Geoffrey James | Ancient and Modern: Selected Panoramas

The Stephen Bulger Gallery is pleased to present Ancient and Modern: Selected Panoramas, our second solo exhibition of work by Geoffrey James, one of Canada’s pre-eminent photographers. James’s panoramic photographs explore the relationship between people and the landscapes they create, shape, and transform. He became known for using a panoramic camera to photograph gardens, parks, cities, mines, and other human-made environments. His photographs are carefully composed and largely devoid of people. His images of formal European gardens reveal the ways in which humans organize and control nature, while later photographs of places such as mines and borders explore the more destructive consequences of human intervention. The works selected for this exhibition represent a long engagement with ideal spaces laden with historical meaning. Many of the selected prints are large-scale digital prints being exhibited for the first time. Most of the images were made with a Kodak panoramic camera from the 1920s, in which the film follows a curved plane. Classical Renaissance perspective is replaced by something more closely resembling the turning of the head. The camera itself required considerable labour. Film had to be cut from a larger sheet and loaded into the camera inside a changing bag. The process demanded patience and deliberation—qualities that were equally necessary when photographing these complex, culturally coded spaces. James was born in Wales in 1942, studied Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford (BA and MA), and immigrated to Canada in 1966. A self-taught photographer, James is the author or subject of more than a dozen publications and is represented in major collections internationally. He has had solo exhibitions at the Palazzo Braschi, Rome; the Americas Society, New York; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, among others. He has participated in group exhibitions at Documenta IX, Kassel; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. James is a Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize and the Governor General’s Prize in Media and Visual Arts, and was named Toronto’s first Photo Laureate.