Image and Imagination: Le mois de la photo à Montréal 2005 (review)

Image and Imagination is a substantial publication produced in conjunction with the 2005 version of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, a major biennial featuring Canadian and international artists. It focuses on a specific over-arching theme designated by guest curator Martha Langford as 'Image and Imagination.'

The book is structured in three sections, each concentrating on differing aspects of individual or collective imaginative engagement with photographs. There are nine commissioned essays as well as thirty shorter 'curatorial' statements describing specific exhibitions. Langford's thesis is that theories of photography have until now focused on concerns with representation and memory but have not, in a concerted way, taken into account the role of spectatorial imagination in relation to meaning. Taking a logical step almost fifty years after Roland Barthes announced the birth of the reader, Langford proposes the book as an opening salvo in the development of 'a photographic theory of spectatorial experience based on an expanded notion of photographic function – one that recognizes the spectator's part in intention and authorship.'

Langford's knowledge, energy, and enthusiasm for her task are impressive. She not only acts as editor but makes numerous contributions herself, penning the introduction, one of the extended essays and most of the curatorial descriptions noted above. The meat of the book for this reviewer lies in the commissioned essays and their illustrations, since the shorter texts (three to four pages each), coupled with a necessarily spare number of reproductions of each artist's works, tend to act more as 'teasers.' While these do sketch out each exhibition's rough outline, they are sometimes not quite long enough to draw out the nuances of each exhibition, or illustrated intensively enough to flesh out each artist's project. This leads to a sense that Image and Imagination is actually two related books woven into one. This occasionally contributes to a slight difficulty in orienting oneself within this hefty book if it isn't approached linearly. Perhaps another model to consider might be a slipcovered two-volume set where the commissioned essays and their accompanying illustrations could be nominally separated from the more catalogue-like functions that the shorter texts and images are attempting to cover.

However, these are not fatal criticisms for a publication that has much to offer the reader. The core essays address Langford's stated theme to varying degrees, but all plunge the reader into the often fascinating research and reflection on the medium of photography. Of note in terms of demonstrating the sheer diversity of approaches corralled by Langford are Francine Dagenais's concept of the 'bodily suffix,' a contemplation of the artist's imagination in relation to the prosthetic possibilities offered through state-of-the-art bio-engineering; Geoffrey Batchen's delving into the unexplored territory of the 'bourgeois imagination' lurking behind the huge mid-nineteenth-century commercial success of the carte-de-visite; Kirsty Robertson's consideration of what might be the imaginative role of the photographic documentation of the physical manifestations of the Global Justice Movement; and, Martyn Jolly's fascinating discussion of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spirit photography and its 'revival' in the work of certain contemporary artists.

This diversity is a strength of the book (producing a stimulating set of readings) but, at the same time, the broadness of the terrain demonstrates the challenges of theorizing a role for 'imagination' in relation to photography that sets it apart from the already well mined territories of representation and memory. Regarding the latter, hinted at by Langford but not pursued, is the question of how we make distinctions between imagination and memory. Imagination would seem to need the bedrock of memory to build upon, and yet memory itself is a faculty that has been theorized as not simply recollective but as a constructive and imaginative act. Also, the predominance of 'theatrical' approaches to photography represented in the book's illustrations means that barely touched upon...