When we speak of the world, we really only speak of an impression of the world. The world is an image, even when we have a scientific conception of it and assert: “This is so and so,” it is still only an image.¹ – Carl Jung
Photography in the public realm – beaming down from billboards, framing walkways on construction hoarding, lighting large-scale digital screens, looming over civic squares – is usually not considered art. Instead, our experiences of the images we encounter as we cross an urban landscape are often set against widely held expectations of the ways we encounter art. Even if it is publicly accessible, say in a free gallery or library, art is often set behind the façades of institutions that may have other kinds of barriers, often embedded structurally into architecture and, less tangibly, mediated by political and socio-economic systems. Our viewing within such contexts is also generally intentional rather than incidental (we go there to see art), and our gazes are directed (we look at art). And, finally, art has more often been at a domestic scale, compressed into an architecture that comfortably holds our bodies, though, as more cultural institutions co-opt and inhabit industrial settings, this is less and less the case.²
These expectations are synonymous with some of the ways that art is legible as art, and the fraught entrance of photography into museums and galleries requires that it conform to these conventions, at least initially. But photography was always also in the street – not only in the growing spaces created and reserved for advertisements but fluttering in the pages of newsstand magazines, pasted up as propaganda, integrated into storefronts and signage. Our perceptions of photographs in these realms are more often serendipitous, part of the flow of visual information; in efforts to compete with a busy urban landscape for our attention, images are lit up, raised, and made larger-than-life. One of the boldest early examples, the Kodak Colorama billboard in Grand Central Station, loomed over American commuters from 1950 to 1990. Illuminated, 18-feet high, and 60-feet wide, it projected rotating scenes of idealized, everyday domestic life: families at bath time or on the beach, postcard vacations in faraway places, holiday parades and other civic events. Almost every image included someone with a camera in hand, memorializing the moment. It answered the question “What does the world look like?” with scenes of an aspirational middle-class lifestyle and implored viewers to not only embrace the images but perpetually recreate them.
In the 1970s, the surge of advertising and consumer culture spurred an artistic counterculture, and many image-makers responded with works that complicated rather than reinforced the kind of idyllic perspectives of post-war America, exposing the power imbalances and contradictions inherent in them. In Possession (1976), artist Victor Burgin pasted up large-scale posters across Newcastle upon Tyne, England, depicting an attractive, amorous white couple in white apparel, with the caption “What does possession mean to you?” and the statistic “7% of our population own 84% of our wealth.” The Guerrilla Girls, founded in 1985, directly implicated the art world as a pillar of patriarchal power, famously overlaying the question “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” above a reclining female nude in a gorilla mask. Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s billboard projects, mainly produced in California between 1973 and 1989, replaced traditional ads with highly conceptual and often surrealist imagery: oranges on fire, billowing suit ties, and a nuclear explosion with the caption “Oh la la!” In the gaps between expectation and reality, viewers are left to consider our evolving relations to, and conceptions of, desire, material culture, self-image, class, and identity.
More recently, art and photography festivals occupy a particularly important space within this history, often bringing images created as art into the public realm as a core aspect of their programming. In Canada, both CONTACT Photography Festival and Capture Photography Festival show art in public spaces across Toronto and Vancouver for the duration of their festivals; public murals, billboards along major roads, and entire subway platforms become spaces for art. At last year’s Capture, Lucas Blalock’s installation French Country Kitchen consisted of three images shown in sequence at an Eastside billboard site over the course of a year (March 2023 – March 2024). Both vivid and drab, replete and blank, repetitive and haphazard, they remix the colours, shapes, and textures of aspirational middle-class, everyday objects – indeed some seem lifted almost directly from the aspirational Colorama images. In them, we find domestic elements: yellow kitchen tile, a scuffed wooden tabletop littered with hard-boiled eggs, fruit atop a white plate atop a Formica-patterned ground. Yet they are also clearly not these things – often pasted over or unfinished like an abandoned children’s drawing, refusing to resolve fully. When we encounter Blalock’s images in spaces normally reserved for advertising, they actively play on our inclination to desire – beauty, status, satisfaction – asking us to reconsider material longing or to replace it with something less assured. Here, they read less as a future we want and more as glitches of memory, of aspiration disintegrating before our eyes – the work of making an image and of asking a question.
As a medium that can shapeshift to fit its environment, photography is often defined by its context. It might be understood as reproduction, documentation, advertising, or art; or it may be understood as reproduction, documentation, advertising, and art. It is the peripatetic, sometimes crazy-making, impossibly glorious quality of photographs to be able to move among these forms and functions. Looking and seeing (or failing to see), choosing where to focus and which bits of information to process, accept, or disregard – these are all political acts, even (especially) when we do them unconsciously. Encountering images that tell us something about the world or offer us a way into a new form of empathy or understanding is deeply important. But seeing in a way that makes us think about how we make meaning, how we understand the world – this is critical for keeping us alert and alive to the possibility of change.
