[PHOTO] Two links on Toronto's Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival

[rfmcdonald]

James Adams at The Globe and Mail lists different prominent photographers' thoughts on the top exhibits in this year's Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival. An example:

Paul Roth, director, Ryerson Image Centre (RIC), Gordon Parks: Collected Works (2012)

1.) Looking: Then and Now by Barbara Astman, Corkin Gallery. Work by a pioneering postmodernist, one of the brilliant cohort of experimental photographers who emerged from the Rochester, N.Y., scene during the sixties, seventies and eighties. I’m excited to see the spectrum of this innovative career in Corkin’s big, beautiful space.

2.) Over a Distance Between One and Many (at Koffler Gallery) and Further Clarities and Convolutions (billboards on Lansdowne Avenue at Dundas West and College Street), Raymond Boisjoly. The RIC is including an earlier Boisjoly in an upcoming exhibition called The Edge of the Earth: Climate Change in Photography and Video, so I’m curious to see some more recent work. Restlessly experimental with materials and techniques, Boisjoly is one of the most interesting artists working with the medium today.

Meanwhile, at Spacing Toronto Ilana Altman and Melanie Fasche interview Bonnie Rubenstein, long-time director at the festival, about its history and development.

Ilana Altman: The Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival is embarking on a major milestone – its twentieth anniversary — how did the festival begin and how has the festival evolved over the last twenty years?

Bonnie Rubenstein: CONTACT was founded in 1996 by four gallerists – Stephen Bulger, Linda Book, Judith Tatar and Darren Alexander. At the time, there were large photo events occurring internationally – Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal, Houston FotoFest, Les Rencontres d’Arles, but few galleries were showing photography in Toronto. They decided to found a festival here as a means to celebrate the medium, educate the public and create an economy for artists. The idea, from the beginning, was that it would be democratic, that anyone could participate. They anticipated having a couple dozen partners presenting exhibitions and events related to photography, and to their surprise there was enormous interest from the beginning. In the first year of the festival, 1997, there were over 50 participating venues.

I started at CONTACT in 2002, three months before the festival was due to open for the year, so it was a tough initiation. Five years into the festival the budget was very limited and there were only two of us working full-time; yet participation had increased dramatically—over 130 venues–so logistically it was quite challenging.

Twenty years on we still maintain the democratic aspect of the festival through our open call to participate, and we will always encourage open exhibitions. It is really important to us to engage the whole community – students, emerging artists, all kinds of people active with the medium and its many different forms, as well as established artists and galleries. In 2004 we added the category of featured exhibitions, which are submissions selected by a jury, based on the quality of the artist’s work, the presentation, and the curatorial concept. In 2006 we co-presented our first major international exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and since then have continued to develop primary exhibitions at major museums and not-for-profit spaces. This year there are twenty throughout the GTA.

I will be doing a lot of touring this year.