About this event
Visual ArtThe 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.