[URBAN NOTE] Photos at Osgoode
May. 25th, 2005 08:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldTwo of the Toronto Photography Festival's public installations can be found right now at the Osgoode TTC station on the corner of University and Queen. I see them every morning as I head to work, and every evening as I return.
On the west side of the station wall are mounted the fourteen photos in the Russian avantAES+F Group's Suspects: Seven Sinners and Seven Righteous, a series of portraits of seven average teenage girls attending Moscow-area high schools and seven teenage murderers held in Moscow-area reformatories. The fourteen girls all look likle typical teenage girls, wearing lipstick or not, wearing Chicago Bulls sweatshirts or not, smiling or not. None of the girls' identies--student or killer?--are revealed. That's left for the viewers to guess.
On the east side of the station wall are mounted the fifteen portraits of James Mollison's James and Other Apes. These photos are entirely conventional portrait photos but for the fact that the subjects are non-human primates: gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, chimpanzees. These faces clearly aren't the faces of human beings, but they're close enough, and the way that the subjects look back at the viewer through the medium of the photography strongly suggests that some qualities of mind bind our species together. Would that we recognized that before we pushed them to the edge of extinction.
On the west side of the station wall are mounted the fourteen photos in the Russian avantAES+F Group's Suspects: Seven Sinners and Seven Righteous, a series of portraits of seven average teenage girls attending Moscow-area high schools and seven teenage murderers held in Moscow-area reformatories. The fourteen girls all look likle typical teenage girls, wearing lipstick or not, wearing Chicago Bulls sweatshirts or not, smiling or not. None of the girls' identies--student or killer?--are revealed. That's left for the viewers to guess.
On the east side of the station wall are mounted the fifteen portraits of James Mollison's James and Other Apes. These photos are entirely conventional portrait photos but for the fact that the subjects are non-human primates: gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, chimpanzees. These faces clearly aren't the faces of human beings, but they're close enough, and the way that the subjects look back at the viewer through the medium of the photography strongly suggests that some qualities of mind bind our species together. Would that we recognized that before we pushed them to the edge of extinction.
