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• Reilley Bishop-Stall, McGill University

This session will investigate the relationship between photography and activism, considering the camera’s role in both recording and facilitating resistance movements. Photography and activism have been linked since, at least, the emergence of photojournalism, with media representation of direct action, demonstrations and confrontations between protestors and authorities contributing to public perception of activist causes and responses. In recent years, the camera has become even more embedded in social justice movements with the capacity to record moving from the professional to the participant and footage instantaneously uploaded. Activists have long recognized the power of photography, redeploying graphic imagery to expose atrocity and/or harnessing the camera to document or counter oppressive representation. This session includes papers that consider photography’s employment as both an activist tool and a means of recording or facilitating resistance.

keywords: photography, activism, resistance, documentary, intervention

session type: panel

"Photographs that only I could take": Imaging the Japanese Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968- 1978

• Kelly Midori McCormick, University of British Columbia

In August 1971 and 1972 the university student Matsumoto Michiko attended training camps for the ūman ribu (Women’s Liberation) movement in Japan in Nagano and Hokkaido where she documented the participants as they were deep in discussion over changes they wanted to see in Japanese society. Her photographs envision the energy, as the women, in Setsu Shigematsu’s telling “imagined liberation as the struggle against and beyond the binary confines of competing empires of capitalism and communism and conceived of itself as part of the ongoing multitude of liberation struggles organizing across the globe” (Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)). In this talk I analyze the relationships of power that constructed notions of who should have the right to photograph the women’s liberation movement and debates around how it should be photographed. Focusing on Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, I explore how the Women’s Liberation movement and photographic theory intersected and influenced each other, and how each grew from a shared political investment with the politics of representation. Addressing the photographic representations of the Women’s Liberation movement in Japan also provides the opportunity to expand our understandings the collective movements to visualize photographs of protest movements in the Global 1960s. In the Japanese case, how did photographs of protest taken by women photographers or depicting women protesting contribute to the boader visual culture of and social formations around the protest photograph?

keywords: Women’s Liberation movement, Japanese photography, feminist visual practice

The Goose Village

• Marisa Portolese, Concordia University

Goose Village is a multi-disciplinary body of work about a six-street borough once located in Pointe St-Charles, Montreal, bulldozed in 1964 in anticipation of Expo 67. The administration of Mayor Jean Drapeau demolished the entire neighbourhood to make way for the short-lived venue of the Autostade sports arena, eradicating 350 buildings and evicting 1500 people from their homes. Adding insult to injury, the arena faced its' demise less than a decade later and was dismantled in 1976. As a result, Goose Village became a parking lot and disappeared from Montreal maps, obliterating certain ethnic groups from this undervalued site's cultural and social fabric.

Through still and moving images, installation, sound, writing and web/graphic design encompassing a myriad of genres such as memory mapping, oral history, portraiture, storytelling, the urban landscape, and a forensic gaze into historical institutional archives and private family albums, I explore the history of this once thriving neighbourhood. Goose Village is not only motivated by the social underpinnings of my art practice but intrinsic to my roots in the city and my identity as a second- generation Canadian. I am inexorably linked to this ostensibly tight-knit community because of my immigrant and familial heritage, as it is where the paternal side of my family settled when they emigrated from Calabria, Italy.

Goose Village signals how poor urban planning decisions negatively affect and displace working-class communities. The purpose is to highlight the destructive consequences of hallmark events and to commemorate the villagers' memories through an autobiographical and empathetic lens.

keywords: archives, culture, heritage, family, history

C. Gutsche. Milton-Parc, 1970

S. Lake, Cautioned Homes and Gardens, 1991.

Camera-Based Artworks, Social Documentary Photographs and Activism in Canada

• Philippe Guillaume, Concordia University

Activist artworks are mostly created in a context that affords the artist physical and/or temporal distance from the event or demonstration, while in most circumstances the photographer’s work requires actual physical presence. An increasing global context over the past half-century means that graphic imagery associated with activism are pictures drawn mostly from international events―demonstrations for civil rights and against the Vietnam War are well-known examples. But what about photography’s application as an activist tool and/or means of recording resistance by artists and photographers in Canada? For example, Suzy Lake’s photographic tryptic Cautioned Homes and Gardens: Barb and Janie (1991), was part of the artists’ social activism to denounce the Ontario government’s intrusion on First Nations land. Since the 1970s Lake had become “more invested in the local struggles that surrounded her and their links to global liberation movements.” (Silver, 2021). In 1988, performance artist Daniel Guimond, presented The Prick, a performance work with a multitude of shocking drug addiction photos projected with slides at Western Front, Vancouver. Clara Gutsche and David Miller took photographs during the early 1970s to denounce the gentrification of the Milton Park neighbourhood motivated by their ‘belief that collective effort could create a better society.” (Gutsche, 2021) My paper will consider select Canadian camera-based artworks and social documentary photographs to examine the changing use of photography as a tool for creating and/or recording activism and resistance since the 1960, a period when art meant to induce emotions had, for many, reached its end.

keywords: activism, photography, camera-based art, social documentary photography