Roland Barthes termed the punctum in the lone youthful figure staring up the camera for the statistically loaded photo album.33

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8.5 Ville de Montréal, Travaux Publics, Expropriation Map, 1956–58. Archives de la Ville de Montréal [Plan_no_L-31-St-Louis_modop.pdf].

The Expropriation Map records that Gill started his series on Sanguinet at street number 1442.34 Lovell’s directory indicates Jos Martel was the tenant at this address in 1957. His neighbour Jos Trzisgo lived at number 1444, before Dust-Less Sweeping Powder Enrg, located at 1450.35 Just up the street, Josephine Hosiery Mills Reg’d planned to set up business at 1590 Sanguinet36 – by most business standards not an expected choice, if you know the street is on the verge of demolition. The placard numbering shows that Gill travelled up Sanguinet to Ontario, where he pursued his route along the west side to Sainte-Elizabeth Street. Heading south, he turned east at the first street, de Boisbriand; this was a dead end terminating behind Martel’s backyard. Gill thus photographed the houses along the entire first block ending at Emile Breton’s house at 281 de Boisbriand, identified as number 21 on the city’s reference placard. Most buildings were photographed following the same system, which included shooting the front (Fig. 8.6) and the rear (Fig. 8.7), emphasizing the shabby wooden sheds in the backyards, as seen with the Martel domicile, documented with three negatives all identified in the picture with the “1” tag board. In one of the photos a

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8.6 Jean-Paul Gill, Front of 1442 rue Sanguinet, Red Light, 1957. Digital reproduction from original black and white negative. A placard with the number 1 is held up above the car roof by someone barely visible in the picture. Archives de la Ville de Montréal [VM94S40D1-001a_141]. 8.7 Jean-Paul Gill, Rear of 1442 rue Sanguinet, Red Light, 1957. Digital reproduction from original black and white negative. A placard with the number 1 has been placed at the bottom of the shed door. Archives de la Ville de Montréal [VM94S40D1-001b_141].

child’s tricycle on the porch and a clothesline, weighed down with drying clothes, bed sheets, towels, etc., indicate that a family occupies the dwelling (Fig. 8.8). The reference numbers in Gill’s photographs are revealing. They are always present and therefore form part of the last official visual representation of all the individual places that formed this neighbourhood before it was erased from the city. The numbers are not like descriptive text below or next to a picture; as with the mug shot, they are a stigma forever inseparable from what is being photographed, in this case a doomed home. Proponents of the area’s eradication often warned of the danger of juvenile crime. The Dozois Plan announced that their research “demonstrates that once again social disintegration is linked to the physical disintegration of the area … With all evidence, delinquency is high in comparison with the rest of the city. It is mostly juvenile delinquency that is most present since the arrest ratio for adolescents in the area is 12 per 1000 persons, while it is 1.3 for the entire city.”37 Indeed, such a bleak account of the children in the neighbourhood was bound to negatively affect public morale, while this alarmist view was meant to further stigmatize this doomed part of the city. Once Gill had taken his last shot of the Red Light, the bureaucratic denotation for every dwelling photographed was fixed to the building by the placard that appears in every photograph. In an interview conducted shortly before his death, Gill recollected that his photographic expeditions to document the Red Light were always done with a city official, who instructed him which buildings he had to photograph. As he puts it: “if the guy from the city in charge of buildings told me he could not go, I wouldn’t go either.”38 The 1,005 photographs were mostly on 4x5 Kodak 301 film. The negatives were exposed taking care to show and preserve detail in the shadows and highlights; if most are overexposed, this was a common practice to assure sufficient light to register information in the darker areas of the image. But this technical element also indicates that Gill was most likely not using a light meter, meaning that he was working fast and was not concerned with technical precision. The image sharpness means a maximum depth of field, combined with a wide-angle lens. The framing and composition of the photos fluctuate between attention to visual balance to an amateurish snapshot aesthetic that is anything but consistent with a professional photographic rendering of buildings and urban landscape. Gill completed his work on the outside of the buildings with a series showing the character of the neighbourhood. They are taken at intersections, looking up or down streets, which are often deserted, thus producing an eerie feeling. The camera was also pointed up alleys and lanes. The crumbling houses and devastated interiors in this group of photographs show that some people had already abandoned the neighbourhood, and contrast with the pictures of a lively area seen in the first group of photos. The square negatives also include high-angle general views of the Jean-Paul Gill’s Red Light Photographs

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8.8 Jean-Paul Gill, Rear of 1442 rue Sanguinet, Red Light, 1957. Digital reproduction from original black and white negative. A placard with the number 1 has been propped up to the right of the back door. Archives de la Ville de Montréal [VM94-40_1-015]. 8.9 Jean-Paul Gill, Dwelling Interior, Red Light, 1957. Digital reproduction from original black and white negative. Archives de la Ville de Montréal [VM94_40-3-261].

8.10 Jean-Paul Gill, Woman in Room, Red Light, 1957. Digital reproduction from original black and white negative. Archives de la Ville de Montréal [VM94-40_3-276]. 8.11 Jean-Paul Gill, Bedroom, Red Light, 1957. Digital reproduction from original black and white negative. Archives de la Ville de Montréal [VM94-40_3-282].

neighbourhood, as seen from rooftops. These images show a concerted effort to depict a sordid slum – a final testimony to justify the demolition. The numerical sequence of the actual negatives from the last set of images Gill took – different from the one presented by the City in its online archive – indicate that the bulldozers had already started their job and that most tenants had left the area, likely leaving only the most destitute, who could not afford the move or had no place to go. This last set of negatives contains eighteen photographs of house interiors. Some include people, all in poverty-stricken circumstances. One such photograph (perhaps the most uncanny of the entire corpus) is a deadpan, skewed shot from the kitchen into another room, where a man wearing a hat and a dark winter coat sits; a young boy, in short sleeves, stands before him, his hands tightly clenched below his waist (Fig. 8.9). Both stare at the camera. The photographer’s flash illuminates the kitchen, leaving both figures in shadow. A window in the door behind though shows a smoking chimney stack and what appears to be snow on the balcony handrail; an oddity for a record supposedly produced during the summer months. Another landmark from the history of the medium is evoked by this small set of pictures. In 1936, the American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975) undertook an assignment from Fortune magazine to produce a human-interest photo essay with the writer James Agee (1909–1955) on the impact of the Depression on individuals; their subjects were impoverished tenant-farmer families in rural Alabama. The project was ultimately published as a book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Evans’s photographs show “a highly reflexive record-making,”39 and this is echoed in the images Gill took inside these Red Light houses more than twenty years later.40 The interior photographs do not include a reference-number board to connect the images with a place; they are a form of archeological incision into anonymous hovel spaces, taken in the last standing dwellings, when most of the area was already demolished and the foundations for the new housing project were already being poured into the ground. The photographs focus on poor living conditions, intensifying the pathos and emotional rhetoric of austerity, or including semiotic tropes to connote that, at the heart of the Red Light, women are never far from bed (Fig. 8.10). Gill shows his skill behind the camera with his shot of a modest bedroom41 featuring a bed and colonial-style rocking chair, strategically placed over a worn-out and torn rug (Fig. 8.11). His flash freeze-frames a white-furred canine, which appears to be walking on his front paws, while in midair its rear legs point to the ceiling. The half-open door shows a male figure just outside the room, his back to the camera. Hanging from the door is a dark winter coat and scarf.

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8.12 Jean-Paul Gill, Chez Dionne, Red Light, 1957. Digital reproduction from original black and white negative. Archives de la Ville de Montréal [VM94-40_1-028a].

THE PEOPLE OF RED LIGHT

The archive includes 113 photographs that show people, often children, engaged in everyday activities. The majority of these pictures are taken along the street, where most of the men, women, and kids are neatly dressed. One of Gill’s photos, which includes a sign, indicating location 28, propped up between the human subjects, illustrates the point (Fig. 8.12). Standing in front of Chez Dionne, the corner store at the angle of de Montigny and Hôtel de Ville streets, two well-groomed young men casually address the camera. Gill’s shot of the corner store shows a place that is not simply an address in a seedy part of town that has reached its end. Gill’s photos show an area where people lived, worked, went to schools, shopped, attended church, an area with local dry cleaners, garages, restaurants, and the corner grocery stores where they ran their

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weekly tab. Robert Petrelli (b. 1943) was a child when he lived with his parents on Sainte-Elizabeth Street. The now-retired professor of urban studies, who taught at the Université du Québec à Montréal (a stone’s throw away from the old Red Light) remembers that sex workers were part of the daily scenery in the area. He also remembers the cohesiveness of the district: En fait, tout ce quartier gravitait autour de l’église Saint Jacques. C’était vraiment le centre du quartier parce qu’à l’époque on sait plus de quatre-vingts dix pour cent de la population fréquentait l’église à toutes les semaines. Il y avait là un clergé très important. Il y avait le curé, mais il y avait aussi de nombreux vicaires. Tout ce clergé habitait dans un manoir qui était situé à l’angle Sainte-Catherine et Berri. Ce bâtiment a été démoli évidemment pour la construction de l’UQAM dans les années soixante-dix … Il y avait des commerces de quartier, de dessertes de la population locale. Comme le magasin de mon père. Mon père était fruitier.42 (In fact, all this neighbourhood revolved around Saint-Jacques Church. It was really the heart of the neighbourhood, because as we know at the time more than 90 per cent of the population went to church weekly. The clergy had an important presence. There was the parish priest, but there were also a number of vicars. They all lived in a manor located at the corner of Sainte-Catherine and Berri. The building was demolished to make space for the construction of UQAM in the 1970s … There were neighbourhood businesses serving the local population, like my father’s store. My father had a fruit market.) Sam Stroll (b. 1928) has always been part of the neighbourhood. He was born in the area where his father before him had the garment store on Sainte-Catherine Street that is now run by his grandson. Stroll no longer lives in the neighbourhood but has been returning to the family store every week for the past seven decades. Thinking back to the fifties, he recollects: “Ontario was a street mostly with shoemakers, locksmiths, but it wasn’t a good business street. There was a police station, it wasn’t very active. Sainte-Catherine was the business street. De Montigny was houses, and at each corner they had a grocery store. At the grocery store you’d buy everything: oranges, apples, canned goods. You’d walk there, go in, and didn’t have to pay; at the end of the week, you paid.”43 Robert Petrelli and Sam Stroll’s accounts contribute a layer of oral history that depicts a lively, popular neighbourhood that inadvertently “slipped” into Gill’s archive as well.

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It would be tempting to associate Gill’s archive with other documentary works that produced valuable photographic records of places in Canada that no longer exist or are always changing. Clara Gutsche and David Miller’s work around the destruction of the Milton Park neighbourhood in Montreal during the early 1970s; Rosemary Donegan’s frontal topography of Spadina Avenue in Toronto (1985); Ian MacEachern’s photographs of urban renewal in Saint John from the 1960s; John Paskievich’s documentary work around Ted Baryluk’s neighbourhood grocery store in the multi-ethnic North End of Winnipeg, where, as the grocer says, “people mix together like soup”; or, in Vancouver, Svend-Erik Eriksen’s streetscapes of the city’s downtown building facades (c.1973); and we could go on. But the Red Light negatives bear a significant difference, in that they were produced by a civil servant. For this reason, there is no trace of descriptive information for the photographs Gill took between May and July 1957, and possibly later, in that neighbourhood. All we have is an execution plan with a map and an archive of negatives. For the most part, the photos Gill took have served as documentation of an important urban renewal project and, more recently, as nostalgic traces of a bygone era and neighbourhood. New questions may arise concerning the production of the photographs and their role beyond documentation, but the archive, like the survey that produced it, needs to be understood as part of a hegemonic apparatus that endorsed the destruction of the Red Light. Referring to Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s seminal paper on documentary photography,44 Al Bersch and Leslie Grant point to the ways that photographs “changed the rhetoric of documentary from the supposed cold presentation of facts to an appeal of emotion … [to help] the viewer to identify with the subject of the image, and [present] the ‘other’ classes as misfortunate and worthy of compassion.”45 In the case of the Red Light photographs, it is critical visual analysis – grappling with what the photographs themselves show – that allows for this change. In Gill’s time, spectres of prostitution, gambling, organized crime, and depravity, fuelled the popular imagination of Montrealers whenever the Red Light was mentioned. That everyday life, with families, children, labourers, and neighbourhood businesses could coexist amid such iniquity was hard to imagine, and these were certainly not included in a critical evaluation of this part of the city when the decision was made to level the area. When the Red Light was flattened, a neighbourhood was simultaneously eliminated. It is a felicitous paradox that scenes from that everyday reality also figure in the archive. The random presence of people in Gill’s photographs complicates this visual report. As such, the photographs Gill produced are more than an indexical record of squalid houses and shabby streets created to vindicate the subsequent bulldozing. Beyond that original purpose,

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this series of images provides a rich visual history of a community on the brink of this urban erasure. The documentary photographs of this neighbourhood de facto provide two striking readings that are, in fact, contradictory. While initially commissioned to show and validate the demolition of this area, today they can be deployed to celebrate local history; a perfect example is the section on the Red Light published in the book Quartiers Disparus (2014). The question “What does photography preserve?” has therefore generated an in-depth reading of this archive. The humanist approach in photographs of the people of Red Light may be interpreted as Gill’s understanding of what he was doing as a city employee working in support of an urban-renewal project that would provide timely social assistance by relocating and rehousing the inhabitants of a squalid zone. Now a paradox in the project appears. This view is corroborated by the oral-history accounts presented earlier. Most of the people who appear in the photos are friendly, cooperative, and cleanly dressed, and certainly bear no resemblance whatsoever to the derelict souls in Riis’s photographs or images of extreme poverty made by Evans and others during the Great Depression. If the purpose of this documentary photographic project was (as I believe) to show poor living conditions and validate the knocking down of a ragged zone, it fails. We can only guess at Gill’s intentions when he tracked up and down every block of houses in the Red Light. He is no longer here to enlighten the narrative, and, to date, any critical record that could illuminate his rationale remains to be brought forth or uncovered. But ultimately, what does remain in Gill’s photographs is working-class people going about their daily activities, in the place where they live and work, and sometimes stopping to look at the man with the camera who was a professional photographer working for the city.

NOTES 1 The archive includes a map from 1957, showing all the buildings in the area that were expropriated by the City. See “Série 40 – Photographies par Jean-Paul Gill: Plan Dozois. – 1957,” accessed 26 May 2020, Archives de Montréal, Ville de Montréal. https:// archivesdemontreal.ica-atom.org/uploads/r/ville-de-montreal-section-des-archives/e/3/1/ e317cb37889d20d8aecc35d423ed8012188edada4f51678011c9a602c50974ae/Plan_no_L-31-StLouis_modop.pdf. 2 Choko, Les Habitations Jeanne-Mance, 35. 3 Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “red-light district.” 4 Paul-André Linteau, “Le Red Light,” in Charlebois and Linteau, Quartiers Disparus, 48. 5 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “red light.” 6 The commission presided over by Judge Louis Coderre was held 6 October 1924 to 9 January 1925.

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7 Proulx, Le Red Light de Montréal, 20. 8 The toponym was changed to Saint-Antoine Street in August 1976. 9 Marsan, Montreal in Evolution, 182. 10 Proulx, Le Red Light de Montréal, 39. 11 Ibid., 54. Translation by the author. 12 Linteau, Quebec since 1930, 48. 13 Proulx, Le Red Light de Montréal, 61. 14 Lacasse, La prostitution féminine à Montréal, 61. 15 There is no clear explanation for the decrease of VD within the group of local female sex workers, although improved hygiene and better health care played a positive role. This information is significant if the area is to be studied in a critical manner while analyzing the role of the most stigmatized group and locations in the neighbourhood, the prostitutes and the brothels. Lacasse, La prostitution féminine à Montréal, 51–2. 16 Proulx mentions that Penverne contributed a few articles to the Jesuit publication Relations, before taking the city’s police department, which he suspected of corruption, all the way to the Superior Court. See Proulx, Le Red Light de Montréal, 47. 17 Drapeau and DesMarais, Main Arguments against Field-Dozois Plan, 9. 18 Ibid., 10. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 12. 21 Drouin, “De la démolition des taudis à la sauvegarde du patrimoine bâti.” 22 Gill’s obituary indicates he was married with eight children and worked as a photographer for the city of Montreal between 1951 and 1983. “Jean-Paul Gill,” Obituary, Dignity Memorial, accessed 11 April 2016, https://www.dignitymemorial.com/en-ca/obituaries/terrebonne-qc/ jean-paul-gill-8201858. 23 Archives Ville de Montréal, Ville de Montréal. Commission du Service Civil/Civil Service Commission, Questionnaire, Classification des Fonctions/Classification of positions, Gill, Joseph Jean-Paul, 9 May 1952. 24 Hambourg, “Charles Marville’s Old Paris,” 8. 25 Ibid. 26 Early suffragists were already making use of photography to record the lives of poor women and children as a means of drawing attention to issues around poverty. For more on this topic, see Hales, Silver Cities. 27 Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 201. 28 Ville de Montréal, Plan Dozois, 9. Translation by the author. 29 Bassnett, Picturing Toronto, 128. 30 Plan Dozois, Ville de Montréal, no L31-St-Louis modop.tiff, accessed 17 September 2020, http://archivesdemontreal.com/documents/2013/10/Plan-no-L-31-St-Louis-modop.pdf. 31 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 9. 32 Langford, Suspended Conversations, 128. 33 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 27. 34 According to the plan, initial demolition was to start in the northeast section of the area along

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Sainte-Elizabeth Street between De Montigny and Ontario streets. This first stage included the demolition of another group of dwellings on the opposite corner of the zone along Ontario between Saint-Urbain and Clark. This meant that, out of a total of 7,141 persons affected by the project, 2,179 individuals had been rehoused or displaced when Gill first started to document the area. 35 “Collection d’annuaires Lovell de Montréal et sa région, 1842–2010,” Collection numérique d’annuaires municipaux, Bibliotèque et Archives nationales du Québec, http://bibnum2.banq. qc.ca/bna/lovell/pdf/03/01/1957/04/02/110773_1957_0477.pdf. 36 See Dominion Bureau of Statistics, New Manufacturing Establishments in Canada (December 1957), 19. 37 Ville de Montréal, Plan Dozois, 11. Translation by the author. 38 Ville de Montréal, “Témoignage Jean-Paul Gill,” Mémoires des Montréalais, accessed 10 January 2018, https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/memoiresdesmontrealais/jean-paul-gill-0. 39 Campany, “Recalcitrant Intervention,” 72. 40 It is tempting to suggest that Gill might have seen Evans’s work in popular publications like Fortune magazine, except that the magazine rejected the article and pictures on submission. Ultimately, the Alabama photo essay gained critical success only in the 1960s. 41 “VM94-40_3-282,” Archives de Montréal, Section des archives, accessed 12 October 2020, https://archivesdemontreal.ica-atom.org/vm94-40-3-282. 42 Interview conducted 19 April 2017. Translation from French by the author. 43 I met with Sam Stroll on 19 July 2017, to discuss his memories about the neighbourhood during the 1950s. 44 See Solomon-Godeau, “Who Is Speaking Thus?” 45 Bersch and Grant, “From Witness to Participant,” 189.

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9.

The Pastness of Allô Police Will Straw

When the Montreal-based weekly tabloid crime newspaper Allô Police ceased publication in 2004, press accounts of its demise treated it as a publication that had outlived its usefulness. The reasons given for its disappearance were those commonly offered for the death in recent years of periodicals specializing in true (rather than fictional) crime. Crime tabloids were the victims, it was argued, of a decline in importance of those social institutions, such as the corner convenience store (like the Quebec dépanneur), where people once bought lowbrow reading materials alongside cigarettes and beer. At the same time, press industry lore suggested, the violent cover imagery of the crime tabloid made it inappropriate for display at supermarket or pharmacy checkout counters, where other kinds of sensational periodicals had flourished since the early 1960s. And, it was claimed, even before the growth of the Internet, the role of crime periodicals as sources of information and entertainment had been usurped by television, where true crime had become a staple programming genre within the expanding universe of specialized cable channels.1 Allô Police had been co-founded in 1953 by lawyer Maurice Mercier and Raymond Daoust, a magazine publisher who would start and manage several titles in the wave of sensational tabloids published in Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s. Although it was launched as just one among many periodicals within this wave, Allô Police outlasted all the others. By 1957, it had reached a circulation of 145,000 copies per issue and, while neither its press run nor its newsstand sales were the object of official audits, circulation was estimated to have risen to a peak of 200,000 copies

in the 1960s, then fallen slowly to 50,000 copies per issue by the time publication stopped.2 As with its counterparts in other national cultures – like American true crime magazines or Mexican nota roja – the period of Allô Police’s perceived decline and outmodedness was the longest in its history, reinforcing the sense that its residuality was one of its defining features.3 Following its demise, in 2004, the absence of significant holdings of Allô Police in any of Quebec’s patrimonial institutions was seen as emblematic of a broader failure to preserve the province’s lively “lowbrow” culture.4 ALLÔ POLICE AS PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE

If Allô Police was an exceptionally long-lasting example of Quebec’s sensational “lowbrow” periodical culture, it is of equal interest for the ways in which, over its fifty-one-year history, it contributed in specific ways to the photographic documentation of Montreal. In the 1970s, the decade examined in this chapter, Allô Police featured a loosely calculated average of seventy photographs per issue. Across the decade’s 520 issues, then, we find a corpus of some 36,400 published photographs (and we may presume that many more were taken but not used). Allô Police’s coverage of crime was limited, with very few exceptions, to the province of Quebec, and from the very beginning the paper saw its mission as the coverage of every murder in the province.5 Roughly half the photographs published in the 1970s were linked to events that transpired in Montreal or its suburbs, and most of these involved violent crimes, like homicides. During this decade, then, Allô Police published approximately fifteen thousand images to accompany journalistic reports on crime in the Montreal region. I have chosen to focus here on photographs published in Allô Police during the period from 1974 to 1976. A key reason for the choice of this period is the frequency of the paper’s focus on violent crime during these years, relative to other periods in its publishing history. In its first decade, Allô Police had set crime within broader contexts of moral transition and had published a wide variety of feature articles on hotly debated social issues, such as the physical punishment of children. The visuality of the paper in the 1950s and early 1960s was more heterogeneous than in later years, as sketches, stock photographs, and even comic strips appeared alongside photographs that themselves were typically of small dimension and usually of human faces. In the latter half of the 1960s, the paper’s focus narrowed to deal almost exclusively with crime, though the range of criminal phenomena covered during this period was broad: it included corruption scandals linked to Expo 67 and the spectacular crimes committed by quasi-celebrity figures like the bank robber Monique le Mitraille (known in English as “Machine Gun Molly”). 200

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By the 1970s, the focus of Allô Police had become even more restricted, as Montreal came to seem like little more than a battleground, rife with massacres involving branches of the Montreal mafia and the province’s ascendant biker gangs. As Mathieu-Olivier Côté has shown, in a master’s thesis tracing Allô Police’s changes throughout its history, the period from 1970 to 1989 saw the paper’s content centred almost exclusively on violent crime.6 This emphasis on extreme violence reached its peak in 1975 with two horrific events in Montreal, which Allô Police covered in detail. One was the burning death of thirteen people on 21 January 1975, in the Gargantua Bar on Beaubien Street, by gang members who locked the victims in a storage room and then set fire to the establishment. The second was the shooting of four individuals at the Lapinière Hotel in the Montreal suburb of Brossard on 13 February 1975, a gangland execution quickly dubbed (because of its date) Montreal’s St Valentine’s Day Massacre.7 These events sat alongside coverage of other crimes that offered their own distinctive forms of horror: an alarmingly lengthy series of reports on the death of children from murder or neglect, in 1975 and 1976, and the unending accounts of murdered spouses or lovers (almost all women), which had been a staple of the paper since its beginning. The exclusivity of its focus on these sorts of crimes was such that, even during the early 1970s wave of political violence emanating from (or in response to) Quebec’s separatist movement, Allô Police paid little or no attention to this larger context.8 If Allô Police in the 1970s seemed more focused on violent crime than in previous decades, we may understand this as a response to the increased public consciousness and broader media coverage of organized criminality during this period. In 1972, Quebec premier Robert Bourassa established the Commission d’enquête sur le crime organisé (CECO), a public inquiry into organized crime in Quebec, the proceedings of which were televised in the province, heightening public interest in the phenomenon.9 However, Allô Police’s emphasis on blood and violence during this decade is also a function of the publication’s greater explicitness, as it competed with other sensational tabloids (like the daily newspaper Journal de Montréal and specialized competitors like Photo Police). In the 1970s, the number of photographs in each issue increased, and while Allô Police had employed staff photographers since its launch, the percentage of images attributable to these professionals was clearly higher during this decade. Throughout its history, the publication had relied heavily on official photographs (like “mug shots”), presumably provided by the police or courts, and on the sort of images (such as family portraits) that were acquired from victims’ families, and so did not require the presence of a photographer. While all these visual forms carried over into the 1970s, they increasingly appeared alongside photographs of people, places, and situations more obviously taken by the paper’s own staff. The Pastness of Allô Police

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THE VISUALITY OF CRIME

What we know of the professional routines and aesthetic dispositions of crime photojournalism normally comes from studies or reminiscences of those few crime photographers who have been elevated out of anonymity and assimilated within the institutions of art. This is the case, in particular, for the American photojournalist Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899–1968) and the Mexican crime scene photographer Enrique Metinides (b. 1934).10 The photographs in Allô Police were almost never credited, however, and there are only fragmentary accounts of the careers or routines of photographers working for the paper.11 While Allô Police’s photographers occasionally showed signs of stylistic bravura, their work was largely anonymous, and the standardization of styles and genres in the publication makes it difficult to distinguish the work of individual photographers. As I have argued elsewhere, the photography of the true crime periodical is shaped by a distinctive predicament. This is the fact that, while criminal actions (such as murders or holdups) constitute one of the most photogenic categories of image content, photojournalists are almost never present at the commission of a crime to take such images. The arrival of press photographers at a crime scene is almost always belated, typically following that of the police, coroner, or other agents of justice.12 One effect of this belatedness is that, while fictional films and television programs may reconstruct crimes in the moments of their greatest drama, the true crime periodical is limited in its corpus of available images to people, places, and situations that have been photographed at moments other than those in which the criminal acts take place. True crime periodicals confront the gap between the dynamic singularity of criminal events (at which journalists are rarely present) and the predictable range of photographic genres through which the aftermath and peripheral features of crime are typically represented. These genres include portraits of people involved in various capacities in criminal events, pictures of the buildings and other sites in which crimes occurred, and representations of various kinds of activity undertaken in the aftermath of a crime (such as police searches for evidence at crime scenes.) As Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini suggests, in her examination of Détective and other French crime magazines of the 1930, the widespread adoption of photographic illustration in news periodicals from the 1920s onwards radically transformed the terms under which criminal events were rendered visible in the press. While the lithographic cover drawings of fin-de-siècle news periodicals such as L’Illustration allowed for a totalizing image of crimes, such that their constituent actions and participants were all visible in tableaux of reconstructed action, the shift to photographic illustration in the 1920s made the human face the privileged token of 202

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criminality. Unable to capture the criminal act itself, news photographers came to focus on the key figures in these acts, compensating for the inaccessibility of images of dramatic criminal action with a new emphasis on individual personality. “The crime scene gives way to the portrait,” Demartini writes, “with attention now focused on the protagonists in a drama … and, in particular, on criminal persona, who find in the image a privileged means of imprinting themselves on our consciousness.”13 The documentary or patrimonial value of the photographs published in Allô Police during its fifty years of publication is not, then, what might be expected. To be sure, these photographs often accompanied articles on momentous events, such as spectacular acts of criminal violence. However, the absence of the photographer at the moment these events occurred means that we are left with very few images of criminal activity itself. Rather, events came to be represented through images of the people and places associated with criminal events. Taken by Allô Police’s photographers, or borrowed from familial or judicial sources, these images, as we shall see, belonged to generic categories, whose conventions have stabilized over time. We shall discuss two of these generic categories here. The first of these is the portrait or headshot. Like most periodicals in the second half of the twentieth century,14 Allô Police favoured images of the human face on its covers, but these were the most common photographs on its interior pages as well. Across the dozens of issues studied here, Allô Police featured photographs of hundreds of individuals who were touched in some way by crime – as victims, perpetrators, agents of the law, or witnesses. The second category of common imagery is that of the buildings that figure within crime narratives, often as the scenes of crimes themselves. If these images were less numerous than pictures of people, they nevertheless constitute a photographic archive of Montreal locations and architectural structures. What these categories of image share is a lack of movement (of the posed head or the immobile building), which is at odds with the imagined dynamism of criminal action. PHOTOGRAPHIC GENRES IN ALLÔ POLICE: THE PORTRAIT

Figures 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3 represent different modalities of the portrait-dominated covers which were typical of Allô Police in the 1970s. In Figure 9.1, we see a collection of photographs featuring the multiple victims of a wave of murders which had occurred over a period of three days. These blocks of images of homicide victims were common in Allô Police in the mid-1970s, when the pervasiveness of murder in Montreal, and elsewhere in Quebec, was one of the paper’s common themes. On this cover, we see nine victims; in other layouts in the interior, covering longer periods of time, there were as many as seventy-five.15 While we might assume that a small number of these images were official police photographs (in the cases of The Pastness of Allô Police

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9.1 Allô Police, 12 January 1975. Cover. Collection of the author.

those victims who were themselves involved in criminal activity), the restriction of all of these images to headshots and the forward orientation of almost all the faces renders most of them official in character, even when they might have been cropped from family snapshots or other forms of vernacular photography. As a result, these portraits of victims are indistinguishable, in most cases, from the photographs of criminals appearing elsewhere in the paper. The people represented in Figure 9.1 are humanized slightly, through the use of circular, rather than square, frames, and through the brief biographical descriptions that accompany each one. However, the ongoing effect of portrait layouts such as these, repeated across dozens of issues, is to fill the paper with thousands of small faces whose restricted expressivity reduces them to tokens of populations circulating through the worlds of Québécois crime. Indeed, throughout Allô Police during this period, innocent victims, slain gang members, and murderers themselves are rendered indistinguishable, appearing as they do in photographic galleries that 204

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9.2 Allô Police, 13 January 1974. Cover. Collection of the author.

provide us with no clues with which to distinguish their roles. Much of the sordid character of Allô Police in the 1970s rests precisely on this generalization of the mug shot format, which gathers up and gives similar treatment to people of widely varying degrees of culpability and victimization. In these images of the human face we find, confirmed, Allan Sekula’s thesis about the tensions in judicial photography between individuation and the production of statistical regularities.16 Even as Allô Police’s reporting captured the distinct narratives of each individual’s implication in a universe of criminal events, the periodical’s mimicry of the poses and layouts of police photography reduced each subject to a symbol of an all-pervasive criminality. The most obviously contrasting cover images in Allô Police during this period were the full-size photographs of smiling children or enamoured adults which featured on a number of covers and filled interior photographic spreads. The family portrait become increasingly common in Allô Police in the mid-1970s, in part because reports on the killings of children became a regular alternative to stories The Pastness of Allô Police

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9.3 Allô Police, 18 May 1975. Cover. Collection of the author.

of gangland executions. The innocent demeanour conveyed in photographs like that in Figure 9.2 confirms the origin of these images as family photographs, taken before the occurrence of the tragic events they are meant to illustrate. However, the difference between these images of innocence and the photographs of crime scenes or arrested suspects which appeared beside them extends beyond the temporal gap between moments before and after a crime. We are dealing, in fact, with two very different kinds of photographic heritage. The images of victims or perpetrators were taken by true crime journalists or agents of justice, who worked with the knowledge that their photographs bore a connection to criminality. In contrast, family photographs were produced within the normal routines of vernacular or professional family photography (and then borrowed or purchased by true crime periodicals).17 The affective complexity of true crime periodicals has much to do with the fact that they contain large numbers of each of these kinds of photographs. 206

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One the one hand, we see images of domestic happiness and innocence, intended as photographic demonstrations of these states and as yet untouched by the crimes that would prompt their publication. Conversely, we confront, alongside them, images of dead bodies, crime scenes, and people (victims or suspects) whose guilt or victimization is inscribed in the very activity of picture-taking. Like so many images in Allô Police, Figure 9.2 belongs to a history of domestic Québécois photography. It captures the Québécois nuclear family in one moment of its historical instantiation. In the Allô Police of the 1970s, dozens of images like this give us access to the innocent poses and intimate rituals of lower- or middleclass Québécois families before they have become victims of violence. While the triadic composition of this photo, with all three individuals’ heads turned away from the camera (and the baby’s gaze returning that of the mother), is highly formulaic, in the context of Allô Police, where it is surrounded by lurid text and sensational lettering, its intimacy becomes more pronounced. The photograph offers us access to an otherwise inaccessible, private moment in lives which would soon be shattered through violence. The portraits in Figure 9.1 offer a zero degree of human individuation, while Figure 9.2 is a highly clichéd tableau of condensed familial emotion. In contrast to both of these, the images in Figure 9.3 invite us to indulge in psychologizing speculation, to construct narratives that will bind together the three individuals represented. Of the two men accused of killing their shared lover’s husband, one expresses the joyous relief of acquittal, his frontal view and smile suggesting the absence of culpability. In the conventions of such photographs, the turned head of the other man suggests a contemplative depth, just as his downcast eyes suggest his guilt. Both the exuberance of the first man’s smile and the angle of the second’s pose stand as guarantees that these are not official mug shots but, rather, candid revelations of interiority. The cover invites, as well, a judgment of the female character, whose moral state is already tainted by the text’s reference to two lovers, but whose complicity in the murder of her husband is left unresolved by the directness of her look and the tightly controlled expression with which she faces the camera. All these photographs, of course, might have been taken long before the events, and acquired by the paper as part of its normal routines. When employed in layouts like these, however, they participate in the elaboration of those melodramatic stories, of small-town or suburban passion and betrayal, which Allô Police interspersed between its ongoing reports on metropolitan gangland slaughter. With few of its stories set in the world of rich or powerful elites, Allô Police of the 1970s left as one of its legacies a record of violence and betrayal unfolding in the petit Québec of small towns and the suburbs and peripheral working-class neighbourhoods of Montreal. More significantly, for our purposes, Allô Police’s The Pastness of Allô Police

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9.4 “Les policiers et les Dubois s’affrontent,” Allô Police, 16 November 1975, 4. Collection of the author. 9.5 “Le gérant du ‘P’tit Ritz’: Il meurt avant d’être accusé du meurtre.” Allô Police, 23 May 1976, 23. Collection of the author. 9.6 “‘Libéré conditionnel’ abbatu.” Allô Police, 23 March 1975, 23. Collection of the author.

procedures involved the acquisition of hundreds of photographs taken by family members or by local professionals hired to document the milestones of familial histories, like marriages or the christening of children. These photographs, borrowed or purchased by Allô Police, constitute an archive of popular, domestic imagery with few parallels elsewhere in the media or patrimonial institutions of Quebec. PHOTOGRAPHIC GENRES IN ALLÔ POLICE: THE BAR AS CRIME SCENE

While portrait photographs are present on almost every one of Allô Police’s pages, the second category of Allô Police’s photographs to be discussed here involves a smaller corpus. This is the class of photographs showing the places in which crimes have been committed. Over the course of its fifty-year history, Allô Police published hundreds of images of places in Montreal. Few of these, however, show us locations identifiable as iconic landmarks or recognized destinations. Rather, almost all these photographs are of minor suburban streets, warehouses, unremarkable residences, hotels of dubious reputation, and empty spaces, such as parking lots. The majority of them are of places located outside Montreal’s downtown – in the city’s east end, or in neighbourhoods outside of the city’s downtown, like Saint-Henri and Rosemont. Typically photographed at street level, from outside a building, these images provide little sense of a broader neighbourhood context or of the place of such sites within a larger urban geography. In this body of images, one of the most common categories of place represented photographically is the bar. This reflects, in part, the extent to which bars were central hubs of underworld commerce or sociability and key sites of violence.18 The six images discussed here (Figs 9.4–9.9) are all of bars in the Montreal region (and their variations, such as the cocktail lounge, strip club, and tavern or brasserie). While all these photographs show us places in which crimes have taken place, and while they were usually intended to supplement portraits of victims and alleged perpetrators, I have detached them from their contexts on the page in order to highlight their formal and aesthetic features. Photographs of bars in Allô Police are striking for the consistency with which they avoid two of the historical and stylistic conventions by which bars are rendered photogenic. The first of these conventions emerged within the tradition of the urban nocturne, prominent in mid-twentieth-century street photography and in the cinematic styles of French poetic realism and the American film noir. Here, the bar, photographed or filmed from an exterior vantage point from which its interior may be glimpsed, evokes a world of stranger-sociability and erotic promise, suggested through the play of inside lighting and exterior darkness. A second set of conventions, common in tourist photography and journalistic coverage of urban The Pastness of Allô Police

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entertainment, represents the urban nightclub as a spectacular space, marked by architectural inventiveness and the gathering of large, glamorous crowds. The dozens of images of bars published in Allô Police in the mid-1970s draw on neither of these traditions of representation. These pictures are striking for the consistency with which they convey a sense of these bars as uninviting spaces, suggesting danger or decrepitude. Typically photographed during the day, and reproduced with low resolution, these images convey a drab, unattractive greyness. The absence of people in almost all of these photographs adds to the sense of menace which hovers over them and discourages any understanding of these places as spaces of effervescent sociability. The architectural forms of these bars further enhance an impression of their tawdriness. Some of those photographed, like the Barina in the Saint-Henri neighbourhood (Fig. 9.4) and the P’Tit Ritz, on Préfontaine in the city’s east end (Fig. 9.5), are squat and rectangular, barely distinguishable from the small offices or retail establishments nearby. The sign for Chez Tonton (Fig. 9.6), on Lacordaire Boulevard in Montreal’s Saint-Léonard neighbourhood, suggests a strip architecture whose novelty was already waning, even as the exterior surfaces of the bar itself exemplify the undistinguished and peripheral small business building. Au Bo-Sexe, in the east of Montreal (Fig. 9.7), and the Taverne des Copains (Fig. 9.8), in the Saint-Henri neighbourhood, resemble, in their architectural form and the manner of their photographic representation, the vice establishments shown in articles that covered Montreal as a “capital of sin” and were published in cheap US periodicals of the 1950s, such as Brief.19 Unremarkable as buildings, these bars employ the vertical signage which, in the conventions of nocturnal vice and its representations, expresses a discreet invitation to places of illicit pleasure. These bars, like the dozens of others whose photographs appeared in Allô Police in the mid-1970s, represent an undistinguished architectural heritage, which that publication, alone among Quebec periodicals, documented week after week. In the context of the mid-1970s, few of these bars would ever be cherished as sites of vanishing working-class rituals or taken as useful evidence of emergent fashions in the design of nightlife venues. If we detach Allô Police’s photographs of bars and other spaces from the crimes they help to document, we are left with a counter-cartography of Montreal that leaves out both the landmarks (such as the mountain or port), which served as orientation points in the city, and those collectively cherished places (like La Fontaine Park), which sustained civic identity. Rather, Allô Police’s photographs of bars constitute an archive of minor architectural forms and obscure urban locations disconnected from their social or geographical contexts. Together, the portrait picture and the bar photograph construct a distinct polarity within the visuality of Allô Police. The former is marked by the imperative of frontality, by the drive to fill the paper’s covers and most of its interior pages 210

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9.7 “Au ‘Bo-Sexe’: Innocente victime d’un fusillade de cabaret,” Allô Police, 12 September 1976, 12. Collection of the author. 9.8 “Les Dubois de Saint-Henri: Un bâton de dynamite et huit coups de feu pour Normand,” Allô Police, 4 April 1976, 7. Collection of the author. 9.9 “Avec la mort de Roland Giguère, un vide s’est créé dans le monde de la pègre de l’est.” Allô Police, 22 August 1976, 9. Collection of the author.

9.10 “Le saccage de ce ‘Cocktail Lounge’ fait revivre ‘la belle époque’ de la protection à Montréal,” Allô Police, 16 November 1975, 4. Collection of the author.

with the images of faces looking out at the reader. If these faces offer themselves up for simple contemplation, they also nevertheless lead us to speculate about the moral status or emotional interiority of those individuals to whom they belong. Allô Police’s photographs of bars, in contrast, almost always block our access to any object of vision which might promise understanding. We are confronted, most of the time, with little more than the sordid banality of a degraded form to which, as readers, we are denied access. (See, for an additional example, the windows of the brasserie in Figure 9.9, located in the Montreal suburb of Iberville, which reveal nothing of the building’s interior.) In one of the rare scenes of a bar’s interior, in Figure 9.10, we see the Barina bar in the Saint-Henri neighbourhood subsequent to its being wrecked by gang members, but the piles of chairs produced by that wreckage deny us any sense of this as a social space. The geography of crime conveyed in Allô Police in the mid-1970s was one of undistinguished bars, back alleys, and aging industrial structures that were typically unnoticed by a mainstream photojournalistic gaze. Allô Police, like other 212

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compilations of crime narratives, was regularly uncovering ways of life and places seemingly left over from another era, or, at the very least, detached from any sense of ongoing modernization. In this, Allô Police’s treatment of crime was faithful to patterns observable elsewhere. Several scholars of the cultural representation of crime have noted the tendency for criminal narratives to reconstruct (or uncover) residual dimensions of city life not entirely eroded by modernity. Dominique Kalifa has traced the ways in which early-twentieth-century French fictional serials about super-criminals (like Fantomas) rewrote Paris as a space of medieval labyrinths that survived adjacent to the wide-open boulevards exemplifying the city’s late-nineteenth-century modernity.20 The version of Montreal that emerges in Allô Police in the 1970s is one of tawdry, working-class bars or industrial zones located in the peripheral and popular neighbourhoods of the city. These were the sites of the principal crimes covered by the paper, and while they were not always old or disappearing, they nevertheless seemed to linger uncomfortably in a city which laboured to promote an image of itself as modern and cosmopolitan. THE WHITENESS OF ALLÔ POLICE

The Allô Police of the 1970s has been rendered out of date most forcefully by changing frameworks for understanding crime and its relationship to social identities. The world covered and constructed by Allô Police throughout its history was one in which cases of sexual violence were treated as crimes of passion, and police brutality was little more than the expected symptom of a violent culture. The most striking sign of Allô Police’s pastness in the 1970s, however, is the racial and physiognomic homogeneity of the people and situations represented within its pages. With very few exceptions (representing less than 5 per cent of all images published in the paper in the 1970s), the people whose photographs were published in Allô Police were white. The whiteness of the twentieth-century true crime periodical, in the United States and Canada, is one of its most consistent and perplexing features. As I have shown elsewhere, while the American pulp fiction magazines of the 1930s and 1940s were laden with imagery which set luridly racialized villains against innocent white victims, the US true crime magazine dealt almost exclusively with crimes whose perpetrators and victims were white. As early as the 1930s, the racial exclusivity of the American true crime magazine was codified in instructions to writers, which warned them (for reasons which remain imprecise) to avoid reports on crimes whose principal characters were not white.21 This would change in the United States only in the 1970s, when the racialization of crime offered a quickly legible framework through which American true crime magazines fanned the flames of the social panic on which they increasingly based their appeal. The Pastness of Allô Police

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Whether or not the consistent whiteness of those photographed for Allô Police expresses in statistical terms the racialized character of crime in Montreal during this period is difficult to establish.22 Nevertheless, in the Allô Police of the 1970s, reports on fatal love triangles, conjugal violence, drug deals turned violent, barroom murders, sexual assaults, and gangland massacres involved, with few exceptions, people who appeared on the basis of their photographs to be white. (Italians and other immigrant populations from southern Europe constituted the outer reaches of this whiteness.) Most strikingly, the dozens of portraits of murdered children or assaulted young women featured on the covers of Allô Police in the years 1974 to 1976 map a variety of versions of innocent whiteness. Large numbers of these images, as noted, originated as family photographs, which were taken in moments of domestic or personal celebration and then acquired by Allô Police for publication following a crime. Across these photographs, we see revealed, in their variety and conventionality, the domestic image-making practices of white Québécois of the working and lower-middle classes. The headshot portraits of perpetrators or the accused show us a population which seems only slightly less racially homogeneous. Indeed, this category accounts for the largest number of photographs published in the paper throughout its history, and the force of these numbers offer the starkest confirmation of the racial exclusivity of Allô Police in the 1970s. This exclusivity would decline in the last two decades of the paper’s existence, as, just behind its American counterparts, Allô Police increasingly framed crime through the prisms of race-based violence and racially organized criminality. In the mid-1970s, those touched by crime in every respect appeared to belong, almost without exception, to the family of white Québécois. CONCLUSION

The narratives of Montreal life produced and conveyed in Allô Police, from the 1960s onwards, registered few of the broader transformations of the city which fascinated other media. Montreal’s building boom of the 1960s, which occurred against the backdrops of demographic explosion and euphoria over the city’s new, chic cosmopolitanism, left few traces in the pages of Allô Police, whose coverage of the city, as noted, traced an unbroken series of tawdry crimes, occurring in unfashionable locales. Similarly, in its emphasis on the city’s criminal underclasses, or on the domestic tragedies of suburban families, Allô Police barely acknowledged the urban professional bourgeoisie whose economic and political ascension was a key result of the Révolution tranquille (the so-called “Quiet Revolution,” which saw Quebec become a highly secularized and urban society). The political tensions and victories of the 1970s, marked by an intensification of radical militancy across 214

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several sectors of Montreal society, and the election, in 1976, of the nationalist Parti Québécois went unnoticed in a newspaper that treated this decade as a time of underworld carnage and endless personal tragedy. Rather than registering these upheavals, Allô Police may be seen as engaged in an endless trafficking of images and affects between metropolis and region. Week after week, it alarmed its smalltown readers with coverage of violent urban criminality, even as it entertained its working-class, Montreal-based readership with sordid tales of fractured innocence and domestic horror in locales just beyond the city’s borders.

NOTES 1 The claim that, as convenience store sales declined, more and more papers were sold in pharmacies and grocery stories, and that crime papers lent themselves poorly to these familyoriented environments, is common in accounts of the death of a crime-oriented press in North America. See, among many accounts which link these changes to the demise of Allô Police, Collard, “Allô Police’s offre un remodelage,” La Presse, 4; and Banerjee, “Adieu Police,” Montreal Gazette, B1. 2 Estimates of Allô Police’s circulation, usually revealed in articles on the periodical in mainstream newspapers, are unreliable, but they show the broad curve of its rise and fall. See, for example, Untitled, Vrai (1957), 9; “Allô Police Is ‘Must Reading’” (1979), Montreal Star, n.p.; Tu Thanh Ha, “Photo-Police Manager Buys Crime Tabloid” (1991), Montreal Gazette, A5; Vailles, “Allô Police s’inscrit en Bourse” (2003), La Presse, D3; and Perreault, “Disparitions convergentes” (2004), La Presse, 1. 3 The American true crime magazine and those Mexican tabloid newspapers devoted to true crime and known as nota roja (the best-known being Alarma!) have all disappeared over the last two decades. 4 For an account of public concern over the lack of library holdings of Allô Police, see Beal’s review of Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1843. Since 2004, the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec has made available a complete run of Allô Police on microfilm. The Google Newspapers project digitized several early issues before that project was discontinued, and bound volumes containing copies of the paper’s first two years sit in the Rare Books Room of the McGill University library. At present, mystery surrounds the status and location of the paper’s archive of original photographs and negatives, a resource of great interest to those who study popular photojournalism. Some claim to know of the continued existence of a photographic archive on the premises of Section Rouge Media, the last owners of the periodical, but this collection has been described by interested collectors as pilfered and neglected. 5 Banerjee, “Adieu Police.” 6 Côté, “La représentation du crime dans la presse écrite québécoise: le cas d’Allô Police.” 7 For an account of these events, see Kristian Gravenor, “The Faces of the Gargantua Victims,” 13 October 2007, http://coolopolis.blogspot.ca/2007/10/faces-of-gargantua-victims.html, and “The Nastiest Crime Ever to Hit Brossard,” 22 November 2012, http://coolopolis.blogspot.ca/2012/11/ the-nastiest-crime-ever-to-hit-brossard.html.

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8 Allô Police’s references to the October Crisis of 1970, in which the Front de Libération du Québec kidnapped the British diplomat James Cross and Quebec’s minister of labour, Pierre Laporte (eventually releasing the former, but killing the latter), were surprisingly brief and short-lived, given the violence of the crimes, the extent of police involvement in the whole affair, and widespread rumours (later confirmed) of Laporte’s connections to the Montreal mafia. For a rare example of Allô Police’s coverage, see “M. Cross raconte ses 60 jours au mains du FLQ,” 5–8. 9 de Champlain, Histoire du crime organisé à Montréal, de 1900 à 1980. 10 See, for example, on Weegee, Pelizzon, and West, “‘Good Stories’ from the Mean Streets” and on the Mexican photojournalist Enrique Metinides, Metinides and Ziff, 101 tragedias de Enrique Metinides. 11 Information on photographers working for Allô Police is scattered and ephemeral. One former freelancer for the paper, Dennis Morin, is listed on a website of people from the Haut-SaintLaurent region, Centre de recherche et d’archives du Haut-Saint Laurent, “Recherchiste: Dennis Morin,” accessed 1 May 2017, http://www.auxorigines.com/110/default.asp; another, Jean-Pierre Rancourt, was named in a complaint against Allô Police adjudicated by the Conseil de presse in 1979. See Conseil de presse du Québec, Decisions, D1979-03-014, 28 September 1979, http:// conseildepresse.qc.ca/decisions/d1979-03-014/. Michel Tremblay, a photographer for the paper, sued the Southam newspaper chain for linking him to organized crime. See St Pierre, “La vérité coule la poursuite d’un photographe d’Allô Police,” La Presse, A16. In 1988, the Montreal Gazette published a profile of photographer Carole Marois, who worked for the competing newspaper Photo Police. See Dunn, “Connoisseurs of Blood and Gore,” F7. 12 I discuss this further in Straw, “After the Event,” 139–44. 13 Demartini, Violette Nozière, la fleur du mal, 39. Author’s translation. 14 For an extensive account of the emergence of the face as cover material, see Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover. 15 The cover of the 14 March 1976 issue features the portraits of fourteen people killed in one week. A lengthy feature in the 7 September 1975 issue contained the images of 115 victims, spread over three pages of portrait photos. 16 Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 22–37. 17 For one of the few discussions of this phenomenon, see Demartini, Violette Nozière, la fleur du mal, 93. 18 de Champlain, Histoire du crime organisé à Montréal, 297–8. 19 For a discussion of these treatments of Montreal in the US popular press, and examples of these photographs, see Straw, “Montreal Confidential,” 58–64. 20 Kalifa, “Crime Scenes,” 175–94. 21 See Straw, Cyanide and Sin. 22 Statistics on the percentage of “visible minorities” within the Montreal population in the mid-1970s are of limited availability and use. The Canadian census began including “visible minorities” as a category only in the 1980s, in response to a requirement imposed by the Employment Equity Act of 1986. While, prior to this, statistics were kept about the country of origin of immigrants, these are not reliable clues as to racial identity and do not include members of racial minorities born in Canada.

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10.

Architecture, Photography, and Power: Picturing Montreal, 1973–74 Cynthia Imogen Hammond

This chapter seeks to understand the ideological work performed by three photographs of elite domestic architecture, taken in the early 1970s in the dramatically changing urban landscape of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Louise Abbott (b. 1950) shot nine rolls of film while documenting the much-protested demolition of the Van Horne Mansion. One image in particular, The Demolition of the Van Horne Mansion, 8  September 1973 (1973), was reproduced numerous times in the years to come. Charles Gurd (b. 1950) took Butler, 1475 Pine Avenue West, Montreal (1974) during his documentation of the interior of the J.W. McConnell house. Part of a series that Gurd produced over six months in 1974, this photograph was seen by very few people before Montreal’s McCord Museum exhibited the collection in 2016. Reacting to rumours that another grand piece of domestic architecture, Shaughnessy House, was going be destroyed, Brian Merrett (b. 1945) visited this building on several occasions in 1973, photographing its interiors and architectural details. Shaughnessy House, the large living room of the east residence, Montréal, 16 May, 1973 (1973) is among the resulting images. Merrett promised the building’s owners that he would not show his photographs to the press, but did present the series to a very important figure in Montreal’s new urban preservation movement, Phyllis Lambert (Figs 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3). The putative subject of these three photographs is the grand domestic architecture of Montreal’s elite Square Mile district in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The “Golden Square Mile,” as it came to be called, was delineated by

10.1 Louise Abbott, The Demolition of the Van Horne Mansion, 8 September 1973, 1973. Copyright and collection of Louise Abbott. 10.2 Brian Merrett, Shaughnessy House, the Large Living Room of the East Residence, Montréal, 16 May 1973, 1973. 35mm colour slide. Collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

10.3 Charles Gurd, Butler, 1475 Pine Avenue West, Montreal, 1974. From the series Portrait of a Period, 1974 (renamed Montreal Mansions in 2014). Digital reprint of original negative using piezography (ink jet) process. Collection of Concordia University.

University Avenue to the east; Dorchester Street to the south, the landform of Mount Royal to the north, and Atwater Street to the west. Of the inhabitants of the Square Mile, architectural historian Jean-Claude Marsan observes that, at the turn of the twentieth century, “70 percent of Canada’s wealth was in the hands of the 25,000-odd residents of this territory, measuring approximately one square mile, a fact for which it earned [its] name.”1 When the photographers – Louise Abbott, Charles Gurd, and Brian Merrett – shot these three images, the buildings in question, and the entire district, were caught in the crosshairs of a remarkably unregulated urban-renewal ethos, and its nemesis, a burgeoning urban-preservation movement. This chapter provides an overview of this important moment in Montreal’s urban, activist history, but it is the work that these photographs do, and have done, that is its focus. Geographer Gillian Rose argues that the “production, circulation and consumption of photographs produce and reproduce the imagined geographies of the social group or institution for which they were made.”2 In this way, photographs are essentially ideological, but this power is always tied to the agents who create, use, and consume photographs. Thus, when asking about the impact of photographic practices on the preservation of the built environment, it is crucial, following Joan M. Schwartz, to “understand them in terms of the action in which they participated.”3 THE VAN HORNE MANSION, 8 SEPTEMBER 1973

On Saturday, 8 September 1973, photojournalist, now author and filmmaker, Louise Abbott photographed the final stages of the demolition of a large house, which is captured toppling down in a cloud of dust and debris (Fig. 10.1). The photograph underscores the moment of architectural annihilation, in which the level entablature of this stately home is divorced from its former post-and-lintel coherence, and starts its final collapse to the ground at the foot of a high-rise apartment tower, seen in the background. This tower, Le Cartier (after French explorer Jacques Cartier, 1491–1557), was one of many high-rises and mega-projects built in Montreal in the wave of expropriation, demolition, and construction that began some years prior to Expo 67, and which accelerated in the early to mid-1970s.4 Often given French names and constructed in International Modernist styles, these buildings contrasted strongly with the architectural legacy of Montreal’s Anglo-Scottish elite, who had, in Marsan’s words, “skimmed its bath of sweat, poverty, and squalor to create the fortunes of the few.”5 The building in the foreground of Abbott’s photograph was emblematic of this small group’s successes. The Van Horne Mansion, perhaps in its time Montreal’s most opulent and well-known house, was located at the corner of Stanley and Sherbrooke streets.6 Its destruction is widely agreed to be the pivotal 220

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moment from which an energetic, grassroots preservation movement sprang up in Montreal.7 The Van Horne Mansion was named for William Cornelius Van Horne (1843– 1915), who in his lifetime was one of the richest residents of Montreal, indeed, of Canada. Van Horne acquired his fortune primarily through the railway industry, being the person responsible for linking Montreal to the west coast of Canada through the Canadian Pacific rail line, dotting it with exclusive “railway” hotels, such as the Banff Springs Hotel. Van Horne was a person of wide interests, one of which was the accrual of a substantial art collection, “the envy of museums around the world.”8 He moved his family from a large home on Dorchester Street even deeper into the “intimate and closed community”9 of the Square Mile, taking possession of an existing, grand house on Sherbrooke Street in 1890, primarily to accommodate his growing art holdings. There he began a program of expansion and decoration that involved artists and architects from around the world. By the time the last family occupant died in 1967, maintenance costs for the home had escalated. In addition, many former residents of the Square Mile had moved, either away from Montreal or to the City of Westmount, a wealthy municipality on the Island of Montreal. Montreal heritage expert Martin Drouin recounts that the inheritor decided to sell, citing costs and the changing landscape of Sherbrooke Street as reasons.10 Drouin writes that “It is not the house’s initial construction that conservationists saw as the main reason for saving it, but rather the expansion work that was done afterward.” As he goes on to explain: “Van Horne gave the remodelling contract to Edward Colonna (1842–1948). Colonna had previously worked in New York for the decorator Louis C. Tiffany (1848–1933) and the architect Bruce Price (1845–1903). The inside of the Van Horne Mansion is a mixture of Art Nouveau and Victorian influence. With its large greenhouse, the house was considered to be a veritable North American palace.”11 The house’s gilded history and its association with an anglophone, industrialist class did not deter individuals and groups of different backgrounds from acting in its defence. Luc d’Iberville-Moreau, who would go on to be a preservation powerhouse in Montreal, wrote “Pourquoi il faut sauver la maison Van Horne” for the French-language daily Le Devoir, on 1 September 1973.12 He argued that the Van Horne Mansion, if conserved, could act as a “réconciliation avec l’architecture victorienne et toutes ses erreurs et prétentions.”13 Moreau begins to anticipate, in this idea, a heritage strategy that architectural historian Dolores Hayden would advance two decades later in The Power of Place (1995). Hayden makes the case that elite homes could be better used to explore the worlds of working people, especially those paid to undertake the building and maintenance of these homes. She writes that “Private clubs and mansions ... could [be] interpreted in terms of the masons’ Architecture, Photography, and Power

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and carpenters’ skills in constructing them, and the maids’ and gardeners’ skills in maintaining them, to supply [the public with] urban working-class history.”14 Unfortunately, this vision did not come to pass in the case of the Van Horne Mansion. Moreau was not the only francophone defender of the mansion, but for other Québécois it was difficult to imagine as “patrimoine” the architecture of an Englishspeaking, Victorian elite, who had built their fortunes on the labour of impoverished, French-speaking Montrealers.15 Relatedly, it is important to note the difference between “patrimoine” and “heritage,” which is often used in translation but does not fully encompass the sense of deep, familial possession that the French word connotes. For many, there was a profound incompatibility between the notion of “un bien cultural” that was also filial inheritance and, as Lucie Dufort described it in 1973, “tout ce qui reste du passé dominateur de l’époque victorienne.”16 Thus the proposed demolition of the Van Horne Mansion brought to the surface issues of class and language, showing deep divides between English and French Montrealers. If reactions to the spectre of demolition revealed how difficult it was to establish a common ground for a shared notion of cultural heritage in 1973, then it also became apparent how few means citizens had to protest municipal decisions. One key tool that did serve the preservation cause was the media. By early September, after months of local and province-wide coverage, the debate about the value of the city’s older, built fabric, especially its Anglo-Scottish heritage, gained national attention. Central to media coverage was photographic evidence of the violence and finality of demolition. Abbott was no stranger to the power of print media. In 1973 she was working for the McGill News alumni magazine, and living in a greystone building on Stanley Street, in what had once been the heart of the Square Mile. “I was surrounded by heritage architecture,” Abbott recalls. As she “began to witness the disappearance of historic buildings in the neighbourhood,” Abbott also began to be “concerned about these losses, and as a young photojournalist, I wanted to document some of the nineteenth-century buildings that remained, including the Van Horne house, which was kitty-corner to my apartment building.”17 Abbott recounts the events of the day: on Saturday, September 8, 1973, I was awakened by the sounds of the demolition crew ... I was aware that the demolition had been scheduled for that day. But I believe that the crew started to work before the legal hour ... I scrambled to get dressed and get outside with my camera ... people gathered to watch the demolition. Some may just have been passersby. But undoubtedly people like Michael Fish and others who founded Save Montreal were on hand. I’m not sure that I chatted much with anyone 222

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that day; I focussed on photographing ... I shot nine rolls of black and white film that day – far more than I would typically shoot in that length of time. I was decidedly caught up in the mix of sadness and outrage that marked the occasion, and I wanted to create as comprehensive a record of the demolition as I could.18 Drouin describes how, “the day after its demolition, the Van Horne Mansion was on the front page of every paper in Montreal.”19 Given that the effort to stop its destruction had involved every level of government, from municipal to federal, the images that circulated after this building’s demise spoke to both the urban rupture of demolition and the failure of existing and new organizations to move their elected representatives to protect what they felt was a significant, collective possession.20 But, as Drouin points out, even before the building’s destruction, the debates about the threat to the Van Horne Mansion meant that “a broader vision of heritage was developing and changing the previous global conception of what constituted national heritage.”21 The demolition of the Van Horne Mansion galvanized the preservation movement. Photographs of the event served as strategies by which individuals and groups mobilized public awareness and educated diverse communities about what was at stake in urban “renewal.” If “the eight-month media storm” that followed the demolition helped the preservationists’ cause, then photography was the primary medium by which the reality of architectural loss became visible, and mobile.22 Abbott’s photograph would be reproduced in over twenty sources, not least of which was the Montreal Gazette, an English-language daily with wide circulation. In addition, her photograph was used, without her knowledge, for Corridart, a citywide exhibition that took place on Sherbrooke Street in 1976. Architect and curator Melvin Charney designed Corridart to actively involve visitors and residents alike in the controversial nature of Mayor Drapeau’s urban transformations. The exhibition directly critiqued Drapeau’s draconian approach to the built environment. Abbott recalls, “In July of 1976, a huge blow-up of my photo of the key moment in the demolition of the Van Horne house was mounted in the Corridart exhibition on Sherbrooke Street opposite the high-rise building that developer David Azrieli had erected on the site of the former Van Horne premises ... I did not know that my photo was going to be included in the exhibition. I discovered its presence when I walked out my door one morning and saw it.”23 Abbott’s photograph would have spoken directly to residents familiar with the public controversy surrounding the Van Horne Mansion, and to the salt in the wound that, for many, was the banal office tower that had replaced the unique house. As intended, the placement of the photograph and a large, accusing yellow Architecture, Photography, and Power

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10.4 a and b Detail of Louise Abbott’s photograph reproduced in L’Affaire Corridart en cartes postales/L’Affaire Corridart Postcards (Montreal: Editions Véhicule, 1977), n.p. The caption to Abbott’s image reads, “The Van Horne Mansion – demolished September 1973, a graceful and historic building razed and replaced by another faceless highrise. From the series of photographs Mémoire de la rue compiled by Jean-Claude Marsan, Pierre Richard, Lucie Ruelland. (Photo: Louise Abbott).” Collection of Les Archives de la Ville de Montréal.

finger, aimed at the high-rise, would have embarrassed both the developer and the city that sanctioned this bland development. With the city filling up with visitors for the 1976 Olympics, the optics of Corridart were particularly and deliberately intense. Abbott writes, “Azrieli protested to the city council, Mayor Jean Drapeau looked into the matter, and the upshot was that my photo and other artworks in Corridart were destroyed, and the exhibition was disbanded.”24 L’Affaire Corridart en cartes postales/L’Affaire Corridart Postcards was produced the year following the destruction of the exhibition. The contents highlight “key images of a major street exhibition and its brutal censorship by the Executive Committee of the City of Montreal three days before the opening of the 1976 Olympic Games.”25 Abbott’s photograph in this book is placed between now-iconic artworks from the project (Fig. 10.4a and b).26 L’Affaire Corridart makes an explicit link between the destruction of the exhibition and the censorship of voices opposed to Mayor Drapeau’s urban vision. As such, the book maintains the stance that urban demolition is a form of censorship, silencing the voices that would oppose it, as well as the information, cultural landscapes, and perspectives associated with the destroyed content, whether this might be a building or an artwork. From the “yes or no” question of whether or not to save this or that work of architecture, then, L’Affaire Corridart moved the image of architectural destruction into a deeper realm of the political. In this context, Abbott’s photograph of the collapsing Van Horne Mansion can be understood as the rubric by which the entirety of the book of postcards can be read. At the bottom right-hand corner of Abbott’s photograph we can just see an older woman, in gloves and hat, holding her purse close to her body. A policeman is ushering her across Sherbrooke Street, his own white-gloved hand solicitously at her elbow, his head turned (anxiously?) toward the falling building (Fig. 10.1). This retirement-age woman may have been a resident of one of the nearby buildings of the shrinking Square Mile, perhaps a member of the very group for whom the loss of this building was arguably most acute. Whatever her relationship to the urban landscape disintegrating around her, the sense of urgency and risk that this figure encapsulates permeates the image as a whole. Today it would be unthinkable to allow a building of that scale to fall to the ground with no means to protect passing traffic or pedestrians. But this circumstance, captured so well by Abbott, tells us something about the moment: how important it was for this demolition to be visible; how important it was to be seen to exercise the power to erase, censor, and disavow the past, no matter who might be at risk as a result. Abbott’s photograph of the last vestiges of the Van Horne Mansion, toppling to the ground in a cloud of dust, threatening to encompass an older woman who dashes out of the way of its debris, is thus not a photograph of architecture. It is a photograph of power, the power Architecture, Photography, and Power

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to change the city, to eradicate a substantial piece of evidence that a prior regime, with all its “errors, flamboyance, and ambition,” ever existed. Yet the persistence of Abbott’s image, in thousands of newspapers and posters, and hundreds of copies of books, has its own power: to resist an urban regime professing erasure as progress. MONTREAL MANSIONS (PORTRAIT OF A PERIOD)27

A black and white photograph was taken in spring 1974 at 1475 Pine Avenue West, a grand mansion on the southern rise of Mount Royal, near Simpson Street (Fig. 10.3).28 The photograph shows a man of about sixty in an interior, standing close to the threshold of a room. The size of this room may be intuited by the eclectic and ornate door frame, which dwarfs the man’s body. The frame is so high we cannot see where it terminates, even though the figure’s head is just above the halfway point of the image. The man’s uncomfortable stance and the slightly awkward composition suggest that the figure, despite his placement at the centre of the image, is not its central subject. But neither, precisely, is the room, most of which is out of view. So, what can be seen? The man’s sober, slightly worn clothing is a foil to the rich tapestry that fills most of the right side of the photograph and to the other decorative furnishings that occupy, but do not crowd, this stately space. The man does not smile, nor does he pose. One hand rests at his side, while the other is hidden in a generous pocket that was not the fashion of the time. The cuffs of his cardigan are loose, a sign that the sleeves have been pushed up many times over the life of the garment. He stands on a beautiful parquet floor, which, despite recently falling out of favour, has a grand design pedigree dating to Versailles. To the left of his lace-up leather shoes is a finely woven carpet. Time or use has chewed away the carpet’s fringe that, along with the figure’s white shirt and hair, provides almost the only highlights in this deeply textured composition. The few remaining white objects in the frame are also the only things that appear new: three ordinary household candles set in a nineteenth-century candelabra to the man’s left. Judging by the whiteness of the wicks, they have never been lit. This image belongs to the series Portrait of a Period by Charles Gurd.29 Undertaken in spring and summer of 1974, while their Montreal-born author was on break from architecture studies in Texas, the photographs in the series document Montreal’s grand domestic architecture. Gurd’s interest lay with buildings that remained in the possession of their owners, that is to say, neither empty nor derelict but rather still being used for the “gracious living” for which they were built.30 His scope included fifteen houses in the Square Mile, Westmount, and the wealthy riverside suburb of Senneville. The project produced four thousand negatives and 226

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a first run of six hundred prints.31 In a letter to the Canada Council for the Arts, Gurd details his approach, explaining that he photographed the “outside of the houses, the grounds, details of doors and windows, the inside, rooms, groupings of furniture, individual pieces of furniture and art work representative of the decor, and in most cases the people living there.”32 Yet, despite this latter statement, fewer than ten images in the series include people. And of that very small percentage, the majority of individuals photographed were not owners, but servants.33 When asked in 2016 about the impetus for the series, Gurd repeated almost verbatim a statement he wrote forty years earlier in a letter to a patron: “I feel a personal interest in the project. My grandmother’s home at the top of Clark Avenue was an example of such tradition, and I wish, if only for the sake of our own family that it had been photographed.”34 Gurd wanted to show the “last vestiges of the cumulative statement” made by what had been Canada’s most powerful families, in what had been Canada’s richest neighbourhoods. For him, the photographic emphasis needed to fall “on the socio-cultural phenomena of the era – such as the almost feudal (not neg. sense) arrangements of family enclaves, with three or four generations of one family being served by as many generations of ‘hired families’ ... the architecture, as an expression of a lifestyle, is very important.”35 As his shooting schedule notes indicate, many of the houses that Gurd managed to photograph in 1974 were either “to be destroyed,” “empty,” or “sold.”36 Given the rate of urban change in Montreal at this time, the speed of Gurd’s project speaks to the urgency of this moment. Yet he has repeatedly stated that his goal was not preservation. In a 1974 letter, Gurd explains to a patron that, as far as “using the photographs now, as a political tool to save the houses [goes] I disagree strongly with Save Montreal and others – that was not the purpose of this project, the inference of the permission to photograph, or even a likely good use of the pictures.”37 Gurd did not consider his role as a photographer to be that of an activist, but rather of an artist.38 Gurd sought with his Leica M4 to capture the spirit of an age just as it was fading away. Often the very last visitor to the houses before their sale, he saw himself and his camera as vital witnesses to a world of wealth and privilege that could not sustain itself, but which had its own intrinsic value. In being the last witness to the material culture of these homes, however, some of the photographs in the Portrait of a Period series manage to witness something else: the way that working people’s lives – the “hired families” – were materially embedded in this cultural landscape of domestic wealth. The house at 1475 Pine Avenue West was the former home of millionaire and philanthropist John Wilson McConnell (1877–1963).39 McConnell, a self-made tramway, sugar, and communications tycoon, made this twenty-two-lot property his main family home from 1924 until his death. Looking out over central Montreal Architecture, Photography, and Power

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10.5 Charles Gurd, Untitled, 1974. (Image #149, Drawing Room, 1475 Pine Avenue West.) From the series Portrait of a Period, 1974 (renamed Montreal Mansions in 2014). Digital reprint of original negative using piezography (ink jet) process. Collection of Concordia University.

and the Old Port, the McConnell estate included an indoor tennis court, as well as a set of stables. The interior of the house was equally impressive; the landings between rooms were larger than most one-bedroom apartments (Figs 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7). By the postwar era, the family had at least eleven permanent staff working at the McConnell house on Pine Avenue.40 While by 1974 the remaining family had already moved away, a skeleton staff stayed behind to maintain the buildings and welcome family members on visits. Figures 10.3 and 10.8 depict two such staff members, identified in Gurd’s files only as “Butler” and “Cook,” respectively (Fig. 10.8). These images of staff work against the paced perfection of the shots of hallways and reception rooms. Even though their numbers are few within the overall collection, the photographs of servants are a concrete reminder that someone vacuumed the fine carpets, polished the beautiful floors, and carefully prepared dining rooms in anticipation of Gurd’s visit. Gurd told me that quite often homeowners would instruct staff to set a table before his arrival, as if a grand party were coming for dinner.41 Understanding that Gurd was documenting for the sake of history, the staff put out cut crystal candlesticks and glasses, ironed napkins, and even fresh 228

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10.6 Charles Gurd, Untitled, 1974. (Image #190, Stables, 1475 Pine Avenue West.) From the series Portrait of a Period, 1974 (renamed Montreal Mansions in 2014). Digital reprint of original negative using piezography (ink jet) process. Collection of Concordia University.

flowers, all of which complete the image of a meal that will not happen, a party whose moment is definitely over. The staff at 1475 Pine Avenue also chose to set their own table prior to the photographer’s arrival. Untitled, 1974 (Image #11, servants’ hall, 1475 Pine Avenue West), depicts the servants’ dining room in the McConnell house (Fig. 10.9). A clean white tablecloth drapes over the simple Shaker furniture, accentuating the light in the space and contrasting with the dark, functional linoleum floor. Instead of cut flowers, a modest African violet adorns the table – a common houseplant, then as now. This gesture is for me a signal that this small “hired family” had as keen a sense of their role in these buildings as Gurd had a clear vision of these houses belonging to a great tradition. In this regard, the photographs of staff and the spaces of servants within the whole of Portrait of a Period recall Elizabeth O’Leary’s observation that “past representations” of servants can help us “see more clearly the ‘invisible’ work and workers” in history, and today.42 In 2016 Gurd’s series, renamed Montreal Mansions, was exhibited publicly for the first time at the McCord Museum.43 The forty images chosen for the exhibit Architecture, Photography, and Power

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10.7 Charles Gurd, Untitled, 1974. (Image #007, Indoor Tennis Court, 1475 Pine Avenue West.) From the series Portrait of a Period, 1974 (renamed Montreal Mansions in 2014). Digital reprint of original negative, using piezography (ink jet) process. Collection of Concordia University.

included several shots of servants, such as the image of the butler (Fig. 10.3). In the necessarily darkened space of the exhibition, the photographs do seem to represent a moment in history that has come, definitively, to an end. After forty years out of sight, the re-emergence of the series interpolates its viewers less toward political action than toward reflection on what Gurd calls the “poetics” of several generations of wealthy families leaving their mark on a place, and a time.44 In our interviews, Gurd recalled being struck by staff members’ “monastic scenario,” having worked for one family all their employable lives. He describes their reaction at having the houses photographed as “happy,” even “thrilled.” In one interview, he explained, “They loved these houses. They were sad that the whole thing was coming to an end.”45 Gurd describes staff relationships to these houses as fundamentally about pride. But perhaps this pride was mixed with fear. The emptiness of the houses’ living and working spaces alike can be read as texts about the insecurity of labour after a lifetime of employment, the difficulty of transferring skills so attached to the deeply classed space of the Square Mile, a neighbourhood that was disintegrating around them. And what waited on the other side of the 230

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10.8 Charles Gurd, Cook, 1974. (Image #33, 1475 Pine Avenue West.) From the series Portrait of a Period, 1974 (renamed Montreal Mansions in 2014). Digital reprint of original negative, using piezography (ink jet) process. Collection of Concordia University.

sales and demolitions? In 1974, entire neighbourhoods were out of work, as industry moved en masse to other cities, and to other countries.46 Gurd photographed 1475 Pine Avenue West in the spring of 1974. Yet his shooting-schedule notes, written later that summer, record the mansion as “empty.” Gone were the owners, but also the butler and the cook. Where did they go? This information, unlike Gurd’s photographs, has not survived. As virtually the only people Gurd met in the grand houses, these staff were, in effect, ambassadors between the photographer and a world that was on the verge of slipping away. In 1975, the Benedictine order of monks accepted the gift of ownership of 1475 Pine Avenue from the J.W. McConnell Foundation, occupying the building until 2001. The “monastic scenario” would thus continue, albeit in a different way, until the house once again became a private residence in 2002. Did Gurd’s photographs help to save this building? No, nor were they intended to do so. But they do perform the rather unexpected service of showing whose homes these grand mansions truly were, at the end of Montreal’s merchant-prince era. While not the possessors of these buildings, the live-in staff that kept these houses Architecture, Photography, and Power

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10.9 Charles Gurd, Untitled, 1974. (Image #11, Servants’ Hall, 1475 Pine Avenue West.) From the series Portrait of a Period, 1974 (renamed Montreal Mansions in 2014). Digital reprint of original negative using piezography (ink jet) process. Collection of Concordia University.

clean and ready for a surprise visit from a family member – or a young photographer – were nonetheless the individuals who called these spaces home. This may be why we see ordinary household candles inserted into a valuable candelabra, perhaps by a careful butler, whose household budget in the final months of ownership by the McConnell family surely did not include the faster-burning, more elegant, and more costly taper. SHAUGHNESSY HOUSE

At first glance, the colour photograph shown here as Figure 10.2, taken in May 1973, simply depicts a bedroom. Light pours into the room through tall windows, past thin curtains. Three single beds, set on modest metal frames, have been made up neatly with covers of the same nondescript fabric. Two beds are fully visible, while the third, in the foreground, is cropped. Stuffed toys rest on the beds, their heads on the pillows. There are no other signs that this is a children’s bedroom. Two posters, perhaps of film or music icons, adorn the walls above the beds, while 232

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a framed religious image looms over the room, above the fireplace to the left. The awkward placement of one bed against a radiator cabinet, and the fact of three beds in one room, suggests that space elsewhere must be limited. The occupants’ personal items are visible, such as books, makeup or perfume bottles, rolled paper, and folded garments. Despite the idiosyncratic details, the uniformity of the beds, bedding, chairs, and dressers as well as the bleak linoleum floor and mint-green walls communicate the institutional nature of the space. That institutional nature, however, is itself offset by other aspects of this interior, especially the wonderfully ornate crown moulding and radiator screen, and likewise the marble-topped fireplace. Bare electric bulbs have been turned on, but left dim by the photographer,47 while a nine-light chandelier glows in the upper-right area of the image. One sign that the inhabitants’ occupancy might be temporary is located almost directly beneath the chandelier. A dark brown suitcase sits on the floor, half-tucked behind a chair. The light that floods the space almost obscures the suitcase, but cannot hide the fact that there is no place for this object to go. On 16 and 17 May 1973, photographer Brian Merrett entered this building, which for most of its existence has been known as Shaughnessy House. Shaughnessy House was built in 1874 on what was then Dorchester Boulevard (today boulevard René-Lévesque). Constructed to plans by William Tutin Thomas, this house was in fact two semi-detached houses: “a double house presented as a mansion set within spacious landscaped grounds.”48 The east wing was first home to a timber merchant, and was then sold to the president of the vast and lucrative Canadian Pacific Railway empire, Thomas G. Shaughnessy (1853–1923) in 1892. The west wing was originally home to Duncan McIntyre, vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The two halves of the building then moved through several wealthy owners, all with powerful connections to the CPR: William C. Van Horne, whom we met earlier in this chapter, Lord Shaughnessy, and Lord Strathcona (Donald Alexander Smith).49 In 1914, Lady Shaughnessy sold her half of the property to St Mary’s Hospital. In 1939 the Sisters of Service, a religious order, purchased the building.50 The west half of the building was owned by Lord Strathcona until 1927, at which point the newspaper magnate Lord Altholstan (Hugh Graham) converted the structure into a nursing home for the elderly, “My Mother’s Home.”51 In 1941, the Sisters of Service bought the duplex outright. By the early 1930s, the building no longer held any allure for the city’s elite businessmen. The interior was far removed from its glamorous heyday of generous billiard rooms, art collections, mahogany-lined smoking retreats, and conservatories filled with exotic plants. Sister Morrissey, a nun who worked at St Mary’s Hospital during its brief tenure in the mansion, recalls the state of the structure: Architecture, Photography, and Power

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However magnificent the Shaughnessy home might have been in the early days, by the time I arrived there in June 1934, it was a sad-looking, brokendown excuse for a hospital. The wards were a series of transformed rooms of varying sizes ... The X-Ray Department was in a cloak room in the hall, the developing tanks under the stairs. The dining rooms in the old Dorchester Street hospital were in the basement, as were the laboratories, the kitchens and the storage rooms. While it was kept as clean as possible, it was an old, dilapidated building and well populated with cockroaches and rats … If you sat on the second floor at the nurses’ desk, the rats would come out of the cupboards and look you straight in the eye.52 By the late 1950s, the district surrounding Shaughnessy House had entered a distinctly classed and gendered phase. The 1957 Underwriters’ Survey Bureau’s survey of Montreal shows Shaughnessy House to be occupied by a Residential Club for Girls, operated by the Sisters of Service, while the property adjacent to the northeast is the Julia Drummond Hostel for Business Girls (the expression “business girls” speaking volumes about the view of working women at the time) (Fig. 10.10). Half a block away to the southeast was the Asylum for Old People (Asile des Vieillards), run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. Single women and aged individuals did not fit easily into Canadian postwar romanticizations of the family as the healing agent for men scarred by war.53 Montreal historian Magdalena Fahrni points to how “much of the welfare state imagined during the war ... would not be realized until the late 1950s and early 1960s ... women’s social citizenship often depended upon their roles as wives and mothers.”54 Women who did not fit into these roles, especially poor or labouring women, were often on the margins of respectable society. The Sisters of Service, in offering young women a home of sorts to live in, mitigated the lingering view of single women outside family or marriage bonds as dangerous to those two institutions. The realities facing such women in the early 1970s in Montreal is borne out by Merrett’s luminous colour slides of the makeshift bedroom in the repurposed Shaughnessy House. Figure 10.11 shows another view of the same room. Here again are more posters, deftly set into the frames of the shallow cupboards that have been built into the threshold between this and another grand room beyond. We can also now see a fourth bed, which itself reveals the true compression of the space for its occupants. But it is also clear from Merrett’s recollections, as well as his photographs, that the young women who resided here found ways – beyond posters and stuffed toys – to make this space their own. “These rooms were lived in and loved by the girls,” Merrett affirms.55 This is especially apparent in the detail of a white marble fireplace surround, graced by two caryatids (Fig. 10.3). “The girls living in 234

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10.10 1957 Underwriters’ Survey Bureau’s survey of Montreal, showing a detail of the former Square Mile (Shaughnessy House is circled). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec.

the rooms ... loved the carved marble cameos and decorated them by applying mascara to their eyes and rouge to their cheeks, lips, and nipples.”56 As Figure 10.12 shows, residents embellished the stately fireplace with affection and humour (note the faint moustache), updating the caryatid’s steady gaze with a dramatic cut crease and blue eyeshadow, while emphasizing the perfect bow of her stone lips with carefully applied crimson. In this unsanctioned makeover of a stately marble female figure, as elsewhere in their lives, the residents of the Residential Club for Girls walked a fine line between the expectations of a previous generation, and the limited options of their own. The made-over caryatid is an emblem, now lost, of how charitable organizations such as My Mother’s Home, the Residential Club for Girls, and other uses of Shaughnessy House provided essential services of housing and medical care, primarily for women, from the years of the Great Depression until the home’s closure in 1973. Perhaps the growing association of poor women with the area, in conjunction with the fading glory of the Square Mile, prompted the decision to further expropriate land in the area surrounding Shaughnessy House for the construction of on- and Architecture, Photography, and Power

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10.11 Brian Merrett, Shaughnessy House, 16 May 1973, 1973. 35mm colour slide. Collection of Brian Merrett. 10.12 Brian Merrett, Nymph, Shaughnessy House, 16 May 1973, 1973. 35mm colour slide. Collection of Brian Merrett.

off-ramps for the Autoroute Villa-Marie. This came after the City of Montreal had begun to demolish buildings along the southern side of Dorchester Boulevard to widen the street, to create a major urban artery. By 1972, the year before Merrett would take his photographs, Guy Pinard wrote: “La maison Shaughnessy se retrouva seule au milieu d’un quadrilatère convoité par les promoteurs immobiliers ... tel était le contexte en 1973 lorsque les religieuses décidèrent de vendre leur proprieté. On peut se demander ce qui serait advenu de la maison Shaughnessy si elle n’avait pas été acquise par l’architecte montréalaise Phyllis Lambert.”57 Phyllis Lambert is the founder of Heritage Montreal and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montreal. The CCA comprises Shaughnessy House and a substantial new development that wraps the historic building protectively around its east, west, and northern facades. A world-renowned museum, archival collection, library, exhibition space, and research centre for the study of the built environment, the CCA is intimately linked in design and space to Shaughnessy House.58 How did Lambert come to choose to purchase this particular building out of all the threatened pieces of architecture in early 1970s Montreal? Brian Merrett, active in the nascent preservation movement in Montreal,59 had been photographing Shaughnessy House since 1971. Word of a new developer’s interest prompted him to complete the project. Merrett recalls, “Over a couple of days in May 1973 I went into the house, [with] a small format camera, tripod, photographed interiors, details, the architecture and the spaces.”60 The space was captivating, despite the institutionalization over the previous decades. Merrett wrote in 1989, “When the doors to the big double sitting room were open, the morning sun flooded the hall. The high ceilings, the off-white walls and colourful posters contrasted brightly with the dark varnished wood trim and dingy paint and illumination of the hall.”61 Merrett’s series of photographs of Shaughnessy House consists of nearly one hundred black and white shots.62 It further includes several colour transparencies, such as the one discussed here. Merrett recalled in 1989 that the Sisters of Service permitted him to take the photographs, on the understanding that these would be kept out of the media: “I promised that nobody would publish any photographs of the house while the nuns still owned it.”63 But, as Merrett explained in an interview in January 2018, the nuns “didn’t say do not show them to the city of Montreal, to architects.”64 As various bids to purchase and develop the site of the Shaughnessy House multiplied, and the changes to the surrounding urban landscape intensified, Merrett realized there was little time to save this significant building. He intuited that he might have an ally in Phyllis Lambert, who had moved back to her home city of Montreal from Chicago in 1971. Back in Quebec, Lambert had joined the Save Architecture, Photography, and Power

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Montreal preservation activist group, and in 1973 became director of the Groupe de Recherche sur les Bâtiments en Pierre Grise de Montréal, whose mission was to examine “the role played by the city’s grey stone buildings in relation to Montreal’s urban character.”65 In 1975, Lambert would found Heritage Montreal, today’s most influential lobby group in the city in terms of preservation, education, and public opinion about the built environment and its history. Since 1971 Lambert herself had already been photographing Montreal’s greystone architecture, with a view to better documenting its importance and singularity within the North American context.66 Merrett approached Lambert in 1973 to show her his photographs of Shaughnessy House. “I met Phyllis Lambert ... at my apartment on Saint-Marc Street. Trotted out all these photographs and laid them on the table ... the next year she purchased the house. A few years later she converted it into the CCA and built all the buildings around it. So, talk about the impact of photography.”67 Lambert herself recalls the pivotal meeting with Merrett as follows: “I took action immediately not because I admired the house (which I did not especially) but because the destruction of buildings in Montreal had to stop. One could say that the fact of Brian’s involvement in photographing the house made him aware of the problem and it was his transmitting his alarm that called me to action.”68 Lambert goes on to say that the involvement in the practice of photographing, in which she herself participated extensively, was the impetus behind the acquisition and protection of Shaughnessy House. In the context of Montreal in the early 1970s, photography must therefore be understood as a political practice (as opposed to photography as a series of objects or images). Further, this practice can be understood as a form of agency that led to this and other important preservation actions in the city.69 Shaughnessy House is today beautifully restored, its interiors and south-facing greystone exterior a hard-won counter-monument to an era in which most of the houses of Montreal’s elite perished. Thus photography, in this case, was an active agent in the preservation movement.70 This photograph, and the series to which it belongs, can be said to have saved a particular building, of course. But it also led to a series of actions that established what Dinu Bumbaru, current president of Heritage Montreal, calls Montreal’s “collective patrimonial conscience.”71 CONCLUSION, OR TALK ABOUT THE IMPACT OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Photographs of formerly elite domestic environments by Louise Abbott, Charles Gurd, and Brian Merrett speak to the ways in which photographs of Montreal’s changing built environment circulated, and the power they wielded in what André Lortie has described as “the dizzying construction site of a metropolitan area in 238

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full transformation mode.”72 The moment to which all three photographs belong, in terms of the time and place in which the shutter clicked, is clear. Considering these photographs in relation to that moment, it is equally clear that the sense of the role of the artist varied considerably from photographer to photographer. Abbott’s experience of the moment was one of great urgency. Describing her choice to remain at the demolition site all day, documenting all aspects of the destruction, she writes, “I was decidedly caught up in the mix of sadness and outrage that marked the occasion, and I wanted to create as comprehensive a record of the demolition as I could.”73 For his part, Gurd is careful to distinguish his 1974 project from the “architectural photographers” of the time. “I was not attending slavishly to architectural details,” he recalls. “I was not doing architectural photography, at all – I was not interested in that.”74 Merrett, in contrast, was fully aware of the capacity of photography at that time to intervene in public discussions about the protection and preservation of culturally significant buildings. So acute was this awareness that Merrett obscured his identity as a photographer from the Sisters of Service in order to gain access, telling them instead that he was a “student of architecture.”75 If the study of architecture – even of the threatened, elite architecture of the Square Mile – were distinguishable from its representation in photography, to the extent that the former could seem neutral, and the latter, dangerous, then the ideological terrain that photographs could occupy in Montreal in the early 1970s begins to emerge. As this chapter has demonstrated, however, the work of picturing Montreal at this time was taken up in markedly different ways by the photographers discussed here. Abbott and Merrett entered directly into that ideological fray, challenging the mantra of change as progress, using photographs as strategic weapons in the battle against the urban siege around them. Gurd, however, in insisting upon the difference between his work and other photographers of the time, accepted that mantra. Complicating the question of these images’ ideological work is the fact that each photograph had a different relationship to the public realm. With these nuances in mind, I want to conclude this paper by asking not only what these photographs did, vis-à-vis architecture and urban change, but also when this impact is achieved, and – to paraphrase Joan M. Schwartz – for whose interests. Abbott’s photograph has been reproduced almost continuously since 1973, but not always with her permission and not always with an attribution to her. A print of the photograph is in the collection of the Centre d’histoire de Montréal, while documentation of her unsolicited contribution to Corridart can be found in Concordia University’s Special Collections, as part of the Corridart fonds. After years tucked away in boxes, a portion of the Charles Gurd collection is now accessible in low-resolution format on both the McCord Museum’s website and the artist’s own website. In this case, the photographer has actively cultivated public and scholarly Architecture, Photography, and Power

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interest in the series to which this photograph belongs, but only recently has this been so. The Merrett image is the least reproduced, but is in no way difficult to locate with simple search terms and a quick foray into the website of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. All three images have thus been “archived” in different ways, and it is worth considering Allan Sekula’s observation that photographs change, in their use, when they enter archival space.76 Their new visibility permits a different consideration of how images of domestic architecture encompass not only distant spaces, following Rose, but also (relatively) distant times.77 With the flattening and untethering effects of digital accessibility, however, the “spacing” and “haunting” that are part of photographic power become somewhat diffuse. And, to borrow from Martha Langford’s observations about the dynamics of the private family album moving into the institutionally public space of the museum, “the removal of an album from a private situation to the public sphere does not deprive it of a context, but substitutes one set of viewing conditions for another.”78 The viewing conditions of these photographs in early 1970s Montreal were vastly different to the viewing conditions of today. Abbott continues to struggle to ensure that her singular, powerful image is credited to her, like so many women artists before her. Meanwhile, Merrett’s series is mostly undigitized, in boxes, out of sight in a beautiful museum that their photographic action helped to create. Gurd’s photographs, in contrast, have come to have a public life as art. Photography in this latter case has triumphed as a precious document about a time and place that has, irrevocably, gone. But given what the other two images accomplished, is this indeed a victory? Whether Gurd intended his photographs to be political or not, there is nonetheless a politics in the bodies he depicts, their gestures, and the small traces of their actions (violets on the table, cheap candles in the silver candlesticks). While his series did not – and does not – challenge the status quo, it is nonetheless possible and, I believe, essential to read Gurd’s images of domestic workers as the punctum of his series, the rare element that, once seen, transforms the significance of the whole. Thus, when the photographs of Montreal mansions are displayed today, as they were recently at the McCord Museum, in dim light in a hushed room, it is the unspoken experiences of this handful of people that leap most powerfully across the divide of history, insisting upon their irreducible presence, their mattering, and their loss. Photography was on the side of Montreal’s most elite and thus most vulnerable architecture in the early 1970s. The photographs discussed in this essay collaborated with rather than simply illustrated the buildings they represented, actively entering into the complex social, economic, political, and architectural histories of their city. Alongside photographs by Clara Gutsche (b. 1949), David Miller (b. 1949), Gabor Szilasi (b. 1928), and Phyllis Lambert (b. 1927), they belong and in some ways were the 240

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precursors to the complex genealogy of organized preservation work in Montreal. Entities such as Save Montreal, Heritage Montreal, and the Groupe d’intervention urbaine de Montréal looked increasingly to the city’s vast vernacular architectural fabric, and the cultural landscapes that this fabric supported and encouraged, using photography as an essential tool to educate the citizenry of Montreal, to communicate with civic leaders, and thus to transform the city itself. For these groups, as with the work of Louise Abbott, Charles Gurd, and Brian Merrett, the photograph was their primary form of documentation, their main mode of persuasion, and their fundamental, if sometimes slippery, ally.

NOTES 1 Marsan, Montreal in Evolution, 257. See also Rémillard and Merrett, Mansions of the Golden Square Mile, Montreal, 1850–1930, 21. 2 Rose, “Practising Photography,” 555. 3 Schwartz, “The Geography Lesson,” 36. 4 See Lortie, The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big; and Germain and Rose, “Montreal’s Built Form,” 35–91. 5 Marsan, Montreal in Evolution, 258. 6 The design of the Van Horne Mansion is not the subject of this essay, but it is a topic that has been well covered in other sources. See MacKay, The Square Mile; Marsan, Montreal in Evolution; and Rémillard and Merrett, Mansions of the Golden Square Mile. 7 See Drouin, “Van Horne Mansion (1870–1973),” n.p.; and Drouin, Le combat du patrimoine à Montréal, 1973–2003; also Rémillard and Merrett, Mansions of the Golden Square Mile; and Southcott, “[Re]Claiming Montreal’s Memory: Demolition and the Photography of Edith Mather.” 8 Marsan, Montreal in Evolution, 258. Silva Sorbelli notes that Van Horne owned twenty-four European Renaissance paintings, “a number unparalleled in any other Montreal art collection during his lifetime,” in her “Renaissance Art in Montreal,” 9. 9 Adams, Minnett, Poutanen, and Theodore, “‘She Must Not Stir Out of a Darkened Room.’” 10 Drouin, “Van Horne Mansion,” n.p. 11 Ibid. 12 Iberville-Moreau was a professor and historian of art and architecture at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), former curator of contemporary art at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MBAM/MMFA), and director of the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts/Musée des arts décoratifs de Montréal (MMDA/MADM) at the Château Dufresne. Iberville-Moreau was also the author of Montréal Perdu/Lost Montreal aimed at educating Montrealers about the loss of their built heritage. 13 “Site of reconciliation between Victorian architecture, and all its errors, flamboyance, and ambition” (my translation). Luc d’Iberville Moreau, cited in Drouin, Le combat du patrimoine à Montréal, 1973–2003, 36. 14 Hayden, The Power of Place, 5. 15 These fortunes were also the result of English-speaking labourers, such as those who

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predominated in the neighbourhoods of Pointe-Saint-Charles and Griffintown up until the start of the Great Depression. 16 “All the remains of the dominance-heavy past of the Victorian epoch” (my translation). Lucie Dufort, “Oui à l’audacieux project,” letter to the editor of Le Devoir, 17 juillet 1976, cited in Drouin, Le combat du patrimoine à Montréal, 1973–2003, 147. 17 Abbott, email correspondence with the author, 10 December 2016. 18 Ibid. 19 Drouin, “Van Horne Mansion,” n.p. 20 Drouin observes that neither could the Jacques-Viger Commission, the Commission de Biens Culturels du Québec, the Society for the Protection of Great Places, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, the Association des Architectes de la Province de Québec, the Société d’Architecture de Montréal, nor the Heritage Canada Foundation prevent the demolition. Drouin, “Van Horne Mansion,” n.p. 21 Drouin, “Van Horne Mansion,” n.p. 22 Ibid. 23 Abbott, email correspondence with the author, 11 December 2016. 24 Ibid. Johanne Sloan describes this exhibition, and its destruction, as “l’un des moments les plus discutés de l’histoire de l’art contemporain montréalais,” in “Corridart revisitée,” 34. 25 L’Affaire Corridart en cartes postales/L’Affaire Corridart Postcards. My thanks to Johanne Sloan for alerting me to the inclusion of Abbott’s photograph within this book. 26 Other notable works in the exhibition and postcard book include Melvin Charney and Gilles Dussureault’s Les Maisons de la rue Sherbrooke: éléments communs (1976) and Pierre Ayot and Denis Forcier’s La Croix du Mont Royal sur la rue Sherbrooke, photographed by Gabor Szilasi. 27 Photographer Charles Gurd used this title for his project in the Square Mile. It refers to a 1967 book, Portrait of a Period: A Collection of Notman Photographs, 1856–1915, by Triggs and Harper, published in Montreal by McGill University Press. 28 Although I do not have a precise date, a letter from the photographer, Charles Gurd, to two potential sponsors in early May 1974 indicates that the project to photograph the inside of this building is complete. Letter of Charles Gurd to Donna Logan, Features Editor, Montreal Star, 6 May 1974, Charles Gurd Collection (Montreal Mansions), Concordia University. 29 In 2014, Gurd gave a selection of prints from the original collection, and the original correspondence related to the project, to Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts. He likewise donated a set of prints and the original negatives to the McCord Museum. At this time, he renamed the series Montreal Mansions. 30 Gretta Chambers’s description of the lifestyle of the families who lived in the buildings depicted. Letter to Charles Gurd from Gretta Chambers, then at 251 Kensington Ave., Westmount, 27 March 1974, Charles Gurd Collection (Montreal Mansions), Concordia University. 31 The original negatives have been digitized and reprinted using new techniques. The acquisition notes for the McCord Museum explain: “En 2014, Francis Sullivan – de Francis Sullivan Photographics à Victoria, C-B. – a réalisé la numérisation des négatifs et l’impression des tirages à la demande du photographe Charles Gurd aux fins de cette donation. Le procédé à jet d’encre est la piézographie : un procédé d’impression en noir et blanc qui utilise sept teintes de gris

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divisées en tons chauds pour les ombres et en tons froids pour les lumières.” Curatorial remarks, Montreal Mansions series, McCord Museum (online catalogue entry, 2014, n.p.). 32 Letter from Charles Gurd to Rodrique Millette of the Canada Council for the Arts, 13 August 1974. Charles Gurd Collection (Montreal Mansions), Concordia University. 33 The McCord Museum website states, “In the 1920s and ’30s, the who’s who of Montreal, such as the Redpaths, the Molsons and the Ogilvies, lived in sumptuous Edwardian mansions. A few decades later, the final generations of these families still living in the grand houses were preparing to move out and move on. In 1974, Montreal architect Charles Gurd met with many of these individuals to photograph the interiors of their magnificent homes.” Charles Gurd, Montreal Mansions, 1974: Photographs Taken by Charles Gurd, Temporary Exhibition, McCord Museum website (2016), http://www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/exhibitions/montreal-mansions-1974-bycharles-gurd/. During interviews with Gurd, undertaken in 2016, it became clear that while Gurd knew some of the families personally, and that his work inspired friends or connections to also either approach him or welcome his inquiries, he never actually met any of the homeowners in their houses. Charles Gurd, telephone interview, 23 May 2016. 34 Letter from Charles Gurd to Mr P. Austin of the Imperial Tobacco Company, 3810 St Antoine, 1974. Charles Gurd Collection (Montreal Mansions), Concordia University. 35 Letter from Charles Gurd to Mrs Anne Drummond of 4373 Montrose, Westmount, 1974. Charles Gurd Collection (Montreal Mansions), Concordia University. With this goal in mind, Gurd offered each homeowner a set of ten prints detailing their home. Patrons also received copies. 36 Charles Gurd, “Project Schedule Notes” (annotated shooting schedule), 1974. Charles Gurd Collection (Montreal Mansions), Concordia University. 37 Letter from Charles Gurd to Mrs Anne Drummond. 38 In addition to local photographers, such as Gabor Szilasi, Sam Tata, Clara Gutsche, and David Miller, Gurd was inspired by the urban documentary tradition, exemplified by Eugène Atget, and street photographers, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson. Charles Gurd, telephone interviews with the author, 23 May and 14 November 2016. 39 The building was begun to plans by architect David Jerome Spence, for businessman Jeffrey Hale-Burland in 1913, but the project was left unfinished until McConnell’s purchase of the property in 1924. At that time, he hired Charles Platt from New York and Kenneth Guscotte Rea from Montreal to complete the building. See La Direction de la culture et du patrimoine de la Ville de Montréal, “Maison Jeffrey Hale-Burland,” Grand répertoire du patrimoine bâti de Montréal, en ligne (2013), http://patrimoine.ville.montreal.qc.ca/inventaire/fiche_bat. php?batiment=oui&requete=simple&id_bat=9839-09-3108-01. 40 Fong, J.W. McConnell. 41 Charles Gurd, telephone interview, 23 May 2016. 42 O’Leary, At Beck and Call, 6. 43 The exhibition was on view from 16 June to 6 November 2016. 44 Charles Gurd, telephone interview, 14 November 2016. 45 Charles Gurd, telephone interview, 23 May 2016. 46 Geoffrey DeVerteuil states that, “Between 1959 and 1973, Southwest Montréal lost 38 percent of its manufacturing employment; between 1951 and 1988, over 21,000 absolute jobs were lost,

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and unemployment reached 19.6 percent in 1986.” See “The Changing Landscapes of Southwest Montréal,” 78. 47 Interview with Brian Merrett, Montreal, 29 January 2018. 48 Lambert, “Design Imperatives,” 57. 49 Valiquette, “Shaughnessy House,” 8. The history of the duplex and its at times attached neighbour, an even larger mansion owned by Lord Strathcona, is complex and best detailed by Pinard, “La maison Shaughnessy.” See also Valiquette, “Shaughnessy House,” 8, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, “Shaughnessy House,” press kit, n.p. 50 Canadian Centre for Architecture, “Shaughnessy House,” n.p. 51 Pinard. See also Valiquette, “Shaughnessy House,” 8, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, “Shaughnessy House.” 52 Sister Morrissey’s memoirs, cited in Dr J.J. Dinan, St Mary’s Hospital, 43. 53 Fahrni, Household Politics, 64. 54 Fahrni, Household Politics, 19. See also Dickinson and Young, A Short History of Quebec, 283–7, where the authors note that this nation-wide reality was nuanced in Quebec, where the attitudes of male clergy toward women remained dominant if not hegemonic, in religious and secular arenas alike, well into the 1960s. 55 Interview with Merrett, 29 January 2018. 56 Merrett, “The Shaughnessy House,” 1. 57 “The Shaughnessy house found itself alone in the middle of a quadrilateral, coveted by real estate developers ... this was the context in 1973 when the nuns decided to sell their property. One wonders what would have happened to the Shaughnessy House if it had not been purchased by Montreal architect Phyllis Lambert” (my translation). Pinard, “La maison Shaughnessy,” A6. 58 The intensely responsive design of the CCA incorporates references to the site’s morphological history, to Shaughnessy House, and – via Melvin Charney’s sculpture garden, situated south of the CCA on René-Lévesque – Montreal’s vernacular, industrial, and colonial architectural histories. The design fundamentally evokes, but does not copy, the tradition of the villa in which a grand house and all its production are gathered together in a generous plot of land. This tradition was the precursor, in Montreal, to the Square Mile. See Canadian Centre for Architecture: Building and Gardens. 59 Merrett’s early impact in the preservation movement, via photography, can be seen in his participation in the exhibition, Perspectives: The Architectural Heritage of Montreal – Paintings and Photographs, shown at the McCord Museum, May to October 1975. Merrett went on to co-author two important books on Montreal’s grand domestic architecture: Rémillard and Merrett, Mansions of the Golden Square Mile (1987), and Rémillard and Merrett, Montreal Architecture (1990). 60 Quoted in Perrin, “‘It’s Your City, Only You Can Save It!’: Save Montreal’s Grassroots Opposition to Urban Redevelopment,” 72. 61 Merrett, “The Shaughnessy House,” 2. 62 The photographs that Merrett took in 1973 would be shown at the Canadian Centre for Architecture a little more than two decades after they were taken, in a solo exhibition titled An Age at a Glance: The Shaughnessy House Photographed by Brian Merrett, 1971–1973 (1994–1995).

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63 Merrett, “The Shaughnessy House,” 2. 64 Interview with Merrett, 29 January 2018. 65 Carr, “Phyllis Lambert and the Canadian Centre for Architecture,” n.p. 66 Lambert recalls, “My goal in photographing was to understand the development of a city and in discovering so many that I had never seen until then … I photographed buildings in good state as I wanted to show how beautiful they were. I was working with the English-born Chicago photographer Richard Pare, who used a view camera. I used a SLR 35mm. Richard and I had been photographing and we had begun to realize that the grey stone buildings were under threat.” Email exchange with Phyllis Lambert, 26 August 2020. See also Lambert, “Photographic Documentation and Buildings: Relationships Past and Present.” 67 Quoted in Perrin, “‘It’s Your City, Only You Can Save It!’: Save Montreal’s Grassroots Opposition to Urban Redevelopment,” 71. 68 Email exchange with Phyllis Lambert, 26 August 2020. 69 Phyllis Lambert notes the preservation of the neighbourhood of Milton-Parc as a “major case” in this sense, writing, “the work of David Miller and Clara Gutsche … was certainly important in that battle.” Email exchange with Phyllis Lambert, 26 August 2020. More information about this battle may be found in the Milton-Parc fonds of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. 70 Phyllis Lambert was herself a very active photographer, taking pictures of hundreds of examples of vernacular architecture in Old Montreal especially. “Her work, which included a photographic study, was aimed at defining government action and educating people about the role they can play in preserving their architectural heritage,” writes Richard Carr (n.p.). 71 Quoted in Carr, “Phyllis Lambert,” n.p. 72 Lortie, The 60s, 107. 73 Abbott, email correspondence with the author, 11 December 2016. 74 Charles Gurd, telephone interview, 23 May 2016. Gurd’s project was indeed different in intent from Merrett’s, whose aim was to capture architecture at risk of demolition. Yet it is also true that the method that Merrett used in 1973 to photograph the interior of the Shaughnessy house was precisely the same as that used by Gurd a year later, and most of the resulting prints in both cases are black and white. 75 Interview with Merrett, 29 January 2018. See also Merrett, “The Shaughnessy House,” and Perrin, “‘It’s Your City, Only You Can Save It!,’” 71. Merrett underscores that his description of himself as a student of architecture was, in its own way, true: he had been – and continues to be – a close observer of historic architecture. However, as he explained in our interview of 29 January 2018, he did keep his word to the nuns. “I told Dusty Vineberg [a reporter who saw the photographs at the same time as Phyllis Lambert] that she would not have access to the photographs until the house was sold.” 76 Sekula, “Reading an Archive.” 77 Rose, “Family Photographs and Domestic Spacings,” 7. 78 Langford, Suspended Conversations, 18.

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11.

Fading In and Fading Out: Negatives and Positives in the Photographic Afterlives of Ephemeral Site-Specific Installations by Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe Martha Fleming

EDITORS’ PREFACE

Throughout the 1980s, Martha Fleming (b. 1958) and Lyne Lapointe (b. 1957) engaged in a collaboration that was artistic, activist, and personal, creating what they refer to as their “Montreal triptych”: Projet Building/Caserne #14 (1983); Le Musée des Sciences (1984); and La Donna Delinquenta (1987) (Figs. 11.1–11.3). These three large-scale projects occupied buildings (a firehall, a post office, a vaudeville/ movie theatre) that had been abandoned and shuttered, sometimes for many years.1 Over a period of months, the artists and their production teams transformed the building in question, which was then opened to the public, with a strong emphasis on welcoming the neighbourhood population. As they jointly reflected on these sites, some ten years later: “The buildings themselves were not cheap and temporary exhibition spaces nor were they found objects – they are ideologically, socially, emotionally, and economically charged architectures which we chose with care as integral parts of our work.”2 This statement comes from an important book of textual and visual documents, as well as conversations about the work, entitled Studiolo: The Collaborative Work of Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, published by Artexte and the Art Gallery of Windsor in 1997.3 Looking back at these remarkable projects, it is clear that the artists announced new directions in artmaking, that would only become dominant tendencies in twenty-first-century contemporary art. Theirs was a “post-studio” practice, because

11.1 Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, Projet Building / Caserne #14 (detail), 1983. Digital scan of a 35mm colour slide transparency. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Geneviève Cadieux.

11.2 Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, Le Musée des Sciences (detail), 1984. Digital scan of an analogue black and white print made from a 35mm negative. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Françoise Boulet.

aesthetic activity was no longer limited to the production of discrete objects within the confines of a studio, objects ultimately destined for an art gallery; instead, they approached entire decaying buildings as their “artist’s material,” as Lapointe remarked at the time.4 Part of what made the Fleming & Lapointe collaboration unique is the amount of interdisciplinary archival research that went into each project. This research was deeply informed by feminist principles, so that each reconfigured building could embody new constellations of knowledge: thus, to describe their body of work in more recent terms as “feminist intersectional epistemology” is entirely appropriate. The Montreal triptych was undoubtedly a contribution to “activist urbanism,” moreover. The once-dormant buildings returned as reimagined nodes in the social life of neighbourhoods, while the artists accorded genuine value to often-neglected histories and collective memories in the post-industrial city. While the Fleming & Lapointe projects are well-known within certain circles, we asked Martha Fleming to reflect on the Montreal work, to put it into

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11.3 Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, La Donna Delinquenta (detail), 1987. Digital scan of a 35mm colour slide transparency. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Martha Fleming.

conversation with a new set of authors, artists, photographers, and readers. The artists’ use of archival photographs and a sustained practice of photographically documenting their ephemeral interventions make their contribution unique and enrich the present-day discourse about Montreal’s post-industrial status. Fleming’s “Fading In and Fading Out” reconsiders the Montreal triptych through its photographic traces and archival apparatus. – J.S. and M.L.

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FADING IN AND FADING OUT: NEGATIVES AND POSITIVES

A number of the photographs in this essay are of photographs: of negatives, of prints, of contact sheets, of labels for slide boxes, of boxes of prints, of photo albums. They are print reproductions of digital photographs taken in October 2016 of analogue photographs taken some thirty years ago of Montreal and of Montrealers. In all cases, the photographs in the images relate to three significant large-scale site-specific art installations that took place in three highly charged abandoned buildings in Montreal in the 1980s. The essay attends to the materiality of the photographs in these images of images, and proposes this materiality as a critical tool in a “looking back” to Montreal that would acknowledge the temporal and conditional context in which these three art installations – and so much else – took place. The three site-specific works in question were created in collaboration by Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe – Lyne and myself. They are: Projet Building/ Caserne #14 (1983, abandoned firehall, Saint-Dominique Street); Le Musée des Sciences (1984, abandoned beaux-arts post office, Notre-Dame West); and La Donna Delinquenta (1987, abandoned Corona Theatre, Notre-Dame West). Though very different from each other in theme, all three of these major projects were forms of activist urbanism, feminist intersectional epistemology, and post-studio art practice, rooted in the meshwork of their 1980s contexts. These projects are also represented in photographs in this essay, in ways both apparently fixed in time and mediated by time – as photographs of photographs. What follows is a reflection on the photographic object as a witness to its own historicity: at once obdurate, malleable, and relational.

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11.4 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of a safety deposit box key, taken with an iPhone 5s, 24 October 2016.

This is a key to a safety deposit box located at a Montreal branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia, on Boulevard Saint-Laurent. The box was one of several which Lyne Lapointe and I rented from the late 1980s until 2016, and in which we deposited among the most valuable things we own: photographic negatives, slides, and largerformat transparencies documenting our site-specific art practice. Key elements of these projects are to be found in several museum collections and in storage, but all that remains of the site-specificity (and therefore temporal specificity) of these ephemeral projects is photographic documentation. Our collaboration began when we met in Montreal in 1981, and I cannot say that it has ever truly ended, or that it ever really left the Montreal in which it was forged, even though we worked together in many other cities, and neither of us live there anymore. As it happens, this was not the right key. When attempting to open two safety deposit boxes for the first time in over twenty years, in the autumn of 2016, this key would not turn in one of the locks, and we were obliged to commission a bank-endorsed break-in to the box beneath the lock. Cracking open photography requires considerable effort, in fact. It felt as illicit as some of the orchestrated takeovers of the buildings in which we had created our works in Montreal. The tiny cubicle of the safety deposit box, as compared to the vast spaces which we had “inhabited” as integral elements of our artworks, seemed an apt metaphor for the shrinking space allowed to artists in cities now. Once we had the right tools and collaborators, it was a remarkably easy, swift, and brute-mechanical process to force the lock and free the box. Freeing the photographs will be more difficult.

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11.5 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of a wall of safety deposit boxes in a Montreal bank, taken with an iPhone 5s, 26 October 2016.

The instant the box was opened, a puff of scent off the hundreds of negatives gave a pungent reminder of the chemical smell of the darkroom, and indeed, all these pics had been in a very dark room for several decades. In that period, and in the sepulchre of the deposit box, they had completely transformed by dint of staying the same. The entire context of the intervening shift to ubiquitous digital imagery that had taken place over the previous twenty years now framed these intractably analogue strips of film anew: no longer simply translucent vessels containing crucial documentary evidence on their emulsions, they had become, while slumbering, significant objects in their own right. This is the actual celluloid that was in the actual cameras in the actual buildings when the shutter opened onto our work in the 1980s in Montreal – there had been a co-location of actual matter in time and space: event and emulsion sedimented together. How does a photographic record become “archival,” vintage, historic – indeed, how does an image of an artwork become a work of art in itself? In the sepulchre of the safety deposit box, these images of artworks imbricating complex concepts inside the signifiers of architectural heritage had themselves invisibly metamorphosed into heritage. 252

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11.6 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of a set of analogue photographic negatives in a negative sleeve, showing Lyne Lapointe (left, 17A) and Martha Fleming (18A), circa 1983, taken with an iPhone 5s, 24 October 2016.

We two are pervasively present in these images, just as is Montreal. Also, like the city, these images render not who we are now, but some afterglow of who we were then. Some of the claims that can be made for “the work” of this work at that particular time in the 1980s relate to event and community – both distant and almost irretrievably evanescent in any evidential way from the images: intangible heritage. These images and their photochemical inscriptions form prismatic reflections of states of being that are no more, and if ever they are to point back with any accuracy to the things that have since evanesced, much work will need to be done. Tracing the impact of the projects themselves, both on the urban fabric of Montreal and in the subsequent practice of artists and urbanists in the city, would engender a multivalent, interdisciplinary research project that would extend out beyond photographs and artworks, or interviews and anecdotes. It would be both of and beyond art history, not simply considering images to be mere framing devices for ephemeral artworks, it would involve historiographic methodologies currently underutilized in that discipline: social science methods in urbanism and activist histories and networks; architectural forensics; intersectional analysis, Ephemeral Site-Specific Installations by Fleming & Lapointe

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intention-mapping, queer studies, reception studies, and more. Reading through The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980 (2015),5 I considered what the sequel could be and, in my mind, titled it “Parallel Worlds: Reconfiguring Montreal in the 1980s.” It is crucial to any rigorous analysis that we understand the conditions of production of works of art, and these are only very partially evident in photographs. Those conditions will always involve the habitat and habitus in which artists are working – especially when they are working, as we were, in and on their immediate built environment as an element of their investigations and their propositions. The particular sociability of underground and lesbian-feminist Montreal in the 1980s; the post-stagflation economics that offered literal room to move following the previous evacuation of the finance industry from Montreal to Toronto in the 1970s wake of the October Crisis; the visible remnants of quasi-feudal, semi-industrial squalor along the Lachine Canal, despite brutal expropriation in the 1960s; a still-sturdy welfare state under Trudeau père and prior to Mulroney’s branch-plant-style dismantling; a Vieux Montréal still full of empty warehouses and ex-convents; the Canada Council’s emerging program for hybrid practice, bravely titled “Explorations” … all this and more defined the conditions in which Lyne and I produced those three projects in the 1980s. The wider social and political contexts in North America in which artists like us were working during this period include organized rights movements and self-organized artists’ organizations, against a backdrop of emergencies such as the AIDS crisis and the interventions of the United States in Latin America, as well as the slow-dawning realization that social liberalism was being stealthily eclipsed by economic liberalism in a globalized economy. Our work in Montreal was profoundly influenced by the work of Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), both his radical photo-document collages and his practice oscillating between architecture, urbanism, and anti-normativity, as well as by the meticulous research and organizational acumen of Hans Haacke’s (b. 1936) institutional critique and property analysis. All three of the buildings that Lyne and I deployed in Montreal were occupied legally, following extensive and persuasive negotiation with municipal and national bodies. They were a kind of open-air epistemology, interweaving and aligning conceptualism and activism: a fusing of representational critique, radical spatialization, and sculptural conceit; of both architectural and urban interventions, involving increasingly sophisticated and scalable appropriation techniques. Significantly, we photographically documented the buildings in which we made projects both before and after, which allows for a sense of the agency of the site and its histories, as well as for a deeper understanding of what we actually did and what it actually took to make this work.

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11.7 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of a plastic slide box, containing 35mm mounted colour transparency slides of La Donna Delinquenta (Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, 1987), taken with an iPhone 5s, 24 October 2016.

Photography is a process, and photographs are only objects, but they are objects with a particular “memorial” agency that issues in part from the very processes from which they have emerged. And from the advent of the charge-coupled device capable of registering a digital image, the analogue photographic object has itself in turn been swept up into the manifolds of the ongoing evolutions of the photographic process. Boxes of our original colour transparency slides in cardboard frames are marked to show which images are over- or underexposed to light: this variation will mean little now that sophisticated algorithms can adjust such anomalies digitally. It will be possible again to consider the primacy of the photographic composition in each image, no matter what the shutter speed: that film, in that camera, in that space, in that city, and at that time. In fact, photographic and optical processes and practices – both in and of themselves and as analytical exegeses for exposing meeting points between perceptual and ideological points of view – were central to much of the work that we did in and with Montreal. In Projet Building/Caserne #14, our first large-scale building project, which took place in an abandoned firehall, we grafted into the very fabric of the building itself a camera obscura that both cleft and cleaved the meanings of captured light to the architectural form of public service. It was January 1983: seven years before the publication of Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.6

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11.8 Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, Projet Building / Caserne #14 (detail, showing camera obscura built into the firehall building facade: the person seated with her head inside the camera obscura is the artist Geneviève Cadieux), 1983. Digital scan of an analogue print. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Françoise Boulet.

We installed a camera obscura in the front-wall doors of the firehall, with its pinhole aperture drilled through the building’s facade. The intention was to highlight the surveillance aspects of public service and relate it directly to regimes of representation – the institutionalization of perspective through photography. A photogram, taken as an exposure from within the camera obscura, was made and then installed as if it were a television, right in the mouth of the overarching descent frame of the fireman’s sliding pole. Illuminated by the thin kerosene lamplight inside a Magic Lantern – an antique projector – the image drew visitors to the vertigo point of the sliding pole hole and kept them back from it. Light travelled down the pole hole to the site where the camera obscura (with its own view hole) was installed, linking the two installations: the positives and negatives, the dark box and the projection light. Flames in the firehall.

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11.9 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of the 1982 photogram light print exposed inside the camera obscura that was an element of the site-specific Projet Building / Caserne #14 (Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, 1983), taken with an iPhone 5s, 27 October 2016.

Montreal – a peripheral metropole? – has always been a cosmopolitan city, connected by history and language to French thought in a way that few other places on our continent were at the time. The 1980s were the last moments in which the routes of thought became transatlantic mainly through books and people, through postal letters and invited guests. We spent a lot of time in libraries and archives and bought more scholarly books than we did art magazines. We sought, ordered, and assembled collections of photographs relating to the issues we were addressing in the works we were making, and had a special relationship with the photographic archives of the City of Montreal. Online access is now possible for some of the photographs that we researched in the archives of the City of Montreal, and even for those that we used in the posters for our projects. It was at the time a completely different experience of research, of engagement with the materiality of the photographs, and of direct contact with archivists, as well as being a time of entirely other copyright regimes and economies of images. And it is significant to note what happens to framing, to metadata, and to evidence of patterns of use in the process of digitization: however large the file size and the resolution, much is lost. Ephemeral Site-Specific Installations by Fleming & Lapointe

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11.10 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of a contact sheet derived from 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ inch colour film negatives of photographs taken by Marik Boudreau of the interior of the Théâtre Corona in February 1987, prior to any artistic intervention by Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe. Taken with an iPhone 5s, 2 November 2016.

The Montreal photographer we most admired, and still do, is Marik Boudreau (b. 1951). We worked with her and with both Geneviève Cadieux (b. 1955) and the late Françoise Boulet (1960–2014), among others, to photograph these projects. In keeping with our preoccupations with representational critique and imaging technologies, we were very concerned by what photography does to artworks and to artists in print contexts. When all images were analogue, it was just possible to regulate the contexts in which the work was seen, mainly by withholding copy prints of the work and keeping a vigilant image register. We tried to control very closely what images were taken of our work, where they appeared, and when. It is a stance unthinkable now, when digital ubiquity is an engine of value, and even then, it was difficult to maintain.

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11.11 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of an analogue print of a 35mm black and white photograph by John Reeves of the anamorphic drawing and corrective mirror in Le Musée des Sciences (Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, 1984) taken with an iPhone 5s, 28 October 2016. Standing people from left to right: Monique Jean, Lyne Lapointe, and Martha Fleming.

The celebrated Canadian photographer John Reeves (1938–2012) was sent to take photographs of Le Musée des Sciences in 1984 for the first issue of Canadian Art. He took some extraordinary shots of the project, including a bird’s-eye view of the vast anamorphosis that we had inscribed on the old post office’s sorting-room floor. With the blithe and dogmatic callousness of youth, we forced Reeves and the magazine to airbrush out of the photo all trace of us as artists. We believed that this would foreground the ideas and avoid the personification of those ideas into “opinions.” I am now astonished that they agreed to do this and wonder what John would say if he had lived to see this 2016 mobile-phone reference pic of a now-vintage print of his contested photograph finally printed. It does no justice to his work, or to ours: but its light flare and the print’s frame forcefully demonstrate its own historicity from within the manifolds of digital “space.” It shows that this particular Montreal both is and has passed; that these projects came into being and are no more; that once, we were young.

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The artwork that Reeves was photographing was among those we made that most explicitly addressed intersectional politics and representational regimes. It was a large anamorphic drawing of the type “corrected” by a cylindrical mirror, extending out across the entire ground floor of the building. Perspective’s project of hiding the site of the investment of meaning in a work of art is thwarted when its own mathematic is used to deflect this purpose. With a mirror in the middle, we see that meaning is inherent in the apparatus itself, not only in the image or in the unconscious … The mirror cylinder was built around an existing column, and the floor drawing was of two women – one a white European from an anatomical textbook by Charles Estienne, dated 1534, whose vulva is a mere hole indiscernible from an anus, and the other a black African Hottentot, replete with hypertrophy of the labia, as observed by Levaillant, in 1803. The first was out of a gynecological treatise, the second was from an anthropological text. Our isomorphism, this drawing together of two representations, created 250 years apart, of women from two different continents, and two different domains of inquiry, made it possible to focus beyond and before the reflecting plane of the cylindrical mirror to see the point of view Estienne and Levaillant shared. The cylindrical mirror membrane was the intimate point of suture, the hinge between the original observers and the focussing eye of the present spectator.7 It is now possible to view images of this work, and of all three of our Montreal projects and more, diffused across a sweep of media – books, magazines, websites. Most of these images were originally embedded in contextualizing and self-reflexive information architectures but are doubtless regularly scanned or downloaded in the distributed materiality that is digital; both used and referenced entirely devoid of the original attendant metadata or our expressed intent. In so doing, audiences and interlocutors unknown to us are gravitating between image registers, media, and even temporalities – just as I do here. How can we obviate, or perhaps harness, this presentism? Photography itself has become evanescent, and critical thinking about it has become even more difficult. These altered interiors that we made, and that punctuated the urban fabric in a culturally experimental period in the long life of this port city, Montreal, are still valid propositions. As analytical events that folded the fabric of the city and three icons of its social architecture into them, their intersectionality was not just a way of understanding complexities of overlapping disenfranchisement, but it was also a way of positing transformational coalitions. 260

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11.12 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of archival storage boxes of analogue photographs of site-specific installations and artworks by Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, taken with an iPhone 5s, 28 October 2016.

The photographs are out of the box. They are unique records, bound in time to their substrates, their chemicals, their emulsions, their captions, and handwritten metadata. As you can see, they are still intractably material, and it is perhaps this very fact that affords them an enduring political potency and potentiality. Can these photos, as records of meticulous deconstructions, of exuberant hypotheses, become in some way reconfigured now as proposals for expansive and inclusive social structures that have not yet come to pass? Are they in fact evidence of thinking that has value for understanding what could be, as much as – or even more than – for understanding what has passed? It is distinctly possible that the power of these site projects has yet to be fully unleashed, and that it is their records that will be their lightning rod.

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NOTES 1 Projet Building/Caserne #14 (1983) occupied the derelict firehall 14 at 4247 Saint-Dominique Street; Le Musée des Sciences (1984) occupied the derelict Bureau de Poste at 1700 Boulevard NotreDame West; and La Donna Delinquenta (1987) occupied the derelict Théâtre Corona at 2490 Boulevard Notre-Dame West. 2 Fleming, with Lapointe and Johnstone, Studiolo, 11. 3 Written and edited by Fleming, with Lapointe and Lesley Johnstone, then director of Artextes Editions, Studiolo accompanied an exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Windsor and also subsequently hosted by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal/Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art. 4 Lyne Lapointe, cited in the press release for Projet Building/Caserne #14, a project for an abandoned firehall in the Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood of Montréal. January 1983, in “Documents,” Fleming, et al., Studiolo, 13. 5 Fisher and Foster-Rice, eds., The City Lost and Found. 6 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. 7 Fleming, with Lapointe and Johnstone, Studiolo, 67 and 68–9.

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12.

Erase and See: The Photogénie of a Metropolis in Progress Martha Langford

Effacer les souvenirs et voir apparaître à leur place des ruines poussiérieuses. Michel Dallaire, TerrAinS VAgUeS1

In Montreal, as elsewhere, early photographs tend to be admired for their sheer staying power. A rather featureless cityscape, Molson Family Brewery after the Fire of 1858, Montreal, Quebec, July 1858, seems at first glance to be one of that inglorious kind (Fig. 12.1). A half-plate daguerreotype, challenging to achieve outside the studio,2 seems hardly to have been worth the trouble. Against a background of ravaged houses, and with a pile of rubble as the first register of visual interest, the image is dominated by empty space. Its constructed title referencing an event – who, what, where, and when (if not why)? – the image is sometimes mistaken for early photojournalism, but there is nothing newsworthy about it.3 The flames have long been extinguished; the sky is clear. No charred timbers or twisted barrel hoops: the debris has been cleared away; the site is clean. A man of property (a Molson or his stand-in) occupies centre stage, while to his right, stage left, a woman and child sit on the ground. In the background, a carriage awaits. The source of this image is the Molson Fonds, held by Library and Archives Canada. Long valued as a technical achievement and a Canadian subject, both the object and its image have been widely circulated in archival and artistic contexts. Attribution to Thomas Coffin Doane (1814–1896; active in Montreal between 1847 and 1866) makes it a jewel in the crown. Doane had earned special mention for a daguerreotype at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris – the Molsons knew who to call. Yet despite a secure provenance and cultural prominence, the dating of the daguerreotype has sometimes wobbled – hesitating between 1852 and 1858.4

12.1 Thomas Coffin Doane, The Molson Family Brewery after the Fire, Montreal, Quebec, 1858. Daguerreotype half plate. Library and Archives Canada, No. e011154380_s2.

This confusion can be blamed on the “why” – a sense that an event of great importance is represented. The word “ruins” has sometimes embellished the title, upping the ante with implications of catastrophic loss, emotional and financial.5 A “Great Fire” can only occur in a “great city”: London, Atlanta, Chicago, and Dresden spring to mind. William Weir gives an eyewitness account of the “Great Fire” that began on 8 July 1852: “The whole of St Mary street (now Notre Dame street east) was burned to the ground, as far as the jail, except the Molson’s brewery, foundry, and granaries, which were saved by the exertions of the men on the premises.”6 Weir reports on the loss of commercial property and some ten thousand people left homeless (“being mostly French, they bore their misfortunes with that cheerfulness that is the characteristic of their race”7). He bemoans the heavy burden on insurance companies, then locally owned. The summer of 1852 was excessively hot – Montreal was a tinderbox, its reservoirs depleted. In Brewed in Canada, Allen Winn Sneath chronicles two conflagrations: the 9 July fire “centred in the old fur-trading part of the city”; the second “one month later ravaged Montreal’s entire east end,” gutting both the Molson brewery and distillery (“fortunately the properties were insured sufficiently to allow the immediate rebuilding of both the brewery and the distillery”).8 Six years later, so in 1858, fire struck again: “While the brewery was severely damaged, the distillery was spared. With the proceeds from the insurance and their personal savings, repairs were made, and the building enlarged and fitted with new equipment.” Sneath tells this story in a chapter entitled “Changing of the Guard”: acts of god are interspersed with internecine power struggles as Molson’s passed from its patriarch to his sons and grandchildren. Still, this was a family business, and with the next generation, a new product, an India Pale Ale, rose like a phoenix from the ashes.9 Assuming that Doane’s daguerreotype was commissioned for insurance purposes and kept by the family as a souvenir, I have long been puzzled by its mannered staging. While the figure of the man makes a suitably determined proprietary statement, the woman seated on the ground with her restless child seems off-message and oddly primitive. Brewed in Canada casts a clarifying light. The mother and child take on meaning, as a sign of fertility guaranteeing longevity (and possibly loans?) to this Montreal dynasty. In Sneath’s bullish telling, and with solid-as-a-rock insurance, an open sky seems appropriate to the brewery’s bright economic future. This is what an empty space signifies in a great city, in this case, our photogenic Montreal. Elsewhere in this book, we examine instances of heritage before the wrecking ball, and what activist and preservationist artists have made of these crises. Taking a community-based approach to urban studies, we look at neighbourhoods as they have been documented and defined by that photographic process. We contemplate The Photogénie of a Metropolis in Progress

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disused industrial interiors and iconic exoskeletons, great hulks of another era, reanimated by art and colonized for adventure. But what we cannot neglect are the spaces in-between – the mortified urban landscape – for this type of space has long characterized the topography of this great city. These are the yawning chasms of somnolent speculation. The phenomenon is hardly exclusive to Montreal: the gap-toothed North American post-industrial inner city has been a photographic subject since the 1960s; as I write this chapter, Detroit holds pride of place. Artist and curator Luis Jacob sees the same pattern of telling absences in the cultural production of another great Canadian city: “In Toronto, we gravitate towards stories that remind us of the mechanisms of erasure.”10 But Montreal had its moment, and it was both dramatic and protracted. Soon after Expo 67, and contrasting sharply with its carnivalesque ebullience, Montreal became an economic accident in slow motion; capital took flight as anglophone investment reacted to Quebec’s independence movement. A start-and-stop economy offers benefits to culture: cheap housing, vast industrial-era studios, artist-run centres, and performance spaces. Dashed hopes spark creative cynicism. A boarded-up building cultivates productive melancholy. Vacant lots invite dog-walkers, naturalists, and artists, when they remain unbuilt – when they grow over – and this is one aspect of the Montreal situation that holds my attention: its longevity. In the images considered here, Progress appears to be holding its breath. The urban landscape, bounded and disused, becomes a sign of imaginative occupation. Entropy creates a vacuum; horror vacui creeps in with the wildflowers, and certain creative practices flourish. This family of resemblance is pegged to a timeline that is nothing other than a selective history of photography, finding surprising fertility in Montreal’s fallow fields. But if the silver lining of photogénie seems to be driving this chapter, its ethical underpinnings need to be stressed. There is no such thing as an empty lot. If photography can be understood as framing, naming, and claiming such spaces, it is only because this act is both psychologically and socially inscribed. I came, I saw, I pictured – that is what a photograph does. And it does so for myriad reasons: depressed developers, homeless people, and creatives walk the same mean streets. Their co-presence is not co-operative; even imaginative possession – photographic authorship – expels other claimants to a site by the simple act of redesignation. Each contestant carries a sign: “Imagine yourself living here”; “Private property – keep out”; or, on a gallery wall label, “Urban landscape.” With this caveat in mind, I begin by establishing the look and function of such intermediate sites in photography. Where nothingness reigns, thoughts on the nature of photography prevail, sometimes as foils to other media, as is generally the case 266

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with Michael Snow (b. 1928). His One Second in Montreal (1969) is an appropriation of “found photographs” that are studies in urban desolation. Their funereal aspect can be compared with the roughly contemporaneous minimalist images of Charles Gagnon (1934–2003). My thoughts on Gagnon are led by Penny Cousineau-Levine’s readings of stillborn potentiality in Canadian photographic practice. In the second group, I look at the barrens of urban topography as framed in the late 1970s and early eighties. The moment roughly coincides with postmodern art’s turn to the everyday and photography’s New Topographic style of clinical observation. Montreal’s laboratory produced somewhat different results: earth turning to asphalt; the livable city littering its winter gardens. I discuss the dystopic urban landscapes of Georgia Freeman (Donigan Cumming, b. 1947) and David Miller (b. 1949). The third group is the closest to us in time, the largest and the most diverse. Drawing on artworks and archives, my aim is to display the range of social and formal responses that the urban void has inspired over its long half-life in the city. Montreal’s interstitial places in translation – performative, realist, poetic, experiential, or activist – are visited in projects by Catherine Bodmer (b. 1968), Emmanuelle Léonard (b. 1967), SYN- atelier d’exploration urbaine (Luc Lévesque and Jean-François Prost, founded 2000), pouf! Art + Architecture (Cynthia Hammond and Thomas D. Strickland, 2005–2015), and Louis Perreault (b. 1979). Their works are contextualized by insightful research and curatorial projects conducted by Suzanne Paquet, Shauna Janssen, Johanne Sloan, and Hammond, who lead us to other researchers – philosophers, cultural geographers, oral historians, and biodiversity experts – who are tilling these rich fields. Finally, in the postscript, I turn to a work by Isabelle Hayeur (b. 1969) designed to inhabit and animate an empty lot with images of protest. The 2014 exhibition of this work was cut short by capitalist pushback. I leave you wondering what this tells us about the future. CONCRETE POEMS

Michael Snow’s One Second in Montreal is a twenty-six-minute, 16mm, black and white film shot on a copy stand from thirty offset reproductions of photographs depicting open spaces – designated parks or plazas – in the city of Montreal (Fig. 12.2). A range of spaces is described, from the southeast entrance and taxi stand of 1 Place Ville-Marie (completed in 1962 as Montreal’s tallest building and the start of its underground city) to tree-lined avenues bounding La Fontaine Park, and some lessprestigious sites of overambitious expropriation. These images were part of a call for proposals for public sculpture that the artist received from the City sometime The Photogénie of a Metropolis in Progress

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12.2 Michael Snow, still from One Second in Montreal, 1969. 16mm film, 25 minutes, colour, silent. Courtesy of the artist.

after 1967. Snow, then living in New York, was increasingly producing sculpture, in both abstract and figurative style. It seems likely that his trademark Walking Woman works, commissioned for the Ontario pavilion, and dispersed across the Expo 67 site, had attracted the commissioners’ attention. Snow either ignored or declined the invitation; he shelved the supporting documents, then appropriated them to his own ends. The structure of the film is simple and symmetrical. The thirty images appear, one by one, and are held on screen for a duration that increases for the first half of the film, then decreases for the second half. To restate in terms of spectatorial experience, the image is sensed as slowing down, then speeding up. This rhythm is imposed and felt without benefit of sound or stopwatch. The visual beat is internalized. That is essentially all there is to it, and the effect is profoundly melancholic. The pictures, all taken in the winter, are dreary; the graininess of the reproductions flattens their values and increases their banality. Taken by someone to describe a lack, they fulfill their purpose admirably. At the same time, they are found objects as Margaret Iversen defines them: traumatic surrealist encounters with the ghost of referentiality, “both a hole in the integrity of our world and the thing that comes to hide the hole.”11

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Reality is indeed ghosted or screened by the photographic imagery of One Second in Montreal, which, in photographic terms, is two generations away from the original. The roughness of the offset reproductions is palpable, even on screen. A photo-savvy audience contemplates the grainy projection, knowing that a smoother, more transparent photograph is just one generation away. Reality lags further behind, ghosted in this cinematic procession of empty spaces – empty signifiers of memory and perfect metaphors for the mental space occupied by Iversen’s found object, “carved out by traumatic experience, defined precisely as an experience that has failed to achieve a representation, but on which, nonetheless, one’s whole existence depends.” As she further explains, “this [found] object calls attention to itself by creating a hole in the fabric of normal perception”12 – a fabric whose dimensions are temporal. In this work of structural cinema, time is clearly of the essence.13 Snow’s papers include a working title and/or credit panel, “Montreal Parks/is about 12 minutes long/Michael Snow/1969.”14 By dropping the literal reference to “parks” and more than doubling the length of his film, Snow injected a bit of mystery, which his critics have solved in different ways. Bruce Elder explains the final title of the work as a play on photographic process, the common exposure of 1/30th of a second.15 Regina Cornwell teases out an autobiographical element: Snow was then becoming a filmmaker, deciding to leave traditional media behind (in the event, this did not transpire).16 My own biographical reading returns to an event that marked Snow from childhood: “a terrible accident that happened in Montreal.”17 The title evokes one arbitrary second, like the single moment of inattention that destroyed his father’s vision when the son was just six years old. This memory is screened, just as One Second in Montreal uses the rough screen of offset mechanical reproduction to shield the spectator from the raw facts of photographic illusion. Some images are held on the screen, others are whipped away; these projections of windswept, wintry spaces are the perfect containers for traumatic lack, both indexical and symbolic in their degraded iconicity. Charles Gagnon’s urban landscapes of the 1970s, many of them sub-titled Montreal, can be admired for their minimalist rigour and semiotic richness. They are systematic in their organization of the built environment, distilling the everyday into found primary structures and industrial materials. Devoid of any living presence, his work represents a stripped-down street photography – not crime scenes, as Walter Benjamin saw Eugène Atget’s early morning views of Paris, but empty places tinged with a sense of abandonment that the photographer’s attendance does not appease.18 Each image stands alone, sliced out of external reality by a flash of recognition and its deliberate inscription in a language of modulated tones.

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Minimalism’s seriality is nevertheless a factor in this work, though not on an image-to-image basis. Repetition occurs within each photograph’s bounded field of vision as frames receding into frames. Taken as a mise-en-abyme, this visual device might be understood in terms of pastness, as a layering of memory onto the presentness of a photographic surface – the archaeological image of the tablet or palimpsest comes to mind, as does the more modern collage (a technique also used by Gagnon). Crucially different in this case is the denial of temporal mobility: the deathly stillness of Gagnon’s photographs, combined with the opacity of their internal passageways, locks the spectator into the given moment, which his title further tethers to place memory, as for example, Corner of Girouard St – Montreal (1973) or Window with X – Montreal (1979). What is remembered by the work, however, is not Girouard in the bourgeois neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-deGrâce, but more abstractly, an organization of elements that have triggered this visual notation. Cousineau-Levine inscribes Gagnon’s work into a pattern of Canadian photographic practice that features “entrances or openings that mediate between life and death.”19 This subset of Gagnon’s oeuvre features blind windows, blocked exits, and opaque glass panes. In his Moving Truck, Fire Hydrant, Blocked-up Door – Montréal (1977), the trope is multiplied, thereby intensified, across the field: there are the bricked-up doors and windows in the ruined shed that forms middle ground and screen; there also is the inky, illegible darkness of the open moving truck – a black square, a found Malevich, perhaps, or its vernacular stand-in that Gagnon seals into a seamless photographic surface (Fig. 12.3). There are no performative human figures, of course, and markedly different from today, no graffiti – the site is artistically undeveloped and psychologically intense. For Cousineau-Levine, Gagnon’s compositions symbolize entrapment – “a consciousness unable, at least for the moment, to achieve transcendence, to descend to the ‘feminine,’ shamanic zone of the imaginal.”20 One of Gagnon’s titles underscores this condition – there is no viable exit from Exit – Montreal (1973), only restless wandering amongst the aesthetically barricaded ruins. ANTI-LANDSCAPES

In 1979, Virginia Nixon, art critic for the Montreal Gazette, visited a solo exhibition, Urban Landscapes, by Georgia Freeman, an emerging local photographer showing at Photo Progression, a gallery-cum-darkroom operation on Bishop Street. She wrote a short review, almost a postscript to a half-page article, “Random Photos Reject the Conventions,” in which she analyzed a major touring exhibition by American Lee Friedlander (b. 1934), hosted by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. 270

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12.3 Charles Gagnon, Moving Truck, Fire Hydrant, Blocked-up Door – Montréal, 1977. Gelatin silver print. CMCP Collection, National Gallery of Canada. 2000.112. With the kind permission of Michiko Gagnon.

Nixon describes Freeman’s work as “seeing the world from under a broad-brimmed hat. Freeman cuts windows and walls off short in her photos of small, downtown backyards, sometimes littered with the sodden debris left over after the snow melts, sometimes swept up but still bare.” Acknowledging that the “cut-off techniques do focus attention,” Nixon was counselling the photographer to raise her eyes, taking in “more of a sense of definition and presence.”21 These downcast eyes belonged to Donigan Cumming, then offering the third in a series of exhibitions presented under different pseudonyms – John Marlowe, C.D. Battey, and finally as a woman, Georgia Freeman. For Cumming, schooled in covert conceptualism and neo-Dada messiness, these were visual exercises. The adoption of a pseudonym was strategic: as he has since disclosed, he was not yet prepared to come out and play. In effect, and as Nixon intuited, the melancholy of Freeman’s landscapes – their Brechtian bleak absurdity – too nakedly reflected his world view. A war resister, he had been living in Montreal since 1970, watching it tear itself down and exile its innercity residents to the suburbs. The Freeman project was conducted on his regular stomping ground, a neighbourhood on the southwestern fringe of the downtown core. Many of its monuments were already gone – the mansion much photographed The Photogénie of a Metropolis in Progress

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12.4 Georgia Freeman (Donigan Cumming), Untitled, from the series Urban Landscapes, 1979. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist.

by Edith Mather and discussed by Tanya Southcott in this book was among the missing. Some of this neighbourhood would be saved, rebaptized by its residents as “Shaughnessy Village.” Other nearby streets, closer to the Ville-Marie Expressway, would be obliterated, just for the hell of it, it seemed, as nothing was ever built. There are no backyards represented in the series; the photographs were all taken from the public way (Fig. 12.4). Had Cumming raised his eyes, as Nixon suggested, he would have been photographing greystone Victorian streetscapes of decaying flats and rooming houses under notice. Instead, he mapped the pathetic topographies of the spring melt – the visible and the unseen. What we see in these cramped front gardens are signs of threatened agency – spaces of sociability become urban foxholes. Their property lines have long since been pushed back by the car. Last-ditch territorial limits are demarcated by rusting metal and picket fences; their feeble plantings are encircled with stones; the earth itself is pushed down by pavers. These efforts at containment are echoed in photographic language: the narrow black lines that circumscribed uncropped images in the day are here widened to brackish moats. 272

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12.5 David Miller, Parking Lot between Drummond and Mountain Looking South from La Gauchetière, August 1981, 1981, from the series Parking Lots and Construction Sites, 1981–1983. Gold and selenium-toned gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist.

Georgia Freeman’s poetic pessimism ran its course with this series. Cumming would recycle Freeman’s very still images as cemetery plots in his video meditation on Vietnam-era radicalism, My Dinner with Weegee (2001). They alternate with portraits of men “eligible” for the draft – Portraits of Men by C.D. Battey. Flashing up from Cumming’s past, images of stagnancy jostle with figures of resistance – all conjured up from nothing, of course. From 1981 to 1983, David Miller created a series of urban landscapes that might be interpreted as an expression of rage: Parking Lots and Constructions Sites (Fig. 12.5). They were all located in downtown Montreal. The backstory of this project is told elsewhere in the book by his photographic and life partner, Clara Gutsche. In the early 1970s, Gutsche and Miller had been involved in a campaign to save their neighbourhood of Milton Park (Milton-Parc) from high-rise development. Himself an American émigré, Miller had applied lessons learned in photographing anti-war demonstrations to capturing the protests of the community; he had photographed the threatened buildings in an effort, as the American activist photographer Lewis Hine had famously put it, “to show the things that had to be appreciated” The Photogénie of a Metropolis in Progress

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– in this case, sound, livable buildings in a vibrant downtown neighbourhood.22 He had recorded the demolition and the piles of rubble when the protest failed. In the process, Miller came into his own as a photographer of urban heritage and industrial buildings. Milton Park (1971–72) was followed by The Port of Montreal (1976–79), views of disused rail lines, grain elevators, and warehouses – monuments of Montreal’s architectural history that activists such as Melvin Charney and Phyllis Lambert were endeavouring to save. Certain paradoxes are built in. Masterfully organized views performed the pride of the industry leaders. Through Miller’s photographs, Montreal’s “great men” legated their monuments to collective memory. The art and craft of Miller’s practice also speaks to posterity. No flâneur, he worked with a view camera, producing not resin-coated glossies for the press, but gold-and-selenium-toned gelatin silver prints for exhibition and permanent collection. And it was by applying the same working methods to present-day positivism that he found his critical edge. Parking Lots and Constructions Sites came forth as a sardonic update of the nineteenth-century mission. The moment was propitious. In the 1970s and early 1980s, photographic practice and its study had turned to the archive. North American landscape movements, such as New Topographics and Rephotography, involved close visual analysis of nineteenth-century survey photographs. These pictures taught contemporary practitioners (artists and theorists) how to cope compositionally and rhetorically with “open space,” whether sight lines for unbuilt railways or panoramic views of plains yet unbroken by the plough. As Shawn Michelle Smith argues, attention to invisibilities – economic, ideological, and exclusionary forces – is crucial to understanding these modes of description.23 This approach has its roots in the interdisciplinary studies of the 1980s. Photographic archivist and historical geographer Joan M. Schwartz’s forensic analysis of Humphrey Lloyd Hime’s The Prairie, on the Banks of Red River, Looking South (1858) is paradigmatic in this respect. No picture could be emptier, but Schwartz’s analysis fills it to the brim with capitalist desire: “the power of this image to stir economic hopes and fuel political dreams among Canadian expansionists and British imperialists becomes clear.”24 Miller’s Parking Lot between Drummond and Mountain, Looking South from La Gauchetière, August 198125 is similarly “empty” and loaded. The urban view is organized boldly into grey horizontal strips: paved street, concrete barriers, asphalt, a chain-link fence, and a planting of lampposts in the parking lot behind. Sight lines are white-painted dividers between parking spaces; running to the edge of the property, their vanishing points are occluded. Miller strategically includes and makes roughly equivalent only two vertical elements, the old and the new: a grain elevator and a parking metre. He documents the urban clearances and alludes to their motivating forces.

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TERRAINS VAGUES?

The first two pairings – Snow and Gagnon, Miller and Cumming – are parallels. These artists were never consciously working in tandem. The third group has connections, formal or not, to an overarching social movement of environmental consciousness that has transformed landscape photography in our time. A first generation, operational by the 1980s, focused on rural and remote military and/ or industrial wastelands; some went further afield, working on the global disaster, while others trained their lenses closer to home. Suzanne Paquet, a contributor to this volume, was active in the 1990s as both photographer and theorist of the post-industrial landscape.26 In a chapter commissioned by Paquet for her edited collection, Terrains vagues/Unspecified, cultural geographer Guy Mercier captures the struggle between contemplation and speculation that interests me here: “The landscape imposes itself upon our vision: it is constantly there, before our eyes. Wherever we are, it dictates its conditions. Since we cannot escape from it, we have to put up with it. We could possibly appropriate it. Unless it ends up possessing us.”27 In the closer confines of the city, citizens repeatedly see and thereby form attachments to disused spaces – voting with their feet, they lay claim to their commons. Artists follow them, turning vacant lots into open studios. Women artists have excelled at this work, making free with pictorial convention, digital technology, and photographic language: Catherine Bodmer’s pseudo-sublime and Emmanuelle Léonard’s empathetic mapping are cases in point. Two complementary projects by Bodmer, Déplacer des montagnes (2004) and Lacs (2005), are readily enjoyable as tongue-in-cheek translations of her Swiss cultural origins. Presented as large-scale prints and postcards, they purport to “discover” majestic mountains and alpine lakes in Montreal’s vacant lots (Fig. 12.6). Bodmer makes light of the sublime, constructing her views from the leavings of winter – derelict snowbanks or huge and putrid puddles left by the same. Individual images in the first five-part series were given lofty titles, such as Mont Cervin (Le Cervin is the French name for the Matterhorn). Curator Pascale Beaudet catalogues Bodmer’s cultural references, conjoining them with autobiographical memories of her own: a Montreal childhood of tobogganing down Everests: those “puny banks of snow obstructing the streets and sidewalks.”28 This twenty-first-century artist’s translation of Old World topography to the New is hardly unprecedented: the propensity to see North America as a quilt of European topological types – Dutch dyke lands, Swiss alps, Norwegian fjords, French pastures, and Ukrainian wheat fields – is endemic to Canadian nationbuilding: painting, poetry, patriotic tracts, and immigration posters.29 From this point of view, Bodmer’s landscapes might be seen to re-enact the settler-colonial The Photogénie of a Metropolis in Progress

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12.6 Catherine Bodmer, Lacs, 2005. From a series of five photographs and postcards, Lambda prints. Photo [exhibition view]: Guy L’Heureux. Centre des arts actuels Skol, Montreal.

gaze that understood North America as a vacant lot and tried to make it so, by military force and biological contamination.30 These darker colonial histories of erasing and seeing infect Bodmer’s pictures. Her five great lakes are bounded by fences, abandoned buildings, and, in the background, astonishingly picture-perfect snow-covered mountains. Her impulse to make something called a landscape from these all-too-familiar spaces is haunted by real and imagined horrors. The shimmering surfaces of her “lakes” are despoiled by garbage and pollution. The tortured spirit of the place is encapsulated in fragments of European-type folktales that she secretes into her prints as tiny blocks of text. Emmanuelle Léonard’s Les marcheurs (2004) is not a landscape project per se. Its unifying theme is labour, considered in terms of spaces and conditions that are documented plainly and sometimes copiously, in the language of mechanical production. Les marcheurs is composed primarily of paparazzi-style shots of workers arriving at a textile factory in what is left of Montreal’s garment district.31 The unidentified business is located on De Gaspé Avenue (avenue de Gaspé), in the neighbourhood of Mile End, marking the northern extension of Plateau-MontRoyal. Industrialized between 1960 and 1975, this area is once again in transition, its former factory floors and warehouses now “becoming” art spaces and lofts.32 Les marcheurs was shot in the dead of winter. Every day for a month, at the crack of dawn, Léonard took up her position near the entrance to the factory and enacted a form of surveillance.33 Most of the walkers look forward and directly at the camera, though the psychological effect of its presence is hard to gauge. Bundled up against the cold, these workers seem intent on reaching their destinations; some human punch clock with a camera is of no account. Their drive to get to their jobs, regardless of the challenges, carries a certain symbolic load. Les marcheurs comments on the precariousness of these people’s lives within a global economy – these issues need not be rehearsed here, except to say that Les marcheurs puts flesh and bone on current statistics and future legends of a gentrifying district. Supplementing these figure studies are cinematic establishing shots of the spaces they have ostensibly come through. Léonard photographs the walkers’ Working Paths along two axes: in Working Paths, No. 1, a long, horizontal view captures the snowy corridor of De Gaspé; in Working Paths, No. 2, the camera leaves the ground (Fig. 12.7). A high vantage point maps an adjacent space that appears in the cold, blue light as a desolate snow-covered field – a dangerous crossing. Léonard’s title implicates this harsh terrain in working-class history; it suggests that beaten-down workers have beaten down these paths. The effect is not entirely fictional, as architectural historian Cynthia Hammond confirms: “there is a steady, illegal stream of pedestrian and cycling traffic across the Canadian Pacific tracks between Rosemont and Mile End.”34 Winter gives it the appearance of a no-man’s land or a desert. The Photogénie of a Metropolis in Progress

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12.7 Emmanuelle Léonard, Working Paths, No. 2, detail from Les marcheurs, 2004. Chromogenic print. Courtesy of the artist.

Such borderlands, marked by human traffic, have become tropes for twenty-firstcentury labour, formations actualized in Léonard’s work by the dawning light of day and symbolized in a post-industrial twilight. This unpeopled aerial landscape becomes a sign of struggle in the context of industrial labour. And yet there is much more to learn about this particular place. It has a name: Le Champ des Possibles (The Field of Possibilities). An irregular-shaped land parcel spun off by the railroad, this post-industrial site became a park in 2013. As Hammond explains, the apotheosis of the site occurred over a decade, led by a consortium of interests: “The indeterminate and un-programmed character of this site and its rich biodiversity have captured the imagination and hearts of nearby residents, as well as artists, urban naturalists, activists, planners, and others.”35 Official recognition of the space acknowledges its multiple uses: “home to itinerant human populations, numerous art installations and events, and many seasonal species of plant, bird, animal, and insect – over 300 have been identified to date.”36 Champ des Possibles is not a wasteland, then, but a “biotic community,” whose astonishing diversity can be traced, at least in part, to the airborne seeds of the Western harvest as it was transported east in railcars: “The grain choices of farmers in Manitoba have had as big an impact on the field as the local activists who stopped the City from mowing the wheat and grasses several years ago. In other words, whether it be a concrete building, a diminishing enterprise such as the local railway, or the desire to eat an apple, whose core was tossed into the field about fifteen years ago (and is now a full tree), human action is inseparable from the ecology, the life, the culture of the Champ.”37 This phenomenon – the “distributive agency” of the railroads38 – was well recognized by botanists on the Island of Montreal by the late nineteenth century. As Robert Campbell reported at the March 1899 meeting of the Natural History Society of Montreal, “At Point St. Charles several introduced plants grow luxuriantly, the seed of which the Grand Trunk no doubt first carried thither; any observant person who travels by the Canadian Pacific will find growing along its line in the Eastern Provinces not a few species whose native home is in the Western Prairies.”39 Montreal’s non-native flora was thriving in its railyards and ditches as a spinoff to its leading industrialists’ speculative nation-building. FOCALIZING FIELDS

Art photography is just one aspect of a movement energized by grassroots actions, site-specific installations, and relational performances. Projects by SYN-, pouf!, and Perreault emphasize different modes of encounter with human and non-human users of land that is seemingly there for the taking. Their definitions, or terms The Photogénie of a Metropolis in Progress

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12.8. SYN -, Hypothèses d’amarrages [Mooring Hypotheses], 2001–. Centre des arts actuels SKOL, Montreal. Turcot site, 2001–2007. Above: Guy L’Heureux, 2001. Opposite: Luc Lévesque, 2003, 2006, 2007. Courtesy of SYN -.

of engagement, are telling: SYN- focuses on the “residual space … produced and abandoned by contemporary urbanisation.”40 pouf! intervenes on a site that could be mistaken for “a green space without distinction,” though it is, in fact, a designated dog park under threat of urban redevelopment.41 Perreault underscores the richness of social encounter and biological diversity in a place that capitalism understands as “post-industrial residue awaiting a better fate.”42 Three different photographic styles are deployed, each fitted to anticipated usage (archive, album, art exhibition) – three different modes of photogenicity. Linking them together requires a balancing act between promise and precariousness – each project brings the present into focus as an argument for the future. SYN-’s Hypothèses d’amarrages (Mooring Hypothesis, 2001–) was “the first phase” in a program of temporary occupations. As its participation in an exhibition organized by the peripatetic artist-run centre Skol, SYN- proposed to use “picnic tables to squat an array of selected interstitial sites of the Montreal Metropolitan area. The intention of the intervention is to exploit the potential of these forgotten, trivialised or underused spaces to offer to urbanites new possibilities of interaction

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with the urban landscape.”43 SYN- characterized the picnic tables as space “probes” or witnesses sent out “to find and to exploit in the spatio-temporal system of the existing city.”44 This quasi-scientific investigation took place in seventeen locations that were mapped and professionally photographed by Guy L’Heureux, then revisited photographically by the artists (Fig 12.8). The archive is a mix of installation views and photo opportunities. Staged photographs range stylistically from the scientific to the uncanny. They are semiotic playing fields, replete with connotations and insinuations. Figures are figurative: a comely cyclist in the background ironically refers to the glamorous tropes of real-estate advertising: picture yourself here. A picnic table wedged between the crumbling pylons of an overpass is a sign of planned obsolescence. Another view of a forlorn picnic table, pictured like an erratic or a spaceship against the Montreal skyline, travesties the commercial postcard – like Bodmer’s imaginary mountains and lakes, Hypothèses d’amarrages circulated in that prosaic form. SYN-’s playfulness is never innocent; their installation records are rife with architectural sous-entendres, as for example, when a picnic table is being carried along a “classic” line of Montreal nineteenth-century greystone facades or has been unceremoniously deposited beside a postmodern portal – each architectural style indebted to an economic bubble. In this sense, the project talks back to power, or, more accurately, shifts the conversation from the economy to culture. In their compilation of essays and images of “interstitial” urban performance practices, Jen Budney and Adrian Blackwell unify works by an international cadre of artists, such as Vito Acconci, Asger Jorn, and SYN-, under the banner of resistance to “alienating forces of capitalism, the State, modernism, the media spectacle, or even architecture and performance themselves … marginality is viewed here as an advantage.”45 Marginality is also a photographic vantage point, here enacted by Heureux’s observational documentary style – illustrations chosen for Unboxed show the artist/actors going about their unusual activities in the most normal way. As Budney writes generally about the artists of Unboxed: “They refuse both architecture and performance in order to locate art once again in what is on occasion problematically called ‘the real,’ and might be better described simply as history and politics.”46 The literature generated by this work of refusal is impressive. More astonishing still is its sometimes-optimistic glow. In his chapter for Italian social theorist Andrea Mubi Brighenti’s Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-between, SYN- co-director Luc Lévesque moves Hypothèses d’amarrages off the island of Montreal and into a realm of infinite possibility. Relieved of its particulars – place and protest – SYN-’s project becomes a visionary redefinition of the urban landscape:

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Diverging from the dominant modes of landscape creation that usually proceed through distanced characterization and contemplation, the landscapeness of the interstitial would operate instead by “bringing out” virtualities that exceed the dominance of the visual. By virtualities we here refer to a “realm of potentials” (Massumi 2002) or “connections,” immanent to a given territorial condition, that can engage the past and present, as well as the future. In this perspective, “the virtual is not opposed to the real” (Deleuze 1968: 269), it constitutes precisely that part of the real opening the present to new imaginations and unforeseen experience trajectories.47 This phenomenological reading takes us far beyond the visible. As Lévesque contextualizes SYN-’s “interstitial approach to landscape,” index and diagram are harnessed to “the territorial condition – the potential of a field of interrelations … that valorizes and activates the relational, virtual, processual and often invisible dimensions of the environment.”48 His “urban contemporary world” is a global concept that can be distilled from “the banal everyday substratum, in plural social spheres as in the poorest of contexts.”49 The importance of SYN-’s actions lies in their research potential – their stimulation of speculation. As he concludes: “What the conceptual field we have briefly covered tends to bring out are the vectors mobilizing the imagination of such possible openings, an interstitial approach to landscape that could only be becoming.”50 SYN-’s interstitial landscape is utopic – a space of limitless imaginal speculation. Recourse to a map or a newspaper moderates the armchair urbanist’s hopes. The indexical content of these indexical images is weighty. The picnic tables have been installed in some of the most contested spaces of the city – for example, under an overpass whose extension is wiping out yet another inner-city neighbourhood. This social dynamic is both visible and imaginable, for what is also seen on the surfaces of these tables is the scratching of citizen-users – their graffitied messages in a bottle – and, in one of “the poorest contexts,” photographed by Lévesque, the transformation of a table into a sleeping platform that will keep its recycler above the snow. These images illustrate Johanne Sloan’s article on SYN-, which underscores the human factor in Hypothèses d’amarrages: the location of these “‘interstices’ within the otherwise repressive or regimented narratives of city life.”51 Associating SYN-’s practice with the transformative gestures of the Situationists, Sloan also considers the biographies of the picnic tables “placed in vacant lots, beside highways, or under bridges … quickly used and symbolically appropriated by Montrealers.”52

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WHEREAS …

By comparison with the imaginative accelerations provoked by SYN-, the transformation of Griffintown’s Parc Gallery into a dog park took a very long time, evolving within the context of a working-class immigrant neighbourhood, determined and dismantled by the vagaries of Montreal’s economy and the “big thinking” of city planners and private developers. Allowed to be/come on the former site of Ogdensburg Coal and Towing Company, indeed championed by a local politician named David Gallery, the green space was used as a playing field for the local residents until depopulation reduced this activity. Dogs and their owners moved in, and by 2010 local history placed the age of the dog park at around forty years. It was a middle-aged crisis, then, when developers took an interest in the site as part of Griffintown’s gentrification – its erasure and replacement by condominiums. pouf!, under the aegis of independent curator Shauna Janssen’s Urban Occupations Urbaines project and in community partnership with 100 Laisses (100 Leashes), responded with a project of their own. Visionary in quite other terms, what the organizers envisioned was that the park be left alone for the use and enjoyment of its four-legged residents and their companions. To this end, pouf! and Janssen conducted research on the history of the site, collected information about the primary users of the park from their owners, and photographed the regulars and their walkers, ultimately creating a website, a fence-line exhibition of portraits, and a book – a compilation of images, essays, and testimonials.53 The photographs in Dog Parc Gallery are snapshots taken by the participants and their confederates (Fig. 12.9). The effect is deliberate: to evoke everyday experience, nothing beats the deskilling tool of vernacular photography, especially when skilfully deployed. The best images adopt the POV of the primary users, capturing the essence of dog-park experience, which is being with other dogs and feeling free to ignore them. In terms of peaceful urban co-existence, humans have nothing to teach their canine companions; they can only aspire to enable and participate in their doggy condition. This is what the photographs of the amenities and landscaping provided by the community and the events organized by pouf! combine to show. Forward looking, as a manifesto, it is clear that Billy, Baloo, Canelle, Duff, Duke, Rocky, and their fellow users are conservative optimists who look forward to their next walk. Dog Parc Gallery models a different mode of interstitial landscape research, one that curbs speculation by knowing when to leave well enough alone.

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12.9 E. Kirkman, Dog Parc Gallery, 2010. Digital file. Courtesy: pouf! art + architecture.

AND SO …

In Louis Perreault’s urban landscape project on the former site of the Canadian Steel Foundries, Sur la trace du renard, the beauty of an urban wilderness creates a first impression. Perreault casts his project reflexively as a narrative of discovery, mapping the site according to its natural characteristics as a rebounding wild place in the city. This emplotment creates suspense: time is a crucial underlying factor, though its rhythm is not shared. The place that Perreault is exploring lives by unsynchronized clocks. Its owners wait for the neighbourhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve to “pick up” – a blue-sky economic future lies ahead. Until then, its human and non-human (animal and vegetal) inhabitants are allowed to co-exist. Some of these “actors” – Perreault conceptualizes their interaction through Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (ANT)54 – will live out their entire life cycle in these overgrown, vine-curtained spaces; others live with the possibility of being forced out by weather or being told

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12.10 Louis Perreault, Vigne et clôture, from the series Sur la trace du renard, 2011. Ink jet print. Courtesy of the artist.

by security guards to move on. Plants, foxes, and people are governed by these conditions, as is the photographer, who doubly trespasses on private property and private refuge, and who expressly desires to make an extended portrait of the site, to be the medium through which it tells its own story and projects its own “futurity.”55 In the process, he narrates his own progress as an artist and a citizen who desires nothing better than to experience and share the plenitude of this site. Perreault’s holistic project resists selection of an individual, iconic image. My choice here rests on his photographic process, rather the content of his work. Vigne et clôture (2011) captures both the entrance and the exit of this project (Fig. 12.10). The hole in the fence, regular and parallel to the ground along its upper side, then peeled back like a can of sardines or a wilted leaf, is a measure of the intruder’s physical strength, size, and impatience. It functions formally as a mise-en-abyme, a clear view of what is otherwise a screened view, the “beautiful” vines using their 286

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“ugly” chain-link and barbed-wire fence to thrive – the natural and the carceral interdependent and intertwined. Through this hole in the fence, Perreault’s uncertainties are projected – as predicted by Mercier, the destabilization of the landscapist’s single-point perspective is performed. For the hole in the fence that is the lens is effectively gazing upon nothing – an open urban field that invites speculation of every sort. This chapter has explored a sub-subcategory of the photographic landscape – less a genre, than a motif, but not inconsequential for all that. Quite the opposite: the photographic opportunity of an empty, indeterminate, or interstitial urban space effectively distils the nature of landscape photography as a whole. As a distillation, it deserves a name: let us call it the proleptic landscape, a view of competing potentialities. Montreal’s overgrown fields nurture both capitalist intrigue and creative rejoinders. For all its allusions to history, the photographic framing of urban emptiness looks resolutely forward, composing a picture of pre-conquered space, a place-in-waiting. And as the history of progress has shown us, time and again, there is no gain for some without loss to others, and this battle continues to be staged, even when the field seems empty. POSTSCRIPT

In 2014, the Biennale de Montréal (BNLMTL) commissioned a new public artwork by photographer and filmmaker Isabelle Hayeur. Entitled Murs aveugles, the work consisted of still and moving images, the former, featuring abandoned workers’ houses (occupants evicted) and textual outpourings (graffiti and hand-made signs) from the Occupy movement; the latter, upward shooting flames and downward flowing pools of redness, suggestive of blood (Fig. 12.11). The projection was installed at the entrance to the Saint-Laurent Metro station, on a wall still bearing the marks of a demolished building, on a plaza that is hardly worthy of the name, more a vacant lot with a bifurcated tract between station doors and the street. When the Montreal Metro first entered the downtown in the late 1960s, the above-ground station, technically known as an édicule, was conceived as a temporary solution. The idea was that skyscrapers would be built above the line, thus absorbing the entrance. The Saint-Laurent station has become a monument to unfulfilled expectations; it remains in its original, temporary state.56 The station now serves Montreal’s burgeoning Quartiers des Spectacles; the rough adjoining wall has been used for other projections – though, as we now know, always at the pleasure of its private owner, who in this instance complained to the BNLMTL, leading to the dismantling of the work one month before the end of the biennale. Hayeur sued the BNLMTL, winning a partial settlement in court.57 The Photogénie of a Metropolis in Progress

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12.11 Isabel Hayeur, Murs aveugles, 2014. Public projection. Biennale de Montréal (BNLMTL). Courtesy of the artist.

Murs aveugles extends the Occupy movement’s cry for social justice, splashing slogans of resistance to big banks and complicit governments, denouncing “austerity,” and calling for a people’s revolution. The piece was passionate, but was it dangerous? Projected in Montreal, on the old, familiar face of unfinished business, Hayeur’s work might have been read as a dirge for Occupy’s waning fortunes. Its rising flames and streaming blood are, after all, mere projections; as pictures, they give off no heat. But the key to this work is its barbed local reference to gentrification. The montage begins with the facade of workers’ row housing, inhabitants evicted, doors and windows blinded, in anticipation of sale, demolition, and replacement by yet another high-rise condominium – maybe, maybe not. The image represents Griffintown, a site close to Dog Parc Gallery, a proleptic urban landscape neatly encapsulating the then-latest chapter in Montreal’s history of hurry-up-and-wait speculation. For this alone, Murs aveugles deserved its place in the 2014 BNLMTL, whose theme, after all, was L’avenir (looking forward).

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NOTES 1 Dallaire, Terrains vagues, 59. 2 Cavell, Sometimes a Great Nation, 43. 3 For the production and circulation histories of a genuine news story, see Schwartz, “Documenting Disaster,” 147–54. 4 See Library and Archives Canada, Framing Canada: “On rare occasions, photographers ventured beyond the studio to capture city or landscape views; the LAC’s holdings include a daguerreotype of the aftermath of the disastrous fire at the Molson Brewery in Montréal in 1852 and another of Allan’s Mill, in Guelph, Ontario.” Illustrated on the same page, the daguerreotype is entitled Ruins of the Molson Family Brewery after the Fire of 1858, Montréal, Quebec, July 1858. Library and Archives Canada, Framing Canada, Virtual exhibition (Archived). 5 Library and Archives Canada, Framing Canada. 6 Weir, “The Great Fire of 1852,” in his Sixty Years in Canada, 194–5. 7 Ibid., 195. 8 Sneath, Brewed in Canada, 65. 9 Ibid. 10 Jacob, Form Follows Fiction, 15. 11 Margaret Iversen, “Readymade, Found Object, Photograph,” 49. They are found objects as understood by Iverson through the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan and translated into photography by Roland Barthes, that is, as traumatic surrealist encounters with the ghost of referentiality. 12 Ibid. 13 One Second in Montreal and Snow’s  [Back and Forth] (1969) were premiered at the Whitney Museum on 21 May 1969 in a program entitled “Four Evenings of Extended Time Pieces.” The other three evenings featured works by Philip Glass, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, and Steve Reich. See Weil, “Evening Programs,” 15 and 19. The poster also promotes a lecture by Max Kozloff: “The Poetics of Transience.” See Michael Snow Fonds, Box 9, Art Gallery of Ontario. 14 Michael Snow Fonds, Box 9, Art Gallery of Ontario. 15 Elder, Image and Identity, 249. 16 Cornwell, Snow Seen, 3. 17 Author’s translation of an interview with Michael Snow’s mother, Antoinette Levesque Snow Roig, recorded in 1999 as part of an oral history project on the history of Chicoutimi, in Saguenay, Quebec. As part of her life-story, Mrs Roig recounted the workplace accident that blinded her first husband, Gerald Bradley Snow, some sixty-three years after the event: “Mon mari a eu un accident très grave pendant que nous étions à Montréal ... un jour pendant le temps du diner, comme c’était tranquille, il a demandé à son aide ... d’aller voir ... ils étaient en train de bâtir un souterrain pour une compagnie de Montréal, de railway, quelque chose comme ça, et puis, ils sont descendus au souterrain pendant ce temps et un autre ingénieur, sans savoir qu’il y avait quelqu’un là, a fait sauter de la dynamite ... Toute sorte de débris a tomber dans ses yeux. Il a perdu la vue dans un oeil complêtement et l’autre a été toujours assez faible. C’est un accident terrible qui est arrivé à Montréal. Ensuite nous sommes rentrés à Toronto.” Taped interview, copy held by her son, Michael Snow. 18 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 527.

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19 Cousineau-Levine, Faking Death, 237. 20 Ibid., 242. 21 Nixon, “Random Photos Reject the Conventions.” 22 Hine’s statement of purpose is frequently cited and almost never referenced. See, for example, Cornell Capa’s “Introduction” to Lewis W. Hine (1974), Volume 4 in the ICP Library of Photographers series, where it is delivered in full: “There were two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated.” (5). The source appears to be Robert W. Marks’s “Portrait of Lewis Hine,” published in the Chicago-based general-interest magazine Coronet (February 1939), 157. Marks, who interviewed Hine, uses a semicolon: “… to be corrected; I wanted to show …” 23 See Smith, At the Edge of Sight, especially her Chapter 4, “Preparing the Way for the Train: Andrew J. Russell,” 99–127. 24 Schwartz, “More Than ‘Competent Description of an Intractably Empty Landscape,’” 108. 25 This part of La Gauchetière has been renamed avenue des Canadiens-de-Montréal. The lot is now fully occupied by the Bell Centre, the twenty-one-thousand-seat home of the Montreal Canadiens hockey team and entertainment centre. 26 Paquet, ed., Terrains vagues/Unspecified. 27 Mercier, “A Geography of Remains,” in Terrains vagues/Unspecified, 77. 28 Beaudet, “Catherine Bodmer: Lacs,” 244–6. 29 I have elsewhere discussed this phenomenon in relation to nineteenth-century landscape photography and Morgan and Burpee’s Canadian Life in Town and Country (1905). See Langford, Suspended Conversations, 136. 30 See Jessup and Robertson, eds., Negotiations in a Vacant Lot. 31 Léonard, “Projets. Les marcheurs,” Emmanuelle Léonard. Artist’s website. 32 Hammond et al., “Possible,” n.p. 33 André L. Paré correlates Les marcheurs with Michel Foucault’s theories of the modern surveillance society, an interpretation that the artist herself has suggested. See Paré, “Emmanuelle Léonard,” 19. 34 Hammond, “From Rust to Green, 47. 35 Hammond, et al., “Possible,” n.p. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Campbell, “Botany in the Island of Montreal,” 84. 39 Ibid., 84–5. 40 SYN- statement, reproduced in Budney and Blackwell, eds., Unboxed, 92. 41 Cynthia Hammond, “Introduction,” in pouf! art + architecture (Cynthia Hammond and Thomas Strickland), Dog Parc Gallery, 1. 42 Louis Perreault, “Sur la trace du renard,” iii. Author’s translation. I thank Cynthia Hammond, primary supervisor of this extraordinarily rich project in research-creation, for drawing it to my attention. 43 Lévesque, “SYN- Project,” 92–5. 44 Ibid. 45 Budney, “Unboxed: Social Space and Participation,” in Budney and Blackwell, eds., Unboxed, 11–16; citation, 12. 46 Ibid., 15.

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47 Luc Lévesque, “Trajectories of Interstitial Landscapeness,” 50. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 50–1. 50 Ibid., 51. 51 Sloan, “Appropriating the Megastructure,” 12–13. 52 Ibid. 53 pouf! Art + Architecture (Cynthia Hammond and Thomas Strickland), Dog Parc Gallery. Also see pouf! Art + Architecture, “Biting Back,” 4–9. 54 Perreault, “Sur la trace du renard,” 8. 55 Ibid., 26–48; for a concept of architecture that is temporally unbounded – that is, a built environment that does not know its own fate – Perreault draws on Grosz, Architecture from the Outside. 56 Magder, “The Métro at 50,” n.p. 57 Clément, “Isabelle Hayeur c. Biennale de Montréal,” 171–85.

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13.

Expo 67 and the Future of Montreal Johanne Sloan

On 20 May 1976, as repairs were being done to Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome in Montreal, a fire was accidentally started, and the entire building was quickly engulfed in flames. The headline in the New York Times the next day was “Fire Razes U.S. Dome at Expo Site” – implying that the building was entirely destroyed, while referring to the dome’s erstwhile identity as the American pavilion at Expo 67, the world’s fair held in Montreal in 1967. This headline was misleading, as the structure’s translucent acrylic shell was burnt off, but the spherical steel armature remained intact. Still, this was a devastating fire, because from this moment on the dome would never again provide a unique, enclosed-yet-transparent architectural environment, as was intended. One of the most widely circulated photographs of the fire was taken from a plane or helicopter, looking down at the burning building while a sinister tower of black smoke issues forth from the dome. In 2015, a version of this photo appeared on the cover of Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, the publication accompanying an exhibition that opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2015 and travelled to other US museums through to 2017 (Fig. 13.1). Texts in the Hippie Modernism book address Fuller’s impact on alternative architecture and design practices of the 1960s, but strangely, this cover image is never mentioned or explained – not the circumstances of the dome’s conflagration, or the Expo 67 context, or the city in which it is located. It is simply taken for granted that a photograph of the geodesic dome on fire exemplifies “the struggle for utopia,” and then, by implication – the dystopian end of countercultural dreams.1 This singular reappearance of the Fuller dome is only one of many instances when an

13.1 Cover of exhibition catalogue for Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, Emmet Byrne and Andrew Blauvelt, design. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015.

image of this building has been appropriated and recirculated – and transformed through the process. While the dome is often associated with Expo 67, depending on the context, its photographic representation can also evoke the city of the future, utopian social projects, or historical rupture and dystopian ruination. This flurry of associations and connotations continues to circle around Montreal’s signature dome. After Expo 67 ended, the American government presented the dome as a gift to the City of Montreal, and if the 1976 fire destroyed the building’s original use-value, its imaginative power lives on into the present day. Expo 67 is an important part of Montreal’s collective identity: such is the message that gets reinforced with each repeated commemoration of the 1967 world’s fair which received over fifty million visits and drew global attention to the city. On the thirtieth anniversary, Radio-Canada’s Visitez Expo 67, a box set of videocassettes that repackaged material originally broadcast on local television, proclaimed that Expo 67 “transformed Quebec in its entirety,” and that “for millions of people, this was the best summer of their lives.”2 On the fortieth anniversary in 2007, largescale billboards set up throughout the city showed colourful Expo 67 memorabilia, each image captioned “En 67, tout était beau.”3 According to this unapologetically nostalgic slogan, everything was beautiful then, in that summer of 1967. Once again, in 2017, on the fiftieth anniversary of Expo 67, museum professionals, curators, filmmakers, and artists across multiple institutions assembled eye-catching photographs and films to remind Montrealers of this historic event. What made the 2017 anniversary different is that it coincided with country-wide “Canada 150” events initiated by the federal government, which in turn brought out decolonizing activists pushing back against a celebratory message of nationhood. The “Canada 150” anniversary was circumvented by the City of Montreal, though, as its burst of Expo 67 programming was instead linked to an earlier historical juncture – the 375th anniversary of the city’s founding by French colonists. Other independently produced exhibitions emerged that year as well; one of the most significant of these, from a scholarly point of view, was the architectural historian Cammie McAtee’s Montreal’s Geodesic Dreams: Jeffrey Lindsay and the Fuller Research Foundation Canadian Division, held at the Université du Québec à Montréal’s Centre du Design. The exhibition and accompanying publication show that Fuller’s connections to Montreal predated Expo 67, as he lived and worked in the city early in his career, while McAtee’s research brings to light small-scale domes being built in and around Montreal during the 1950s by Fuller’s Montreal-based collaborator, Jeffrey Lindsay. Over at the city’s Musée d’art contemporain, the exhibition In Search of Expo 67/ À la recherche d’Expo 67, curated by Monika Kin Gagnon and Lesley Johnstone, assembled a cross-section of contemporary artists whose work critically revisits Expo 67.4 Two remarkable films shown in that exhibition will be discussed later in this essay: 294

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13.2 The Fuller dome fenced off during the fiftieth anniversary of Expo 67. Author’s photo.

1967: A People Kind of Place (2012) by Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn (b. 1979) and By the Time We Got to Expo (2015) by Philip Hoffman (b. 1955) and Eva Kolcze (b. 1981). Fuller’s geodesic dome is inevitably a central element in the visual re-presentation and commemoration of Expo 67. It is one of the few surviving architectural elements of the world’s fair. Of the others, the one-time France pavilion is a gambling casino run by the Quebec government; Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 is an exclusive condominium; and Alexander Calder’s monumental sculpture Man (1967) is the nodal point for an electronic-music dance scene. If the dome has become Expo 67’s most iconic surviving structure, so too can the future-oriented project developed by the architect, designer, inventor, and philosopher Buckminster Fuller (1895–1993) be considered part of a shared cultural legacy. Fuller explicitly tapped into a science-fiction vocabulary when he introduced the concept of “Spaceship Earth,” as a way of reminding all the planet’s inhabitants that they are part of the “crew” on a planet/spacecraft that is hurtling through space. Thus, for Fuller, it is our collective responsibility to design ways to equitably share the earth and its natural bounty. In fact, Fuller’s contribution to Expo 67 was initially intended as a showcase for this form of planetary thinking, as he proposed to the US pavilion planners that the geodesic dome he’d designed would house one of his World Game projects (sometimes known as a “world peace game”). Expo 67 and the Future of Montreal

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13.3 Expo 67. 50 ans. Poster issued by the City of Montreal, 2017.

The architectural historian Jonathan Massey comments: “Fuller and his collaborators set out to design a giant time machine capable of transporting humanity back to the Garden of Eden or forward to a time beyond the division into communist and capitalist blocs and first, second, and third worlds.”5 But that offer was refused; instead, the Cold War ideologues in charge of the Expo 67 pavilion “coopted Fuller’s idealism for triumphalist purposes,” while filling the pavilion with pictures of movie stars and NASA-branded spacecraft. Fuller’s alternative model of futurity nonetheless circulated widely during this period, as he was a regular speaker on university campuses across the North American continent, was greatly admired in countercultural circles, and indeed became a kind of media star. So it can be argued that, right from the start, some powerful cultural energies embedded in the dome managed to exceed the United States’ propagandistic imprint. Fuller would speak of domes in unapologetically utopian terms: he said they could enable the realization of “cosmic thoughts, hopes, supplications and glorious conceptions.”6 Thus the Expo 67 dome, which was Fuller’s magnum opus, could continue to be inspiring and generative. The actual structure residing on Saint Helen’s Island has not always been treated as a cultural treasure. Having been abandoned for almost twenty years after the 1976 fire, the dome has in recent years housed a museum dedicated to 296

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environmental issues. And yet, during that 2017 anniversary summer, the Fuller dome on the Saint Helen’s site was inaccessible, completely surrounded by fencing and scaffolding (Fig. 13.2). While the city’s rationale for undertaking repairs during the anniversary summer is hard to fathom, perhaps this was a tacit recognition that physical access to the dome is of limited importance, as compared with its agency as a pictorial representation. Certainly, during that anniversary summer, the iconic, quasi-pictographic silhouette and distinctive geodesic pattern of the Fuller dome could be seen on posters, banners, T-shirts, websites, and across numerous exhibitions (Fig. 13.3). Fifty-plus years later, these spectral images of Expo 67 continue to nourish what Andreas Huyssen has named an “urban imaginary.” While acknowledging that cities must be understood according to their material infrastructure, political orientation, and socio-economic contradictions, Huyssen calls attention to the affectively embedded ways that people respond to the promise of urban life: “an urban imaginary is the cognitive and somatic image which we carry within us of the places where we live, work, and play.”7 This essay asks what is at stake for Montreal, when Expo 67 imagery is so compulsively recycled. While it is true that some Expo 67 revivals rely on cheery nostalgic slogans like, “the best summer of their lives,” the long-term impact of that evanescent environment has proved to be more complex and interesting. It is paradoxically the futuristic appearance and ethos of the world’s fair that often draw people into the past. Remembering Expo 67 therefore entails both nostalgia and futurity, and as such becomes a complex form of historical consciousness. Other cities too have modern and/or futuristic moments lodged in their past, with world’s fair constructions becoming iconic in this respect – Gustave Eiffel’s tower, built for the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle and the Trylon and Perisphere geometric structures built for the 1939 New York World’s fair are some prominent examples. Amanda Lagerkvist has written about the enduring impact of such experiments in futurity on the identity of cities; in particular, she has analyzed how Shanghai’s 2010 world’s fair reframed the assertively modern and westernized character the city had forged during the 1930s. According to Lagerkvist, the Shanghai world’s fair reactivated that earlier modern condition, which had been suppressed for political reasons, but nonetheless remained dormant. She deems “futurity to be a defining propensity of the place,” while also suggesting that this futurity is malleable, in that it becomes “a material and symbolic resource that is used by different agents with different agendas at different points in time.”8 While the case of Shanghai is unique in certain ways, and the world’s fair she discusses is a contemporary one, Lagerkvist’s insights are still relevant to the discussion of how Montreal continues to revisit its world’s fair and its modern past. Expo 67’s fantastical environment, erected on the margins of the city, does represent a moment of Expo 67 and the Future of Montreal

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13.4 Fonds de solidarité FTQ advertisement that appeared in the Montreal Metro system, 2016–2017. Ad created by Marketel Agency.

radical futurity, a glimpse of how urban life might evolve – but since the material dimension of Expo 67 has largely disappeared, this futuristic cityscape survives as a flickering apparition. The serial resurrection of Expo 67 imagery over the years nonetheless suggests that the futurity associated with the 1967 event has remained “a defining propensity of the place.” Using Lagerkvist’s terminology once again, it can be said that Expo 67’s futurity has been, and continues to be, mobilized in accordance with “different agents … agendas … (and) points in time.” If Expo 67 is periodically revived in museum and gallery contexts as anniversaries roll around, Expo imagery has also permeated broader categories of visual culture. One curious example of this was a home-ownership advertisement by Fonds de Solidarité FTQ that was displayed in Montreal’s Metro trains as well as online in 2016–17 – in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Expo 67. This ad featured 298

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a photograph of a cute, one-storey pink bungalow with a distinctively Fulleresque dome digitally grafted onto the back of the house (Fig. 13.4). The advertising copy explains that “Matilde” has become a first-time homeowner while simultaneously re-experiencing Expo (“Matilde revit l’Expo”). This fictional conceit was further developed in a moving-image component of the ad campaign: a young woman is seen surrounded by cardboard boxes in a living room; her bookshelf swings open and she enters a portal into the past, riding the monorail at Expo 67 with young versions of her parents, against the backdrop of a large facsimile dome. The pastel-pink hues chosen for these images don’t adhere to Expo 67’s punchy colour scheme, but this is, after all, a rose-coloured vision of the past. It is important to know that this was not a typical corporate-bank sales pitch, as the FTQ (Fédération des travailleurs du Québec) is the largest workers’ union in Quebec, and remains associated with the leftist/utopian project of Québécois nationalism that flowered during the 1960s and 1970s. This image of the Fuller structure bypasses its US origins, to root the meaning of the dome in the experience of Montrealers who were part of a tremendous cultural upheaval. Without providing specific information about Matilde’s parents, this intergenerational engagement makes the dome stand in for the sixties-era vision of a new world opening up for the people of Quebec. It is worth pointing out that Matilde, the fictional protagonist of this publicity campaign, appears to be a single woman, who is purchasing a home on her own, as there is no mention of husband or other conjoint (the Québécois term for domestic partner). The fantastical addition of a geodesic dome onto the back of her bungalow becomes the idiosyncratic expression of a young woman’s plans for her future. In other words, another utopian social project has been conjoined to this reuse of the Fuller dome: reaching far beyond the precincts of Montreal or Quebec, the feminist revolution of the twentieth century enabled women to pursue their dreams, which included being able to walk into a bank and ask for a loan under their own names. Throughout the examples cited in this essay, what is at play is the transformation of archival source material. Images and objects that had been returned to the archive are once again extracted and reactivated, so that the futurity embedded in them can be channelled in new directions. It is nonetheless vital to problematize the very nature of the “Expo 67 archive.” Huge quantities of visual content were generated before, during, and after the 1967 event: photographs were central to the displays of every national and thematic pavilion, and otherwise took the form of colourful posters, brochures, and magazine pages, chrome postcards, snapshots, black and white half-tones printed in newspapers or books, stereoscopic “Viewmaster” cards, personally or commercially produced slides, etc.9 Such still images were accompanied by a wealth of moving-image material, that included televisual coverage by Canadian, Québécois, and international broadcasters, documentary films, the Expo 67 and the Future of Montreal

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13.5 Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyên, 1967: A People Kind of Place, 2012. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

Super-8 home movies shot by innumerable visitors, as well as the technologically advanced cinematic experiments shown in a number of pavilions.10 These visual artifacts have remained largely dispersed since 1967, since no concerted archival plan was devised by any level of government after the world’s fair wrapped up. Museums, government archives, and institutions therefore possess only bits and pieces of Expo 67, with private collectors playing an important salvaging role, while there is no database that synthesizes the disparate public and private holdings. Thus the Expo 67 archive exists primarily in a conceptual, Foucauldian sense, in that this avalanche of stuff gets discursively organized and presented in specific ways. As Michel Foucault remarked: “historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge.”11 Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s nineteen-minute film 1967: A People Kind of Place approaches Expo 67 in explicitly archival terms. The film makes use of documents, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, posters, audio recordings, film footage, and photographs from multiple sources. As a kind of meta-commentary, we occasionally catch sight of a woman in an archive – searching, handling, and sorting documents – and it can be said that this figure stands in for the ongoing question of who has control over representations of the past (and implicitly, the future) (Fig. 13.5). The main focus 300

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of the film is actually another centennial-celebrating project – the construction and dedication of the “world’s first UFO Landing Pad” in the town of St Paul, Alberta, during the summer of 1967. Nguyễn links the landing pad (photographs of which resemble postcard views of Expo 67 pavilions) to Montreal’s world’s fair, and more particularly, to the Fuller dome. What becomes clear is that both Expo 67 and the UFO landing pad were enveloped by a rhetoric of universal values, global citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and futurity. Nguyễn’s film opens with a recognizable documentary-film trope – an authoritative and paternalistic male voiceover, borrowed from an Expo 67 source, vaunting “the universal ambience of this unique rendezvous of man – past, present, and future.” But shortly thereafter there is a new voiceover, this time a technologically processed, reverberating, female voice that self-identifies as an alien, “travelling between galaxies, approaching earth.” Such explicit sci-fi references (the alien voice and the UFO landing pad, along with images of a starry cosmos, revolving planets, strange flashes of light, and eventually a flying saucer) create an alternative framework for considering Expo 67. In the case of the Fuller dome, it is more accurate to describe this as the reinscription of a sci-fi discourse. Shortly after its construction, a French journalist wrote that “the immense ball [seemed] to have descended from another planet,”12 while Nguyễn’s film includes footage of Buckminster Fuller himself being interviewed at Expo 67, saying, “there is no kind of dreaming going on in science fiction that will not be realized.” A few moments later, the dome itself appears; overlaid onto it is a quote from the science-fiction author Ursula Le Guin: “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive”13 (Fig. 13.6). Nguyễn’s historical journey back to 1967 taps into the sci-fi discourse deployed by Fuller and Le Guin, and in this way a narrative emerges that fuses space-age iconography with a reactivation of the era’s unrealized social projects. The film makes evident the exaggerated language of inclusion and welcome that accompanied the UFO Landing Pad. One local resident proclaims: “the idea of this Landing Pad is to welcome everybody from this earth and also extraterrestrial beings,” while Canada’s minister of defence, Paul Hellyer, is seen delivering a speech at the opening ceremony, where he commends the townspeople: “You’ve combined the very best elements of imagination and open-mindedness … the Pad will forever be a meaningful symbol of Western hospitality.” While the otherworldly aspect of these sentiments might be unusual, they otherwise echo Expo 67’s theme of transnational, planetary harmony; the people of the world converging on Montreal’s world’s fair were in principle on a level playing field – supposedly able to recognize and respect each other’s humanity. The visitor’s ticket at Expo 67 even took the form of a passport, which allegedly transformed its holder into a citizen of the world. This was nothing new for world’s Expo 67 and the Future of Montreal

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13.6 Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyên, 1967: A People Kind of Place, 2012. Video still, with quotation from Ursula Le Guin. Courtesy of the artist.

fairs; going back to the first nineteenth-century iterations of Great Exhibitions and Expositions Universelles in Britain and France, every world’s fair would trumpet its global consciousness, even when the international encounters in question were informed by colonialism, imperialism, and racism. Nguyễn is clearly critical of the hypocrisy that could inform the centennial/Expo brand of global friendliness, and the film includes references to Canada’s restrictive immigration policies, as well as its infamous residential school system, circa 1967. Which aliens, foreigners, immigrants, or Indigenous people were made to feel welcome, after all – whether in St Paul, on the streets of Montreal, on the Expo site, or in Canada more broadly? Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, herself the child of Vietnamese immigrants, who grew up in Montreal, would have first-hand knowledge of people who were marginalized and/or written out of master narratives about nationhood and citizenship during this period. She is not alone in questioning the terms of Expo 67’s cosmopolitan image. Gary Miedema writes that Canada’s own pavilion at Expo 67 sought to present the country as “a nation of nations: a community of diverse peoples united by its openness to all cultures,” but he argues that this was only a facade, and that “Canada’s ugly ghosts of disunity and dissent were deeply buried in the closet.”14 Sean Mills, writing about countercultural politics in Montreal of the 1960s, regards 302

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Expo 67 as a conservative and even reactionary spectacle: “The millions of people who visited Expo 67 came from around the world, and most left the city unaware of the seething discontent below the event’s pomp and ceremony.”15 Nguyễn’s film overlays this level of critique with a sense of imaginative potentiality, though, referring to the UFO Landing Pad she appropriated for her project as a “conceptual vessel.”16 The 1967 structure gets retroactively transformed, becoming a kind of counter-pavilion to house ideas about futurity, space, and otherness. Once the historical record is archivally realigned, the UFO structure can incorporate genuinely utopian qualities, alongside Fuller’s dome. When the female alien in Nguyễn’s film calls out “Citizens of the world!” this voice represents a radical, cosmic alterity, far beyond Montreal, Canada, or the 1967 image of “Man and His World.” It is as if we are once again being interpellated as crew members on Fuller’s Spaceship Earth. If recycled photographs can tap into the unrealized promise of Expo 67, this brings us back to the question of what can be done with an archive. Okwui Enwezor, curator of the exhibition Archive Fever (held at the International Center for Photography in New York, in 2008–09) has remarked that “traffic in the photographic archive rests on the assumption of the surplus value that an image can generate.”17 The notion of “surplus value” is extremely pertinent here, as it demonstrates the possibility of endowing unearthed artifacts or images with new associations and constellations of meaning, inviting them to generate new narrative pathways. Despite the weight of institutional memory, the archive is not immutable, but rather can be regarded as a site of possibility. If the past is rearranged, different futures become possible. While the Buckminster Fuller dome can exemplify futuristic thought, there are times when that futurity manifests as an explicitly urban vision. Much of the photographic imagery produced during Expo 67 emphasized the site’s city-like environment: crowds of people are seen moving along streamlined avenues and walkways, they gather in stylishly modern, art-filled plazas, and effortlessly zoom around on elevated trains. Architectural critics and journalists said it was akin to stepping into a city of the future; “the inhabitants of our grey cities and drab suburbs have never seen anything like Expo,” wrote Mildred Schmertz in the pages of Architectural Record.18 Expo 67’s dazzling fictional cityscape threw the drab realness of most cities into relief. If the legacy of Expo 67 can be considered in urban terms, this is not only because the world’s fair site was materially attached to Montreal, but also because contemporaneous politicians, urban planners, and architectural theorists reinforced this identification, in discussions that were held locally, nationally, and internationally. The July 1967 issue of the UK magazine Architectural Design assessed the architectural Expo 67 and the Future of Montreal

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13.7 Photographer unknown, aerial photograph of razed Faubourg à m’lasse neighbourhood, Montréal magazine, October 1965.

contributions of individual pavilions, but also asserted that, “by the end of this year, Expo’s 1000-acre location, one of the finest urban sites in the world, will become a permanent part of Montreal.”19 To understand this kind of hyperbole, it is important to know that Montreal in the mid-1960s was booming, and that the city was expected to grow exponentially in the post-Expo years, achieving a population of eight million by the year 2000; this is what local urban planners were saying, and clearly there was a global audience for their predictions.20 The admiration directed at “one of the finest urban sites in the world” situated Montreal at the very centre of a globally circulating discourse about the reinvention of cities in the late-twentieth century. The influential architectural critic Rayner Banham regarded Expo 67 as a new kind of urban experiment, commenting on its “mechanical movement, multiplicity of levels, emphasis on fun or ludique experience, stylish Archigram-type colours, people in complex artificial environments, visual information saturation,” 304

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while he was equally interested in the complex spatial relationship that was forged between Montreal and the world’s fair.21 Tom McDonough has written that the Fuller dome’s “analogy with a spaceship” pointed to “its radically altered relationship to the gravity-bound, earthly realm” of the conventional city.22 The experimental and megastructural nature of Expo 67’s architectural contributions notwithstanding, the idea that an entirely new city could suddenly appear was a modernist fantasy – one that had indeed been undertaken a few years earlier in Brazil, when the new capital city of Brasilia was planned and built from scratch. The intentionally enlarged Expo islands were a version of this modern tabula rasa approach, whereby a site apparently lacking pre-existing social meaning or historical traces becomes the ground on which a brand new cityscape arises. (The falsity of this claim must be emphasized; the location chosen for Montreal’s world’s fair does have a complex history, encompassing centuries of Indigenous habitation and militarization by the British in the nineteenth century, while it was the site of an internment camp during the Second World War.) But the fact remains that this new cityscape appeared almost overnight, adjacent to and plugged into a city that had existed for hundreds of years. Photography played a fundamental role in publicizing each stage of this brand new built environment in the years leading up to 1967. In Montreal Magazine, a short-lived publication sponsored by the city, the Expo grounds under construction appeared again and again, alongside photographs of razed buildings or neighbourhoods in Montreal proper. In this magazine, such “vacant lots”23 were clearly meant to evoke real-estate opportunity rather than a sense of loss. Such was the case when the October 1965 issue included an aerial view of the razed Faubourg à m’lasse neighbourhood (Fig. 13.7).24 The article containing this photo expresses awe at “the fantastic building boom Montreal is enjoying,” and celebrates the young owner of a local demolition company, but only the mention in passing that “800 lodgings were removed” provides any sense that one of Montreal’s oldest working-class neighbourhood had been eradicated to make way for a new Radio-Canada tower.25 That building, completed in 1973, would stand alone amidst vast parking lots for decades to come. The construction of Expo 67 thus went hand in hand with a commercially driven “renewal” of Montreal. This was the type of modernist dogma that would attempt to leave behind “the heavy burden of historical memory,” as Mark Wigley has noted.26 It was only once a militant heritage movement rose up in Montreal, as is discussed elsewhere in this book, that the city’s everyday built environment could be regarded as a genuine repository of collective memory. The urban character of Expo 67 is pronounced in Phil Hoffman and Eva Kolcze’s experimental film By the Time We Got to Expo, which reuses and reimagines two short films made in 1967: Impressions of Expo, directed by William Brind for the Expo 67 and the Future of Montreal

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13.8 Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze, By the Time We Got to Expo, 2015. HDV/Original on 16mm (still). Courtesy of the filmmakers.

National Film Board of Canada, and Expo 67 (no credited director), made by the US-based company Castle Films. These general-interest films show exterior views of Expo 67’s space-frame architecture and multi-levelled plazas (rather than focusing on pavilion interiors and displays), and many sequences were shot from the fair’s smoothly-gliding elevated railway system. Conventionally conceived travelogues, these films do nonetheless successfully capture the sense of embodied immersion in a futuristic city. Hoffman and Kolcze proceeded to re-film, slow down, tint, colourize, chemically burn, and otherwise manipulate selected passages from these films. Some sequences in the film are suggestive of faded celluloid, while elsewhere the original colour has been purposefully drained away (Fig. 13.8). There are also moments of complete reversal of the film stock, from positive to negative; in this artificially induced negative universe, Expo 67’s light-coloured or transparent buildings are oppressive black shapes, and a group of visitors crossing a plaza becomes a ghostly assembly. As Jacques Aumont has remarked, filmmakers’ deliberate use of the negative “is the visible sign of something invisible – decay, spiritual dereliction, the undoing of social ties.”27 By the end of the Hoffman and Kolcze film, it seems as though the pavilions and urban infrastructure of Expo 67 are materially disintegrating before our eyes. In this way, their film unsettles the memory of Montreal’s futuristic moment. 306

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By the Time We Got to Expo deserves to be discussed in photographic terms, moreover, because one of Hoffman and Kolcze’s tactics is to hinder the very momentum of the moving image. The mobile gaze of the original films encounters an entropic counterforce, so that the filmic images move jerkily or in slow motion, and in the dramatic final sequences come close to imploding. While not fully achieving the status of still photographs, this effect can be described as barely moving imagery. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, editors of the book Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, call attention to artists and filmmakers who find an aesthetically productive tension between the stasis of photography and the movement of cinema. They remark that “uncanny rhythms of hesitation, interruption, delay and return released by photographic technologies … contribute to the disintegration of organic constructs of memory and temporality.”28 This insight illuminates the Hoffman and Kolcze film; in the space that opens up between two time-based media (photography’s instantaneity and cinema’s temporal span), new forms of memory-work become possible. The Expo site was supposed to be dismantled immediately after the 1967 event; its glittering surfaces were not meant to succumb to time and decay in the way that cities normally do. Montreal’s Mayor Drapeau refused to accept this closure, though, as he wanted to extend Montreal’s very own summer of love indefinitely. And so, while some pavilions were taken down, some dismantled and rebuilt back in their home countries (thus was the fate of the enormous USSR pavilion, for instance, which was resurrected in Moscow), other pavilions lingered on for years, being used for various displays and exhibits, until they fell into disrepair, were abandoned, and were eventually demolished. In 1978 Robert Altman was able to shoot his dystopian ice-age film Quintet inside the hulking remains of the “Man the Explorer” pavilion.29 The Hoffman and Kolcze film has ruination play out differently – beginning with the pristine, never-faded, always-new picture of Expo 67 that has remained in circulation, and fast-forwarding, as it were, to a ruined cityscape. The spectacle of disintegration that By the Time We Got to Expo invites us to witness culminates in a dramatic sequence toward the end of the film: the outlines of pavilions and people are barely identifiable, while it is as if their innards are being aggressively compressed or charred (Fig. 13.9). The Fuller dome makes its appearance on several occasions; in one memorable sequence the camera is positioned a few cars back in the monorail, as this elevated train glides along its curved track, approaching the dome and piercing through the geodesic structure. Accentuated by a soundtrack of industrial noise,30 the flickering, distorted effects make it seem as if we (the viewers) are entering the dome at the very moment of its dissolution. Thus, the picture of Expo 67 becomes quasi-apocalyptic – the filmmakers producing Expo 67 and the Future of Montreal

307

13.9 Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze, By the Time We Got to Expo, 2015. HDV/Original on 16 mm (still). Courtesy of the filmmakers.

a more gripping end-story for Expo 67 than the banal reality of civic neglect. To recall the words of Beckman and Ma, this pictorial artifice has triggered the “disintegration of organic constructs of memory and temporality.” By the Time We Got to Expo and 1967: A People Kind of Year are extraordinary films, and as such they shed light on how complex any process of archival engagement can become. Fragments of archival evidence can be reconfigured and transformed, such that this episode of Montreal’s history is renarrativized. Enwezor’s notion that photographs retrieved from the archive contain a potential “surplus value” is of great epistemological consequence. We see how mutable photographs and films of Expo 67 constructions can be, as they are imaginatively reinhabited, and released into public space. Excess or supplementary meanings are generated, even as the architectonic and conceptual structure of Expo 67 is revisited – as indicated by Nguyễn’s idea that the representation of a 1967-era construction turns it into a “conceptual vessel.” It is in this archival sense that Buckminster Fuller’s dome remains a futuristic supplement to Montreal’s built environment. The afterlife of Expo 67 has thus depended on the periodic recirculation of its photographic and cinematic visual culture. It has already been mentioned that a paradoxical form of historical consciousness is involved in these repeated acts of 308

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re-presentation, whether undertaken by institutions or individuals. The retrospective gaze can be associated with nostalgic sentiment for a time that seemed simpler or happier, but on the other hand it is often a forward-looking and exploratory futurity that draws people into this particular historical past. The title of the Hoffman and Kolcze film – By the Time We Got to Expo – is of interest here, because of the ambiguity of the “time” being referred to, and since a further clause seems to be forthcoming with this phrase. Is it possible that by the time “we” (the filmmakers as well as present-day viewers) got there, it was too late in some sense? The film positions itself as a deliberately belated encounter, while the filmmakers’ strategies of slowing down, distorting, and welcoming pictorial unruliness do manage to block viewers’ easy access to the past. Because of this temporal destabilization the question of whether we’re too late to experience the utopian promise of Expo 67 can be posed. Can the futurity of Expo 67 still call out to Montrealers? According to the Italian cultural theorist “Bifo” Berardi, in his book After the Future, the future disappeared during the late-twentieth century; he says the “slow cancellation of the future got underway in the 1970s and 1980s,” and then more provocatively he dates this demise to a precise year, 1977.31 (Coincidentally, this is the year after Montreal’s geodesic dome went up in flames.) As the present-day regime of biotechnological capitalism becomes more entrenched, what is missing is a sense of the future that depends on a “utopian imagination.”32 He explains further: “the future is not a natural dimension of the mind. It is a modality of projection and imagination, a feature of expectation and attention.”33 This essay has shown how, in the guise of photographic representation, Expo 67 continues to be the catalyst for a range of future-oriented meanings, memories, and desires – whether dystopian or utopian. As Amanda Lagerkvist, says, the future that resides in the past can be reactivated, especially when futurity has become “a defining propensity of the place.” Expo 67’s futurity is part of Montreal’s history. That futurity has become part of our heritage. If the meaning of the intertwined Expo/Montreal cityscapes is still in flux, this matters because the future identity of the city is still to be determined. The Buckminster Fuller dome that still resides on the old Expo 67 site embodies this futurity. It remains rooted to its Montreal location, even as its image is on the move, open to possibility.

NOTES 1 It is only in an interview that curator Andrew Blauvelt has commented, “Well, when the dome burned in 1976, the bicentennial of the United States, it seemed to signify the end of the countercultural era. All those dreams go up in flames. Or do they? From the ashes of the dome … a museum of the biosphere rose inside it. That seemed like an interesting way to think the fate and future of hippie modernism.” See Muraben, “Hippie Modernism,” n.p.

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2 Radio-Canada, Visitez Expo 67. The text on the box set is in French: “a transformé le Québec tout entier,” “ce fut pour des millions de personnes le plus bel été de leur vie.” Radio-Canada is the French-language branch of the federally administered Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 3 These billboards were sponsored by Historia, a French-language Canadian channel, headquartered in Montreal and owned by Corus Entertainment. 4 Montreal’s Geodesic Dreams at UQAM Centre de Design, September 27 to December 10, 2017. In Search of Expo 67 was at the Musée d’art contemporain from June 21 to October 9, 2017. Other Expo-themed exhibitions in Montreal during 2017 were: Expo 67: A World of Dreams, at the Stewart Museum; Explosion 67: Terre des Jeunes, at the Centre d’Histoire de Montréal; and Fashioning Expo 67, at the McCord Museum. Also, the city’s Nuit Blanche event in March 2017 featured Expo 67–themed events and exhibitions at multiple venues. 5 Jonathan Massey, “Buckminster Fuller’s Cybernetic Pastoral,” 478. 6 Fuller, Ideas and Integrities, 148. 7 Huyssen, “Introduction: World Cultures, World Cities,” 3. 8 Lagerkvist, “The Future Is Here,” 222. 9 Various aspects of Expo 67’s visual culture are discussed in Kenneally and Sloan, eds., Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir. 10 See Gagnon and Janine Marchessault, eds., Reimagining Cinema. 11 Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, 5. 12 Jacques Michel, quoted in McDonough, “Obsolescence as Progress and Regression,” 87. 13 Le Guin, Introduction to the 1976 edition, The Left Hand of Darkness, vi. 14 Miedema, For Canada’s Sake, 123. 15 Mills, The Empire Within, 38. ~

16 Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyên, in conversation with the author, November 2019. 17 Enwezor, Archive Fever, 12. 18 Schmertz, “A Brilliantly Ordered Visual World,” 115. 19 “Expo 67,” in Architectural Digest. 20 See Lortie, ed., The 60s. 21 Banham, Megastructure, 117. 22 McDonough, “Obsolescence as Progress and Regression,” 87. 23 See Martha Langford’s “Erase and See” chapter in this book. 24 This is indeed the same part of the city that features in the daguerreotype Molson Family Brewery after the Fire, Montreal, Quebec (1858), discussed by Langford in the previous chapter. 25 Ranger, “A Scythe Called Progress,” 4, 6. 26 Wigley, “The Architectural Cult of Synchronization,” 32. 27 Aumont, Le montreur d’ombre, 83. Author’s translation. 28 Beckman and Ma, Still Moving, 17. 29 See Lyons, “Memory of a Post-Apocalyptic Future,” n.p. 30 The soundtrack for By the Time We Got to Expo, created by Joshua Bonnetta, shifts from a low-keyed electronic drone to a loud, staticky, crashing noise. 31 Berardi, After the Future, 18. 32 Ibid., 17. 33 Ibid., 24–5.

310

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Illustrations

0.1 Greystone: Tools for Understanding the City, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2017–18. Installation view. 4 0.2 Robert Walker, Looking North from Basin Street, 2019. 5 0.3 Patrick Dionne and Miki Gingras, Identité Centre-Sud, 2012. 8 0.4 Angela Grauerholz, Interior view of Artexte, 3575 Boulevard Saint-Laurent, Montreal, 1984. 11 0.5 Robert Morin and Lorraine Dufour, still from Le voleur vit en enfer, 1984. 14 0.6 Melvin Charney, ed., Montréal, plus ou moins? Montreal, plus or minus? 1972. Exhibition catalogue. Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 16 0.7 Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, Construction of Man the Explorer Pavilion, August 1966. 18 1.1 Alain Chagnon, Taverne de Paris, l’homme au journal, 20 octobre 1973, 1973. 33 1.2 Alain Chagnon, Deux amies, 13 septembre 1985, 1985. Installation view, Vie de quartier (2015). 34 1.3 Alain Chagnon, Vie de quartier (Montreal, 2015). Book cover. 35 1.4 Auteur Photography in Quebec: A Collection Takes Shape at the Museum. Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2013. Exhibition view. 39 1.5 Alain Chagnon, Rue Plessis, 29 juin 1973, 1973; Rue Plessis, 29 juin 1973, 1973. Double-page spread, Vie de quartier (2015). 49 1.6 Alain Chagnon, Boucher cacher, rue Saint-Viateur, août 1986, 1986; Cordonerie Godinho, rue Saint-Viateur, août 1986, 1986. Installation view, Vie de quartier (2015). 49 1.7 Alain Chagnon, Photographies de marriage au Jardin Botanique, juillet 1983, 1983; Photographies de marriage au Jardin Botanique, juillet 1983, 1983. Double-page spread, Vie de quartier (2015). 50 1.8 Alain Chagnon, Fête de la Saint-Jean, Parc du Mont-Royal, 1975; Fête la Saint-Jean, 1974; Dépanneur, rue Saint-Viateur, août 1986, 1986. Installation view, Vie de quartier (2015). 50

2.1 “Silos et élévateurs à blé aux États-Unis,” reproduced from Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: Crès et Cie, 1923), 18. Top: Photographer unknown, Grain Elevator No. 2, Montreal. 58 2.2 Melvin Charney, View of the Principal Façade of Marché Bonsecours with Grain Elevator No. 2 (Now Demolished) in the Background, Montreal, Quebec, 1968. 58 2.3 Melvin Charney, Partial view of the arcaded porch of Saint John the Baptist Church, showing a column, arches, and dentils, Cavusin, Cappadocia, Turkey, 1961. 61 2.4 Melvin Charney, 415–419 Des Récollets Street, Montreal, n.d. 64 2.5 Photographer unknown, Saint Paul Street West, Montreal, 7 July 1953, 1953. 64 2.6 Melvin Charney, View of the stairs and gardens of row houses, Waverly Street, Montreal, 1971. 65 2.7 Melvin Charney, The Main … Montreal, 1965. 66 2.8 Photographer unknown, Dismantled Housing, Montreal, ca. 1975. 71 2.9 Melvin Charney, Une histoire, le trésor de Trois-Rivières, 1975. 72 2.10 Melvin Charney, Les maisons de la rue Sherbrooke, 1976. 74 3.1 Cecelia Blanchfield, “Edith’s Eye ‘Rebuilds’ Our Castles in the Air.” Montreal Gazette, 30 August 1977. 81 3.2 Cover of Edith Mather and René Chicoine, Les rues de Montréal, façades et fantaisie/ Touches of Fantasy on Montreal Streets, Tundra Books, 1977. 83 3.3 Edith Mather, 2302 rue Moreau. In Mather and Chicoine, Les rues de Montréal, façades et fantaisie/Touches of Fantasy on Montreal Streets, 18. 83 3.4 Edith Mather, Sussex, E Side, N of Dorchester (GM), 15 February 1969, 1969. 88 3.5 Edith Mather, Edith Mather mirrored 3 times! Notre-Dame Street West, 1966. 92 3.6 Edith Mather, Strathcona Park, Fort and Dorchester, 5 August 1967, 1967. 95 4.1 Meeting of student protesters, Ninth Floor, National Film Board of Canada, 2015. 101 4.2 Photographic contact sheet, showing students demonstrating outside the Hall Building, Sir George Williams University; smoke emerging from ninth-floor windows of the Hall Building, February 1969. 102 4.3 Student speaker. Montage of images in Ninth Floor, National Film Board of Canada, 2015. 102 4.4 Issue of student newspaper The Georgian, guest-edited by the Black Students’ Association, 28 January 1969. 103 4.5 Senator Anne Cools being interviewed, Ninth Floor, National Film Board of Canada, 2015. 103 4.6 Students demonstrating in front of Hall Building, 11 February 1969. 105 4.7 Students assembled. Ninth Floor, National Film Board of Canada, 2015. 109 5.1 Clara Gutsche, Jeanne-Mance Street, 1972. 112

312

Illustrations

5.2 David Miller, Jeanne-Mance Street, between Prince Arthur Street and Pine Avenue, January 1972, 1972. 112 5.3 Clara Gutsche, Mrs Roach, 3615 Jeanne-Mance Street, 1972. 115 5.4 David Miller, Hutchison Street, April 1972, 1972. 115 5.5 Clara Gutsche, Sainte-Famille Women’s Centre, 3694 Sainte-Famille Street, 1971. 117 5.6 David Miller, Occupation on Prince Arthur Street, 23 May 1972, 1972. 119 5.7 Clara Gutsche, Janet Symmers, 3703 Hutchison Street, 1972. 120 5.8 David Miller, 3581/3 Hutchison Street, 14 June 1972, 1972. 122 5.9 Clara Gutsche, Dimitri and Lucia, Montreal, 2015. 122 5.10 David Miller, Lane between Jeanne-Mance and Sainte-Famille, looking “N” from Milton St, January 1990, 1990. 124 5.11 David Miller, Hutchison Street, looking “N” from Milton Street, July 1971, 1971. 124 5.12 Clara Gutsche, Hannah, Montreal, 2015. 126 5.13 Clara Gutsche, Hélène Brisebois, First Communion Portrait with Aunt and Uncle, 1972. 127 5.14 David Miller, 3585 Hutchison Street, May 1972, 1972. 127 6.1 Clara Gutsche, Redpath Sugar, 1990, from the series The Lachine Canal/Le canal de Lachine, 1985–1990. 135 6.2 Jarold Dumouchel, Ray of Light, n.d., from the series The Old Canada Malting Plant. 135 6.3 Gabor Szilasi, Orange Julep, from the series lUX, Enseignes lumineuses, 1983–1984. 138 6.4 Vincent Brillant, Je…gOd, Canada Malting Plant, 2011. 139 6.5 Jarold Dumouchel, Window, n.d., from the series The Old Canada Malting Plant. 140 6.6 Vincent Brillant, Décrépitude totale, Canada Malting Plant, 2010. 144 7.1 John Colin Forbes, Portrait of Ramsay Traquair, n.d. 152 7.2 Student field notes from the Ferme Saint-Gabriel. 158 7.3 Plate XII. “The Ferme Saint-Gabriel, from a painting by H. Bunnett in the McCord Museum.” In Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec. 162 7.4 Henry Richard S. Bunnett, The Saint-Gabriel Farmhouse, 1886. 162 7.5 Measured drawings of the Ferme Saint-Gabriel. Represented in Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec. 162 7.6 Plate XIV. “The Ferme St. Gabriel, Montreal. Two views in the Community Room.” In Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec. 162 7.7 Ramsay Traquair, Interiors of the Hôpital Général and of the Ferme Saint-Gabriel. Ramsay Traquair Fonds. 164 7.8 Adrien Hébert, Le Château Ramezay, Montreal, c. 1930. 164 7.9 Photographer unknown, Group Portrait of Traquair and Male Students. Old McGill, 1931. 167 7.10 Houses with bell-cast roofs. Plate XXVII: “House at Sault au Récollet. Houses at Oka,” in Traquair, The Old Architecture of Quebec. 169

Illustrations

313

8.1 Jean-Paul Gill, Red Light Demolition, 1957. 176 8.2 Jean-Paul Gill, Red Light, 1957. 179 8.3 Jean-Paul Gill, Chanteuse Édith Piaf et chanteur Jacques Pills: Hôte Jean Drapeau, 10 mai 1955, 1955. 183 8.4 Jean-Paul Gill, Boy Posing for the Camera, Red Light, 1957. 186 8.5 Ville de Montréal, Travaux Publics, Expropriation Map, 1956–58. 187 8.6 Jean-Paul Gill, Front of 1442 rue Sanguinet, Red Light, 1957. 188 8.7 Jean-Paul Gill, Rear of 1442 rue Sanguinet, Red Light, 1957. 188 8.8 Jean-Paul Gill, Rear of 1442 rue Sanguinet, Red Light, 1957. 190 8.9 Jean-Paul Gill, Dwelling Interior, Red Light, 1957. 190 8.10 Jean-Paul Gill, Woman in Room, Red Light, 1957. 191 8.11 Jean-Paul Gill, Bedroom, Red Light, 1957. 191 8.12 Jean-Paul Gill, Chez Dionne, Red Light, 1957. 193 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10

Allô Police, 12 January 1975. 204 Allô Police, 13 January 1974. 205 Allô Police, 18 May 1975. 206 “Les policiers et les Dubois s’affrontent,” Allô Police, 16 November 1975. 208 “Le gérant du ‘P’tit Ritz’: Il meurt avant d’être accusé du meurtre.” Allô Police, 23 May 1976. 208 “‘Libéré conditionnel’ abbatu.” Allô Police, 23 March 1975. 208 “Au ‘Bo-Sexe’: Innocente victime d’un fusillade de cabaret,” Allô Police, 12 September 1976. 211 “Les Dubois de Saint-Henri: Un bâton de dynamite et huit coups de feu pour Normand,” Allô Police, 4 April 1976. 211 “Avec la mort de Roland Giguère, un vide s’est créé dans le monde de la pègre de l’est.” Allô Police, 22 August 1976. 211 “Le saccage de ce ‘Cocktail Lounge’ fait revivre ‘la belle époque’ de la protection à Montréal,” Allô Police, 16 November 1975. 212

1 0.1 Louise Abbott, The Demolition of the Van Horne Mansion, 8 September 1973, 1973. 218 10.2 Brian Merrett, Shaughnessy House, the large living room of the east residence, Montréal, 16 May 1973, 1973. 218 10.3 Charles Gurd, Butler, 1475 Pine Avenue West, Montreal, 1974, 1974 219 10.4 Detail of Louise Abbott’s photograph reproduced in L’Affaire Corridart en cartes postales/L’Affaire Corridart Postcards (Montreal: Editions Véhicule, 1977). 224 10.5 Charles Gurd, Untitled, 1974. (Image #149, drawing room, 1475 Pine Avenue West.) From the series Portrait of a Period, 1974 (renamed Montreal Mansions in 2014). 228 10.6 Charles Gurd, Untitled, 1974. (Image #190, stables, 1475 Pine Avenue West.) From the series Portrait of a Period, 1974 (renamed Montreal Mansions in 2014). 229

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Illustrations

10.7 Charles Gurd, Untitled, 1974. (Image #007, indoor tennis court, 1475 Pine Avenue West.) From the series Portrait of a Period, 1974 (renamed Montreal Mansions in 2014). 230 10.8 Charles Gurd, Cook, 1974. (Image #33, 1475 Pine Avenue West). From the series Portrait of a Period, 1974 (renamed Montreal Mansions in 2014). 231 10.9 Charles Gurd, Untitled, 1974. (Image # 11, servants’ hall, 1475 Pine Avenue West.) From the series Portrait of a Period, 1974 (renamed Montreal Mansions in 2014). 232 10.10 Underwriters’ Survey Bureau’s survey of Montreal, showing a detail of the former Square Mile (Shaughnessy House is circled), 1957. 235 10.11 Brian Merrett, Shaughnessy House, 16 May 1973. 1973. 236 10.12 Brian Merrett, Nymph, Shaughnessy House, 16 May 1973, 1973. 236 Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, Projet Building/Caserne #14 (detail), 1983. 247 Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, Le Musée des Sciences (detail), 1984. 248 Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, La Donna Delinquenta (detail), 1987. 249 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of a safety deposit box key, 24 October 2016. 251 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of a wall of safety deposit boxes in a Montreal bank, 26 October 2016. 252 11.6 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of a set of analogue photographic negatives in a negative sleeve (circa 1983), 24 October 2016. 253 11.7 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of a plastic slide box containing 35mm mounted colour transparency slides of La Donna Delinquenta, 24 October 2016. 255 11.8 Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, Projet Building/Caserne #14, 1983. 256 11.9 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of a photogram light print exposed on site in 1982 inside the camera obscura that was an element of Projet Building/Caserne #14 (1983), 27 October 2016. 257 11.10 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of a contact sheet of photographs taken by Marik Boudreau of the interior of the Théâtre Corona in February 1987, prior to any artistic intervention by Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, 2 November 2016. 258 11.11 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of an analogue print of a 35mm black and white photograph by John Reeves of Le Musée des Sciences (1984), 28 October 2016. 259 11.12 Martha Fleming, digital photograph of archival storage boxes of analogue photographs of site-specific installations and artworks by Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, 28 October 2016. 261 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5

12.1 Thomas Coffin Doane, The Molson Family Brewery after the Fire, Montreal, Quebec, 1858. 264 12.2 Michael Snow, still from One Second in Montreal, 1969. 268 12.3 Charles Gagnon, Moving Truck, Fire Hydrant, Blocked-up Door – Montréal, 1977. 271

Illustrations

315

12.4 Georgia Freeman (Donigan Cumming), Untitled, from the series Urban Landscapes, 1979. 272 12.5 David Miller, Parking Lot between Drummond and Mountain Looking South from La Gauchetière, August 1981, 1981, from the series Parking Lots and Construction Sites, 1981–83. 273 12.6 Catherine Bodmer, Lacs, 2005. From a series of five photographs and postcards, Lambda prints. Centre des arts actuels Skol, Montreal. 276 12.7 Emmanuelle Léonard, Working Paths, No. 2, detail from Les marcheurs, 2004. 278 12.8 SYN-, Hypothèses d’amarrages [Mooring Hypotheses], 2001–. Centre des arts actuels Skol. 280–1 12.9 E. Kirkman, Dog Parc Gallery, 2010. Digital file. Courtesy: pouf! art + architecture. 285 12.10 Louis Perreault, Vigne et clôture, from the series Sur la trace du renard, 2011. 286 12.11 Isabel Hayeur, Murs aveugles, 2014. Public projection. Biennale de Montréal (BNLMTL). 288 13.1 Exhibition catalogue for Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, Emmet Byrne and Andrew Blauvelt, design. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015. 293 13.2 The Fuller dome fenced off during the fiftieth anniversary of Expo 67. Author’s photo. 295 13.3 Expo 67. 50 ans. Poster issued by the City of Montreal, 2017. 296 13.4 Fonds de solidarité FTQ advertisement that appeared in the Montreal Metro system, 2016-2017. Ad created by Marketel Agency. 298 13.5 Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, still from 1967: A People Kind of Place, 2012. 300 13.6 Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, still from 1967: A People Kind of Place, 2012. 302 13.7 Photographer unknown, aerial photograph of razed Faubourg à m’lasse neighbourhood, Montréal magazine, October 1965. 304 13.8 Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze, still from By the Time We Got to Expo, 2015. 306 13.9 Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze, still from By the Time We Got to Expo, 2015. 308

316

Illustrations

Bibliography

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Contributors

annmarie adams is an architectural historian specializing in the intersections of medicine, gender, and the built environment. She holds the Stevenson Chair in the Philosophy and History of Science, including Medicine, at McGill University in Montreal. Adams is jointly appointed in the School of Architecture and Department of Social Studies of Medicine (SSoM), where she also serves as department chair. Her books include Architecture in the Family Way (MQUP, 1996), Designing Women (UTP, 2000), and Medicine by Design (UMP, 2007). She is currently writing a “spatial biography” of cardiologist and museum curator Maude Abbott, funded by SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada). Martha Fleming is a museum professional and academic who has held research, teaching, and leadership posts in museums and universities in the United Kingdom, European Union, United States, and Canada. From 1981 to 1996 she collaborated closely with her then-partner, the artist Lyne Lapointe, on a number of international large-scale sitespecific installations. Philippe Guillaume is a walking artist, photographer, and art historian. His research and creative work emphasize the urban landscape and involve connections between walking and photography in modern and contemporary settings. Often relational, his artworks feature walking, making photographs, and performances that exist through pictures, installations, and artist books. A recent multidisciplinary project was included in Walking Bodies: Papers, Provocations, Actions from Walking’s New Movements, the Conference (Triarchy Press, 2020). Based in Montreal, Canada, Guillaume is completing a doctoral thesis in art history at Concordia University. Clara Gutsche has worked as a photographer, educator, and critic since she moved to Montreal in 1970. Her photographs are found in the collections of the Musée d’Art de Joliette, the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson), the Musée de la Photographie à Charleroi (Belgium), the Château d’Eau (Toulouse), the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the National Archives of Canada, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Major exhibitions have

taken place at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal (1992) and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa (1995). Key publications include La série des couvents/The Convent Series (1998), An Industrial Landscape Observed: The Lachine Canal / Regards sur un paysage industriel: Le canal de Lachine (1992), Paysages Vitrés/Inner Landscapes (1980), and You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’Til It’s Gone: The Destruction of Milton-Park (1973). Cynthia Imogen Hammond is professor of art history at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Hammond is an interdisciplinary artist and historian of the built environment (cynthiahammond.org). From 2014 to 2017 she directed the Right to the City pedagogical project, which linked students with different Montreal neighbourhoods in an experiment in place-based learning and community engagement. Hammond is presently the lead investigator on a SSHRC Partnership Development project that explores the urban knowledge of diverse groups of older citizens (“La Ville Extraordinaire,” 2020–23). Her feminist research and creation explore the gendered relationships between women and urban and biological landscapes. Hammond has published one book and numerous essays on art, architecture, gender, and the city. Martha Langford is research chair and director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, a distinguished university research professor in the Department of Art History, Concordia University (Montreal), and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her most recent publication is an edited collection: Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (MQUP, 2017). Her booklength studies of Canadian photographic practice and experience include Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (2001); Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (2007); and A Cold War Tourist and His Camera, co-written with John Langford (2011) – all from McGillQueen’s University Press. Louis Martin is professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)’s Département d’histoire de l’art, where he has taught architectural history since 2004 and served as director of Graduate Studies since 2018. Having graduated in architecture from the Université de Montréal (B.Arch. 1983), he holds a master’s degree in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (S.M.Arch.S., 1988) and a PhD in architecture from Princeton University (Ph.D., 2002). Martin edited On Architecture – Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology (MQUP, 2013) and “Pour une définition de l’architecture au Québec” et autres essais de Melvin Charney (Potential Architecture Books, 2018). He has published several essays on contemporary architectural theory in collective works, as well as articles in periodicals such as Log, Assemblage, Future Anterior, Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale et urbaine, Exposé, Casabella, Parachute, and ArQ, among others.

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Contributors

Suzanne Paquet is professor in the Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques de l’Université de Montréal; her teaching and research areas are photography studies and sociology of art. With her research group Art et site, she considers the circulation of images, the place of specific art forms within the production of contemporary space, the reciprocity between public spaces, material and digital. Her writings have been published in multiple collective works and in scholarly journals, notably in Cahiers de géographie du Québec, rACAr, Photoresearcher, Nouvelle revue d’esthétique, Captures, Intermédialités, and Sens Public. In 2009, she published Le paysage façonné. Les territoires postindustriels, l’art et l’usage. She has also edited a number of collective works and thematic journal issues. Johanne Sloan is professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal. Her research is often concerned with Montreal, Expo 67, and the intersection of art with urban identity. She is the editor of Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities (MQUP, 2007), and co-editor of Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir (UTP, 2010). Her essay “Urban Artworlds (in Canada)” appeared in the book Narratives Unfolding (2017), and an essay on Melvin Charney’s 1972 Montréal plus ou moins exhibition appeared in the Journal of Curatorial Studies (2018). Articles on Expo 67 have also appeared in the McGill-Queen’s University Press books Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (2014) and In Search of Expo 67 (2020). Tanya Southcott studied architecture at the University of Waterloo and McGill University, and holds a certificate in heritage conservation planning from the University of Victoria. She is completing her PhD at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University, and is investigating the rise of the heritage movement and the women’s movement in Montreal, Quebec, by focusing on the use of architectural photography and demolition.  Will Straw is professor of urban media studies within the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University. He is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 1950s America, and has published over 160 articles on media, cities, and the visual culture of crime. His current research focuses on the nighttime culture of cities and true crime periodicals in Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

Contributors

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340

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. 100 Laisses, 284 Abbott, Louise, cover, 21, 217, 218, 220, 222–6, 224, 238–41 Abraham, Christiana, 100 Acconci, Vito, 282 activist art, 246, 250, 253–4, 284–5 affect theory, 91, 206–7 Agee, James, 31, 192 Agence de presse libre du Québec, 41 Ahmed, Sara, 91 Allaire, Serge, 7 Altman, Robert, 307 Ammon, Francesca, 123 anamorphosis, 259–60 anti-communism, 178–9 anti-Semitism, 167 Aquin, Benoît, 38 Aquin, Hubert, 14 Arboleda, Pablo, 142, 143 architectural drawing, 156–7 architectural education, 73, 154, 156–7, 159, 171 architectural ornamentation, 82, 154, 160 architectural style, 282; Art Nouveau, 221; urban type, 165; Victorian, 61, 85, 113, 115, 221–2, 272 archive theory, 22, 300, 303, 308

archives, artists’ engagement with, 248–9, 252, 257, 261, 299–300, 303, 308–9 Arendt, Hannah, 35 armchair travel, 14–15, 144 armchair urbanism, 12–15, 283 Arnopoulos, Sheila, 114 Art Association of Montreal, 155 Art Gallery of Windsor, 246 Artexte information centre, 10, 11, 246, 248 artists’ archives, 86, 111–30, 250–62 Arts and Crafts movement, 154, 167 Atget, Eugène, 21, 32, 137, 269 Athens, 156 Atlanta, 265 Aubin, Henry, 8 Aumont, Jacques, 306 Austin, David, 104, 106, 108 authenticity, 136, 139, 142 Azrieli, David, 223 Baker, Joe, 117 Baldwin Street Gallery, 119–20 Banerjee, Sidhartha, 215n1 Banham, Reyner, 304–5 Barbeau, Marius, 155 Barthes, Roland, 186 Bassnett, Sarah, 185 Bate, David, 38 Battey, C.D. See Cumming, Donigan Bazin, André, 128

Bean, Audrey, 84 Beaudet, Pascale, 275 Beaugrand-Champagne, Claire, 14, 39, 40, 42, 44, 54n32, 121 Beaulieu, Claude, 77n29 Beckman, Karen, 307–8 Bélanger, Michelle, 132, 141–2 Bemma, Adam, 123 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 11, 32, 269 Bennett, Luke, 133, 136–7 Berardi, Franco “Bifo,” 309 Bersch, Al, 195 Bertillon, Alphonse, 183–4 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, 215n4 Biennale de Montréal, 287–8 biometric photography, 183–4 Black activism in Montreal, 104, 106, 107–8 Black Panther movement, 104, 108, 110n6 Blackwell, Adrian, 282 Blain, Dominique, 10 Blanchfield, Cecelia, 81–2 Bland, John, 163, 170 Blouin, Marcel, 38–40, 45 Blunt, Anthony, 160 Bodmer, Catherine, 267, 275–7, 276 Boogie, 138 Borduas, Paul-Émile, 17 Boston, 116, 157 botany, 279 Boudreau, Marik, 7, 44, 258 Boulet, Françoise, 248, 256 Bourassa, Robert, 201 Bourdieu, Pierre, 44 Bourke-White, Margaret, 140 Brasilia, 305 Brassaï (Gyula Halász), 139 Brecht, Bertolt, 271 Brighenti, Andrea Mubi, 282 Brillant, Vincent, 139, 143, 144 Brind, William, 305 Brossard, 201 Brosseau, Marc, 41 342

Index

Bucharest, 131 Budney, Jen, 282 Bumbaru, Dinu, 8, 238 Bunnett, Henry Richard S., 161, 162 Butcher, LeRoi, 104 Cadieux, Geneviève, 10, 247, 256, 258 Calder, Alexander, 295 camera obscura, 255–7 Campbell, Robert, 279 Campeau, Michel, 14, 15, 38, 42–5, 54n32, 77, 121 Canada Council for the Arts, 227, 154, 254 Canada Malting Plant, 135, 139–45 Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (cmhc), 123 Canadian Armed Forces, 177 Canadian Centre for Architecture (cca), 3, 36, 121, 123, 136, 141, 240. See also Shaughnessy House Canadian Museum of Civilization, 52n7 Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 52n7 capitalism, 4, 31, 46, 143, 265, 274, 282, 309 Carmichael, Stokely, 104, 108 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 51, 121, 137 Casgrain, Thérèse, 90 Cave Clans, 146n3 censorship, 287–8 Centaur Gallery. See Optica Centre des arts actuels skol, 276, 280–1 Centre d’histoire de Montréal, 239 Chagnon, Alain, 14, 19, 20, 31–55, 33, 34, 35, 49, 50 Champ des Possibles, Le, 278, 279 Charbonneau, Diane, 45 Charbonneau, Roger, 14, 38, 42–5, 54n32, 63 Charney, Melvin, 7, 12, 15, 20, 56–79, 58, 61, 64, 65, 66, 72, 74, 223, 274 Chicago, 114, 265 Chicoine, René, 84 Choko, Mark H., 175

Ciel Variable magazine, 9 cinema: auteurist, 53n20; direct cinema, 32, 40; documentary, 128; film noir, 209; and photography, 307; structural cinema, 269 Cinémathèque québécoise, 52n7 circulation, 143–4 Clark, Larry, 138 class, 37; class warfare, 44; working class, 43–4, 277, 284; working-class history, 221–2; working-class neighbourhoods, 62, 68, 70, 73, 75, 78, 175–6, 178, 185, 196 Clément, Serge, 14, 38 Coderre Commission, 175 Cohen, Lynne, 137, 140 Cohen, Sorel, 10 collaboration, 111, 155, 246, 248, 250–1 Collard, Nathalie, 215n1 collective identity, 17, 41, 52, 294, 305. See also memory collectives, 7, 25, 40–1, 42–5. See also Fleming, Martha, and & Lyne Lapointe; Groupe d’Action Photographique; Groupe des photographes populaires; Groupe Point Zéro; Photocell; Plessigraphe; Vox Populi Colonna, Edward, 221 Communauté Milton-Parc (cmp), 111, 123, 125 community, 111, 116–17, 121, 132, 134, 141–2, 145, 147, 253, 265; biotic, 279 conceptualism, 254, 271 Concordia Estates Ltd, 111, 113, 118–19, 121, 123, 125, 129n10, 130n17 Concordia University, 17, 89, 100, 106, 108, 239 Congress of Black Writers, 104, 108 Constantinople, 156 Cools, Anne, 103–4, 107 cooperatives, 68, 123 Cornwell, Regina, 269

Corridart exhibition, 20, 21, 73, 223, 224–5, 239 cosmopolitanism, 47, 214, 257 Côté, Mathieu Olivier, 201 Cousineau-Levine, Penny, 267, 270 crime, 189, 195, 199–216; crime scenes, 209–13 Crimp, Douglas, 46–7 Cumming, Donigan, 34, 38, 49, 50, 267, 270–3, 272 Cutler, May, 84, 97 Dada, 15; neo-Dada, 271 daguerreotype, 263–5, 289n4, 310n24. See also Excursions Daguerriennes Dallaire, Michel, 263 Daoust, Raymond, 199 Davey, Moyra, 10 Davidson, Bruce, 44 decisive moment, 51, 137 Deichmann, Nicholas, 113, 116, 121 Deleuze, Gilles, 283 Demartini, Anne-Emmanuelle, 202–3 demolition, 20, 63, 70, 75, 80–99, 174–98, 217–19, 222–5, 227, 231, 239, 241n7, 241n20, 245n74, 305 DeSilvey, Caitlin, 142 Desmarais, Pierre, 178 Dessureault, Pierre, 52n7, 141 Detroit, 44, 131, 132, 266 d’Iberville-Moreau, Luc, 221 Dickens, Charles, 185 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 100 Dionne, Patrick, 9 Disraëli, qc, 43–4, 54n32 diversity: biological, 281; social, 51 Doane, Thomas Coffin, 263–5, 264 documentary photography, 36, 118–19, 126, 128, 133–4, 137–41, 145, 147; social documentary, 5, 32, 34 Dog Parc Gallery, 284–5 Doisneau, Robert, 139 Index

343

domestic architecture, 217, 238, 240, 244n59, 245n77 domestic workers, 219, 226–32, 240 Donegan, Rosemary, 195 Doran, Harold J., 165, 166 Dorval, 13 Douglas, Rosie (Roosevelt), 104, 107, 108 Drapeau, Jean, 20, 75, 178, 179, 184, 223, 307 Dresden, 265 Drouin, Martin, 179, 221, 222, 223 Drummondville, 181 Dufour, Lorraine, 13, 14 Dumont-Johnson, Micheline, 94 Dumouchel, Jared, 135, 138, 140, 140, 141 Duplessis, Maurice, 175 Edensor, Tim, 19, 142 Edinburgh, 153 Edmonton, 104, 106 Eisenman, Peter, 75 Elder, R. Bruce, 269 Enke, Anne, 90–1 Enwezor, Okwui, 303, 308 epistemology, 248, 250, 254 erasure, 225–6, 263–91 Eriksen, Svend-Erik, 195 Estienne, Charles, 260 Evans, Walker, 21, 31, 77n26, 192, 196 Ewing, William A., 118 Excursions Daguerriennes, 3, 31 exhibitions: locational connotations, 31–55, 118, 239–40. See also Corridart; site-specificity Expo 67 (1967 Universal Exposition), 7, 13, 18, 25, 59, 200, 220, 266, 268, 292–310; commemoration of, 294, 295, 297, 298, 308, 309; critique of, 302–4 Exposition Universelle de Paris (1855), 263 Exposition Universelle de Paris (1889), 297 expressways, 82, 121, 272, 237 expropriation map, 185, 187, 195, 196

344

Index

Fahrni, Magdalena, 234 family photographs, 201, 205–6, 214 Farley, Denis, 39 Farm Security Administration, 140 Faubourg à m’lasse, 304–5 Fédération des travailleurs du Québec (ftq), 298–9 feminism, 41, 44, 90–1, 93, 96–7, 99n36; second-wave, 54n37, 90–1, 97, 116 Ferme Saint-Gabriel, 161–5 Fiorito, Jean, 41 Fish, Michael, 222 Fleming, Martha, 251, 252, 253, 254, 257, 258, 259, 261 Fleming, Martha, & Lyne Lapointe, 10, 12, 20–1, 24, 44–5, 246–62, 247, 248, 249, 256 Forbes, John Colin, 151, 152 Forsythe, Dennis, 104 Foucault, Michel, 69, 75, 300 found objects, 268–9 Fournier, Sarto, 178 Frank, Robert, 139 Freeman, Georgia. See Cumming, Donigan Friedlander, Lee, 270–1 Frigon, Martin, 8 Front de libération du Québec (flq), 78n36, 201, 216n8. See also October Crisis frontality, 137, 210–12 Fuller, Buckminster, 25, 292–310, 293, 295, 296, 302, 308; and science fiction, 295, 301, 303, 305 futurity, 286, 294, 296–8, 303, 308–9 Gagnon, Charles, 267, 269–71, 271 Gagnon, Monika Kin, 294 Gallery, David, 284 Gariépy, Edgar, 163, 172n36 Garrett, Bradley L., 132, 136, 142, 145 Gaudard, Pierre, 42, 45 Gauvreau, Jean-Marie, 155 gender, 21, 54n37, 153, 155, 166; postwar roles, 234–5

gentrification, 8–9, 47, 51, 284, 288 Germain, Annick, 55n45 Gill, Jean-Paul, 23, 174–98, 176, 179, 183, 186, 188, 190, 191, 193 Gilloch, Graeme, 11n16 Gingras, Miki, 8, 9 Gladu, André, 7 Godbout, Jacques, 13 Golden Square Mile. See Square Mile Goldin, Nan, 138 Goose Village, 17 Goss, Arthur, 185 graffiti, 51, 141, 270, 283 Graham, Hugh (Lord Altholstan), 233 grain elevators, 57, 58, 59, 76, 274 Grand, Suzanne, 7 Grant, Leslie, 195 grassroots activism, 37, 221, 279 Grauerholz, Angela, 10, 11 greystone architecture, 3–4, 8, 113, 222, 238, 272, 282, 238, 272, 282 Griffintown, 3–5, 284, 288 Grosbois, Louise, 7 Groupe d’Action Photographique (gap), 42–5, 53n15, 63, 77n25 Groupe de Recherche sur les Bâtiments en Pierre Grise de Montréal, 238 Groupe des photographes populaires (gpp), 41–2, 44, 45, 54n27 Groupe d’intervention urbaine de Montréal, 241 Groupe Point Zéro, 12 Guerra, Jorge, 42–5 Gurd, Charles, 24, 217, 219, 226–32, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 238–41 Gutsche, Clara, 14, 21, 22, 38, 135, 136, 139, 140, 141, 145, 195, 240, 273 Haacke, Hans, 254 Hambourg, Maria Morris, 184 Hammond, Cynthia, 267, 277, 279

Harper, Jennifer, 120 Harris, Kenneth D., 155 Haussmann, Baron, 184 Hayden, Dolores, 221 Hayeur, Isabel, 267, 287–8, 288 Hébert, Adrien, 17, 164, 165 Hellyer, Paul, 301 Helman, Claire, 114 Hemispheric Conference to End the Vietnam War, 104, 108, 110n6 heritage, 3, 6–8, 19, 22, 31, 38, 40, 84–6, 89, 96, 97, 133–4, 136, 142–4, 155, 180, 221–3, 237–8, 239–40, 265, 309; distinguished from patrimoine, 222 Heritage Montreal, 85, 111, 129n3, 237, 238, 241 Hillel, Edward, 14 Hime, Humphrey Lloyd, 274 Hine, Lewis, 273 historicity, 250, 253, 259 Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, 285 Hochman, Nadav, 145 Hoffman, Philip, 25, 295, 305–9, 306, 308 homelessness, 283, 285–6 Honeyman, John, 15, 27n35 Hornstein, Shelley, 86 Houde, Camilien, 178 housing, 70–1, 78n36, 123, 175, 178, 185 Howell, John Mead, 159 Hutchison, A.C., 163 Huyssen, Andreas, 12, 297 Iberville, 212 Île d’Orléans, 154 immigrants, 9, 10, 52, 55n45, 104, 113, 161, 302; denigration of, 166–7 Indigenous peoples, 52, 302, 305; denigration of, 166–7 interdisciplinarity, 10, 248, 253–4, 274 interior decor, 114, 116, 163, 192, 221, 227 intersectionality, 104, 248, 250, 253, 260

Index

345

Iversen, Margaret, 268–9 Jacob, Luis, 266 Jacob, Selwyn, 21, 100–1 Jacobs, Jane, 11, 114, 129n8 James, C.L.R., 108 Jannsen, Shauna, 267, 284 Johnstone, Lesley, 294 Jolicoeur, Nicole, 10 Jones, Laura, 119–20 Jongué, Serge, 35–6, 45 Jorn, Asger, 282 juvenile delinquency, 189, 195 Kahn, Louis I., 60, 77n14 Kalifa, Dominique, 213 Kelly, J. Frederick, 159 Kertész, André, 140 Kirkman, E., 285 Klinck, Elizabeth, 109 Kolcze, Eva, 25, 25, 295, 305–9, 306, 308 Kouwenhoven, John A., 77n30 Kowaluk, Lucia, 121–3 Krauss, Rosalind, 46 Kriebel, Sabine T., 13 La Fontaine Park, 210, 267 labour, 41, 222, 230, 277, 279; reform, 185 Lacasse, Danielle, 177 Lachance, Ralph, 120 Lachine Canal, 136, 139, 141, 142, 145, 254 Lagerkvist, Amanda, 297, 309 Lamarche, Lise, 28n47, 42 Lambert, Phyllis, 3–4, 4, 123, 125, 217, 274, 237, 238, 240, 274 Lamoureux, Ève, 54n37 Langford, Martha, 99, 186, 240 Lanken, Dane, 118 Lapointe, Lyne, 10, 12, 246–62 Latour, Bruno, 285 Laurier, Wilfrid, 151, 178 Laurin, Serge, 13, 42–5 346

Index

Le Corbusier, 57, 59, 60, 78n40 Le Guin, Ursula, 301–2 Leary, John Patrick, 131, 139 Lefebvre, Henri, 11, 12 Léonard, Emmanuelle, 267, 277–9, 278 Lessard, Michel, 6, 7 Lethaby, William, 168 Levaillant, François, 260 Lévesque, Luc, 267, 282–3 Levitt, Helen, 139 Levitt, Nina, 10 L’Heureux, Guy, 276, 280, 282 Lindsay, Jeffrey, 294 Little Burgundy, 17 Local Initiatives Program, 121 London, Mark, 84 London, uk, 265 Lugon, Olivier, 133 Ma, Jean, 307–8 MacEachern, Ian, 195 MacLennan, Hugh, 13 Maestro, Lani, 10 Magazine OVO/OVO Magazine, 42–5 Maheux, Camille, 7, 44 Maison de la culture de Maisonneuve, 52n7 Malevich, Kazimir, 270 Manovich, Lev, 145 Marien, Mary Warner, 185 Marlowe, John. See Cumming, Donigan Marois, Carole, 216n11 Marsan, Jean-Claude, 84–5, 176, 220 Marville, Charles, 21, 137, 184 Marxist theory, 42, 46 Massey, Jonathan, 296 Massumi, Brian, 283 materiality, 250, 257, 260–1 Mather, Edith, 20, 80–99, 81, 83, 88, 92, 95, 272 Mathers, Andrew, 152 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 254 Maurault, Olivier, 155 Mavrikakis, Nicola, 52n9

Mayerovitch, Harry, 165, 166, 170 McAtee, Cammie, 294 McCarthy, Bryan, 87, 94 McConnell, J.W., 217, 227–9; Foundation, 231 McCord, David Ross, 161 McCord Museum, 3, 14, 20, 36, 86–7, 118, 123, 217, 230, 239, 240 McDonough, Tom, 305 McGill School of Architecture, 23, 117 McGill University, 111, 113 McIntyre, Duncan, 233 Meessen, Vincent, 100 memory, 133, 141, 143, 145–6; collective, 23, 31, 38, 141, 248, 274, 305; and place, 270 Mercier, Guy, 275, 287 Mercier, Maurice, 199 Merrett, Brian, 14, 15, 38, 40, 63, 120, 217, 218, 232–8, 236, 238–41 Merrett, Campbell, 163, 166, 170 Meskimmon, Marsha, 96 Metinides, Enrique, 202 Miedema, Gary, 302 Mile End, 9, 25, 47, 48, 118, 277–8 Miller, David, 14, 15, 136, 145, 195, 240, 267, 273, 273–4, 275 Mills, Sean, 302–3 Milton-Parc Citizens’ Committee, 111, 113–14, 116–18, 121, 123, 129n4 Milton Park, 21, 111–30, 273 mise-en-abyme, 270, 286 Missions Héliographiques, 3 modernism, 10, 13, 17–19, 23, 67, 85, 155–4, 168, 170–1, 292, 297, 305 Moholy-Nagy, Sybil, 76n10 Molson Brewery, 263–5 Montréal Centre-Sud, 9 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts/Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal (mmfa/ mbam), 19, 36, 38–40, 39, 45–6 Montréal, plus ou moins? Montreal, plus or minus? exhibition/catalogue, 7, 12, 15–16, 20, 63

monuments, 3, 31, 57, 59, 68–9, 143, 155, 156, 274, 287; counter-monuments, 238 Morgan, Ceri, 13–14 Morin, Dennis, 216n11 Morin, Robert, 13, 14 Morisset, Gérard, 155 Morisset, Lucie K., 166 Morris, William, 168 mug shot, 183–4, 289, 201, 205, 207 Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (macm), 36, 270–1 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 46 Muthesius, Hermann, 168 Napoleon III, 184 National Film Board of Canada, 104; Still Photography Division, 42–3, 45, 120 Natural History Society of Montreal, 279 neighbourhoods, 3–4, 44, 175–6, 178, 185, 196, 265, 271 Neilson, Gordon Antoine, 155, 156 Nesfield, William Eden, 168 New Topographics, 267, 274 New York City, 44, 46, 178, 185, 268, 297 New York Public Library, 46 Nguyễn, Jacqueline Hoàng, 25, 295, 300, 302, 300–3, 308 nightlife, 209–10 Nixon, Virginia, 270–1 Nobbs, Percy, 153, 154, 159 Nora, Pierre, 47, 146 nostalgia, 82, 137, 139, 294, 297, 309 Notman Photographic Archives, 14, 118 Notman Studio, 161 Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, 270 Occupy movement, 287 October Crisis, 78n36, 216n8, 254. See also Front de Libération du Québec O’Leary, Elizabeth, 229 Olympics (Games of the XXI Olympiad, Montreal 1976), 225 Index

347

Onions, Wilfred, 163, 165 Opp, James, 34 Optica (formerly Centaur Gallery), 41, 118, 120 Osborne, Peter, 14 Ottawa, 13 Panofsky, Erwin, 38 Paquet, Suzanne, 267, 275 Pare, Richard, 3–4, 4, 245n66 Paris, 161, 183, 184, 263, 297 Parti Québécois, 18, 215 Paskievich, John, 195 Pearson, Cedric, 54n32 Penverne, Jean, 178 Perception Gallery, 120 Perreault, Louis, 267, 285–7, 286 Petrelli, Robert, 194 Phillips, John, 119 Photo Progression, 270 photobook, 38 Photocell, 44, 113 photogram, 256–7 photographic process, 116, 181–2, 189; analogue versus digital, 247–61; archival process, 121 photographic style, 114–16, 128, 134, 137–40, 282 photography as activism, 13–15, 36, 219, 222–3, 237–8, 239–40 photography theory, 12–13, 37, 186, 307–8 Piaf, Édith, 183, 184 Pills, Jacques, 183 Pinard, Guy, 237 pinhole photography, 265 Place Ville-Marie, 267 Plan Dozois, 175, 178–80, 184–5, 189 Plateau-Mont-Royal, 10, 19, 31–52, 277 Plessigraphe, 7, 44 Pointe-Saint-Charles, 161, 279 Poissant, Louise, 141 Polanyi, Michael, 77n31 Pop Art, 69

348

Index

popular culture, 43, 75, 200 postcards, 224, 275, 282 postmodernism, 10, 37 post-studio practice, 246, 250 pouf! art + architecture (Cynthia Hammond and Thomas D. Strickland), 267, 281, 284–5 Price, Bruce, 221 proleptic landscape, 263–91; defined, 287 Prost, Jean-François, 267 prostitution, 175, 177, 194–5, 197n15 Protests and Pedagogy exhibition/ conference, 100 Proulx, Daniel, 177 psychoanalysis, 268–9 Quartier des Spectacles, 287 Quebec City, 161 Quebec Federation of Women, 90 Quebec nationalism, 18–19, 24, 68, 299 Quebec photography history, 35–6 Quiet Revolution, 214 race, 213–14 racism, 100–1, 106–8, 153, 166, 167, 171 Radice, Martha, 55n45 Radio-Canada building, 305 railroads, 221, 274, 279 Rajotte, Normand, 38 Ramsden, Anne, 10 Rancourt, Jean-Pierre, 216n11 Readman, Sylvie, 10 real-estate speculation, 284, 288 Realism, 128, 209 Red Light district, 23, 174–81, 183–4, 186, 188–96 Reeves, John, 259 Refus global manifesto, 17 Rendell, Jane, 86, 98n16 Revett, Nicholas, 156 Richler, Mordecai, 13

Riegl, Aloïs, 143 Riis, Jacob, 185, 196 Rodney, Walter, 108 Roman Catholicism, 13, 17, 43, 194 Rose, Gillian, 220 Rosemont, 209, 277 Rosler, Martha, 37 Roussopoulos, Dimitri, 121–3 Roy, Gabrielle, 13 Rudofsky, Bernard, 76n10 ruins, 19, 22, 31, 52n2, 73–4, 270, 279, 281, 289n4; post-industrial, 131–48 rural Quebec, 155, 160–1, 168, 170–1 Ruscha, Ed, 63, 77n26 Ruskin, John, 168 Safdie, Moshe, 295 Sainte-Famille Women’s Centre, 117, 119 Saint-Henri, 13, 17, 209, 210, 212 Saint-Jean, Michel, 14 Saint-Tite, 41 Save Montreal, 84–5, 111, 129n3, 222, 227, 237–8, 241 Schmertz, Mildred, 303 Schwartz, Joan M., 220, 239, 274 Scott, Marian Dale, 17 Scott Brown, Denise, 68 Scully, Vincent, Jr, 76n10 Seale, Bobby, 108 Sekula, Allan, 46, 205 Sénéchal, André, 41 Senneville, Village of, 226 sexism, 153, 166, 171 Shanghai, 121, 297 Shaughnessy, Thomas G., 233 Shaughnessy House, 217, 218, 232–8. See also Canadian Centre for Architecture Shaughnessy Village, 272 Shaw, Norman, 168 Sheppard, Gordon, 14 Shum, Mina, 21, 101, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 109

Simmel, Georg, 10, 11 Simon, Cheryl, 10 Sipes, Todd, 133 Sir George Williams Affair, 17, 21, 100–10 Sise, Hazen, 170 site-specificity, 250–1, 257, 261, 284–5 Situationist movement, 68, 100, 283 slide collections, 153, 159, 163 Sliwinski, Sharon, 13 Sloan, Edward, 108 Sloan, Johanne, 242n, 24n25 slum clearance, 175, 178, 180, 185 Smith, Donald Alexander (Lord Strathcona), 233 Smith, Laurajane, 142 Smith, Shawn Michelle, 13, 274 snapshots, 7, 15, 69, 134, 137, 185–6, 204, 284, 299; snapshot aesthetic, 189 Sneath, Allen Winn, 265 Snow, Michael, 24–5, 266–9, 268, 275 social media, 143–4 social networks, 132, 134 Solomon, Ron, 120 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 46, 195 Sontag, Susan, 43 Sourkes, Cheryl, 10 Spasoff, Nicola, 153, 154, 155 spatial stories, 86, 90–1, 98n16 speculation, 283, 287 Square Mile, 24, 217, 220, 221–2, 225–6, 230, 235, 239 St Paul, Alberta, 301, 302 stereotypes, 167, 265 Stotz, Charles Morse, 160 street photography, 32, 34 Strickland, Thomas D., 267 Stroll, Sam, 194 syn- atelier d’exploration urbaine, 267, 279, 280–1 Szilasi, Gabor, 14, 38, 42–5, 121, 137–8, 138, 140, 240

Index

349

tabloids, 199–216 Tannery Village, 17 Tata, Sam, 14, 121 temporality, 125, 132–3, 136–7, 139, 141–2, 144–6, 250–1, 260; belatedness, 202; pastness, 37, 199–216, 270 Tenhaaf, Nell, 10 Thibodeau, Jean J., 165 Tiffany, Louis C., 221 Toronto, 178, 185 tourism, 131–2, 136, 145; dark tourism, 132; dereliction tourism, 132 Tousignant, Zoë, 45–6 Traquair, Ramsay, 23, 151–73 Tremblay, Michel, 13, 216n11 Trépanier, Esther, 6, 41 Triggs, Stanley G., 118 Turcot, Laurent, 8 Université du Québec à Montréal (uqam), 73 University Settlement Centre, 116, 120–1 Upton, Dell, 154, 157 Urbain, Jean-Didier, 131–2 Urban Ecology Centre, 123 urban exploration, 131–4, 136–7, 140–3, 145 urban imaginary, 12, 297 urban knowledge, 69, 72–4 urban naturalists, 279 urban preservation, 217, 220, 221, 223, 227, 237–8, 241 urban renewal, 80, 82, 87, 90, 96, 113, 174–5, 178–80, 184–5, 195–6, 220, 303–5 urban theory, 10–12, 297, 304–5 Van Horne, William C., 233 Van Horne Mansion, 24, 85, 217, 218, 220–1 Van Millingen, Alexander, 156 Venturi, Robert, 68 vernacular architecture, 23, 67, 70–1, 76n10

350

Index

vernacular photography, 82, 84–5, 89, 201, 284–5 Vietnam War (Second Indochina War; American War), 113, 271, 273. See also Hemispheric Conference to End the Vietnam War Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène, 3 Vox Populi, 45, 54n2 Walker, Robert, 3, 5 walking, 13, 84, 86–7, 93, 96–7 Walsh, John C., 34 War Measures Act, 113. See also October Crisis Warburg, Aby, 37 Washington, dc, 113 wasteland, 275–83 Weegee (Arthur Fellig), 202, 273 Weir, William, 265 Westmoreland, Juanita, 104, 108 Westmount, City of, 60, 87, 120, 221, 226 White, Michael, 40, 42–5, 121 White, Minor, 120 Wholever, John Kendall, 165 Wigley, Mark, 22, 305 Williams, Raymond, 31 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 159 women’s history, 90–1, 93–5, 97 women’s movement. See feminism Youngstown, 131 Zervigón, Andrés Mario, 13