We Can’t Paint

A couple of days ago I was having a conversation with a friend and we got to talking about photographic style. There was an agreement that Germany has a style and you could even say that there is an American style as well, but we wondered if there is a Canadian style of photography?

Before I entered art school I was more interested in painting - let alone realistic images. It was only in my first year of university that I started to delve into a serious photographic study and with this change, as many people do, I began to observe styles of photography. I noticed that German photography was for the most part centered around the document, an almost scientific type of observation. Whether this was social or political, it always seemed to be structured in such a way as to present a very serious mode of image production, notebly when dealing with the landscape. This is not to say that all German photography is created this way, it is simply an observation of the “Bernd & Hilla Becher School”, or “Düsseldorf School” of thought that is so easy to characterize.

Typologies© Bernd and Hilla Becher

South State Street Apartments III, Chicago, 1990© Thomas Struth

Narodni knihovna Praha V, 2004© Candida Höfer

I also noticed that the Americans style was rooted in both artists from the Winogrand generation of street photographers:

World’s fair, New York City, 1964© Garry Winogrand

Route 9 W, New York, 1969© Lee Friedlander

and the large format greats like Shore and Sternfeld:

Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California, August 13, 1979© Stephen Shore

Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona, 1983© Joel Sternfeld

These stylistic constructions of photography define a national character, both German and American, and have since branched out to form variations of their core selves. One could say that these are the “bread and butter” of other photographic styles that now define their own German and American aesthetics.

However, there was still the problem of a distinct Canadian style of photography; I was a bit confused. I leafed through books, looked on the Internet, attended shows, and asked instructors if there was a general Canadian style. The usual answer I got was that there wasn’t a finite definition of what a Canadian photographer’s style is. Mostly I was directed to artists such as Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Stan Douglas, photographers who for the most part base their practice within the conceptual realm.

Picture for Women, 1979© Jeff Wall

Flanders Trees Series, 1989 - 2001© Rodney Graham

Thirty one, thirty two, thirty three, thirty four, 1994© Ken Lum

Walhachin, 2006© Stan Douglas

This was very unsettling. If there is a Canadian style of photography was it confined to a “Vancouver school”? Or was it left up to contemporary Canadian photographers to define? Are we devoid of a unifying voice within art?

To be continued next week in Part2: Do Canadians have style?