To make the images for Midcentury Studio, a selection of which are at The Power Plant in Toronto until 4 March, Stan Douglas not only constructed a working period studio stocked with authentic equipment from the post-war North America that these images ‘document’, he also invented an impressively resourceful fictional character, a working photojournalist of the time, to make them. Douglas cast himself in the[.....]

At a talk at the Frieze Art Fair in London in October artists Broomberg and Chanarin and Taryn Simon talked about the relationship between photojournalism and art photography. In the Q&A that followed, someone in the audience asked why there were no strictly-photography galleries at the fair. The question seemed both unanswerable and, to a large extent, irrelevant. Though the talk itself circled an issue[.....]

Canada’s Grange Prize officially launched last month in Toronto. The Prize, now in it’s fourth year,  nominates four contemporary photographers, two from Canada and two from a different partner country—this year India—but lets the world decide the winner. The prize is one of many corporate-institutional partnerships (the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize presented by The Photographer’s Gallery, for example, or Canada’s recently inaugurated Scotiabank Photography Award,[.....]

A walk along Toronto’s west Queen West these days is a journey through a neighbourhood still in the throes of gentrification. With a thriving gallery scene now fully entrenched, the condos are going up, taking shape amidst the soaring cranes and massive construction pits. A little jaunt south of the main drag, a newly-renovated 99 Sudbury now holds a fitness club and event spaces, as[.....]

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying In the yellow haze of the sun There were children crying and colors flying All around the chosen ones All in a dream, all in a dream – Neil Young, After the Gold Rush, 1970 Recent contemporary photography, particularly examples frequenting the walls of major museums, often seems drained of political poignancy, given over instead to[.....]

A room filled with a new series of distinct wall works, Hypoxia 1-6 (all 2011) can seem overwhelming at first. Each piece is a mess of metal tubing, cables, motors, microphones, amplifiers and compressors that activate expandable balloons covered in brightly colored braided sleeving. But as you walk around the room, moving between one work and the next, the distinctive intricacies of each individual piece[.....]