- Stan Douglas, Guilty (1950)
- Stan Douglas, Guilty (1950)
- Stan Douglas, Guilty (1950)
- Stan Douglas, Guilty (1950)
Edition
Stan Douglas, Guilty (1950)
2010
Artist: Stan Douglas
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Byron Peters, Detail from B-Roll Video Poem (1987-2024, Ep. 1), 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
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Guilty, 1950 (2010)
Special fundraising edition for the Or Gallery, previously unreleased from the artist’s Midcentury Studio series.
Stan Douglas produced his “Midcentury Studio” series of photographs in 2010, meticulously staging a series of photographs under the conceptual premise that they were the work of an anonymous Vancouver photographer practicing between 1945 and 1951. Work in the series includes studio shots of fashion and hair models, promotional shots for entertainers, candid street scenes and film noir-like snapshots of possible crime figures caught in the glare of a blinding flash bulb, destined for the newspaper pages. Guilty, 1950 is of this latter category. Reminiscent of the crime photography of Weegee (Arthur Fellig) or Vancouver’s Ray Munro, the work depicts a well-coiffed man walking up a narrow stairwell, covering his face with his open palm against the ambushing photographer.
“Midcentury Studio”, 2010-2011
After World War II, former soldiers turned to photography, hoping to earn a living as photojournalists. A striking example of such a career was Raymond Munro. According to Douglas, Munro was “a veteran of the Royal Canadian Air Force who, in 1949, arrived in Vancouver slightly drunk and with a broken collarbone to apply for the position of aerial photographer with a local newspaper. Munro had no photographic training, but he was pretty sure he could fly a plane with one hand, and he got the job.” In the archives of the photo agency Black Star at Ryerson University, Douglas looked through numerous images from the years 1945 to 1950. These were taken by autodidactic photographers using 4 x 5 field cameras with flashes that were slow to load and cumbersome to reset. The motifs were street and crime scenes, accidents, animals, moonshine bars, and famous people – anything with which a photographer could earn money. For his 29-piece black-and-white series “Midcentury Studio”, Douglas slipped into the role of such a postwar photographer, who photographed for practical purposes and shot “technically bad pictures that now and then could be interesting images”. In Douglas’s “Camouflage, 1945” (2011), “the lighting intended to make the subject more visible [but] makes him more invisible; in “Athlete, 1946” (2011), “the portrait of the athlete [was] shot at the wrong moment with peripheral action distracting from the “subject.”
Although Douglas meticulously researches historical events and stages them in a complex manner, these photographs remain free of any claim to historical truth or interpretation. They reveal themselves as conjectures and fragments, as spoken narratives told in the conditional tense. Here, Douglas makes use of a literary technique: After researching historical facts, the author creates a fictional protagonist who narrates from the authorial perspective, telling about how things might have been. A novel constructed in such a way also gives the impression that knowledge is piecemeal and reality unstable.
– Art Daily, Exhibition of photographs produced since 2008 by Stan Douglas on view at Haus der Kunst
Biographies
Stan Douglas
Stan Douglas was born in Vancouver in 1960. He reenacts historical moments of tension that connect local histories to broader social movements of struggle and utopian aspiration. In the artist’s intricate works, time and place fold back onto themselves to create a parallax of both vision and narrative: multiple moments in history and geography are experienced by the viewer simultaneously and reconciled into a new story.
The artist’s hometown of Vancouver often serves as inspiration for research into transitional periods—the raucous early twentieth century, the noirish aftermath of World War II, the revolutionary and libertine 1970s—while Douglas’s investigations take him around the globe to explore moments of crisis and change in Cuba, Detroit, Berlin, Paris, New York, Lisbon, and Angola, among others. Working at the forefront of new media technologies, Douglas’s works have taken the form of mobile apps, virtual reality simulations, live cinema, theatrical productions, and multi-channel video installations where the narrative alters continuously through recombinant editing software. Douglas also produces photographs with the period detail and staging of a feature film director, freezing both reenactments and imagined scenes from the past in sumptuous color and rich black and white.
Stan Douglas attended Emily Carr College of Art + Design (BFA, 1982). Douglas’s awards and residencies include the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2016), Scotiabank Photography Award (2015), ICP Infinity Award (2012), Honorary Doctoral Degree from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2009), Documenta Arnold Bode Prize (2001), Gershon Iskowitz Prize (1999), and a DAAD Scholarship (1994-95). Douglas has had major exhibitions at Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels (2015); Brooklyn Academy of Music (2015); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2014); Minneapolis Institute of Arts (2012); The Power Plant, Toronto (2011); Documenta (2002, 1997, 1992); and the Venice Biennale (2005, 1999, 1990), among others. Stan Douglas was selected to exhibit in the Canada Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, an exhibition curated by former Or Gallery Director, Reid Shier.