Martha Langford – författare

The agency of photographs is a recurrent concern within the context of the city. Whether found in architectural records, social documentary, photojournalism, or artistic practice, photographic objects are embedded in urban contestation, aesthetically charged by artists, reinserted into social histories, and mobilized to imagine a future city. Photogenic Montreal takes a question initially posed by heritage debates – what does photography preserve? – and creates a rich conversation about the agency of the human actors before and behind the camera, and of the medium itself.The interplay of archives and activisms structures the book. Photographs that appear to be sealed off in newspapers, storage rooms, or archives accrue new meaning when they cross the threshold back into social spaces and circulate anew. It is through the reactivation of archival photographs that submerged traces of urban experience are discovered, and alternate histories of Montreal can be recounted. Multiple forms of activism and artistic expression complement this archival work. Beginning in the 1960s, community-minded and heritage groups responded to the tensions arising from urban reconstruction, gentrification, and the erasure of neighbourhoods; this activism also left its photographic traces.Attentive to the still-changing face of the city's architecture, neighbourhoods, and street life, Photogenic Montreal participates in debates about who the city belongs to, who speaks on its behalf, and how to picture its past and present.

From early reports of the invention to its wide application during World War I, the idea of photography created anticipation and participation in the modern world. The first volume of A History of Photography in Canada captures this phenomenon by looking at hundreds of photographs generated in and about Canada-in-the-making and by listening to the chords they struck in the collective imagination.Emphasizing technological readiness and cultural eagerness for the medium, Martha Langford shows how photography served ideals of progress and improvement as Canada’s settler society looked to master the world by seizing its visible traces. The imposition of these programs on Indigenous Peoples and indentured labourers is confronted throughout this volume, which offers both narratives and counternarratives of subjectification. Reproducing images of people, places, events, and objects from the unceded territories of the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, from British North America, and from the Dominion of Canada and the Dominion of Newfoundland, Langford asks where and when photographs were taken, why, and by whom. How did the making and preservation of a photograph alter the circumstances in which it was produced, and how did this affect individual and collective consciousness? Alongside accomplished portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and their vernacular counterparts, the book draws glimmers of photographic experience from treatises and doggerel, official reports and personal diaries, newspapers, magazines, letters, and travelogues.Anticipation to Participation chronicles eight decades of reinvention and repurposing, from a wondrous discovery to the wide adoption of a basic tool for knowledge gathering, artmaking, and journaling. Langford’s sweeping narrative rewrites the history of photography from the bottom up, vividly expanding the definition of photographic experience.

By the early twentieth century photography had emerged as a ubiquitous medium with deep cultural, social, and political force. A Medium Unleashed shows how photography moved beyond recording events to actively shaping them, transforming how Canadians imagined themselves and their country.Drawing on the work of photographers in Canada and Newfoundland, foreign correspondents, and Canadian-born artists active abroad, Martha Langford relates a lively and richly researched history of the medium. The First World War had greatly expanded the reach of photography – already in use for four generations – introducing photojournalism as well as aerial, industrial, and reconnaissance photography. Professional practice grew alongside widespread amateur enthusiasm, supported by clubs, communal darkrooms, classes, contests, and salons. During the Second World War photography became more organized and specialized as information units laid the groundwork for the postwar commercial studio. The medium also moved into public and commercial life, from medical and advertising uses to more provocative explorations of the human body. But socialization begins at home, where participation is varied: not just taking or making but staging, posing, and talking about pictures. Across twenty-five chapters devoted to distinct photographic practices, the second volume of this comprehensive history puts people, places, events, and objects in the frame: at home or on the move, on the ice or in the ring, from farm to factory to laboratory, shipyard to outport to far North, from the Winnipeg riots to Expo 67. By 1969 photography had secured creative recognition, mass appeal, practical utility, and persuasive authority, embraced by both establishment institutions and countercultural movements.This is the history of a transnational medium seen through a national lens. Langford moves fluidly between incisive readings of individual photographs and the broader transformation of the Canadian imaginary, vividly expanding the definition of photographic experience.

Finalist: Raymond Klibansky Book Prize Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada (2008) Making a connection between photography and memory is almost automatic. Should it be? In Scissors, Paper, Stone Martha Langford explores the nature of memory and art. She challenges the conventional emphasis on the camera as a tool of perception by arguing that photographic works are products of the mind - picturing memory is, first and foremost, the expression of a mental process. Langford organizes the book around the conceit of the child's game scissors, paper, stone, using it to ground her discussion of the tensions between remembering and forgetting, the intersection of memory and imagination, and the relationship between memory and history. Scissors, Paper, Stone explores the great variety of photographic art produced by Canadian artists as expressions of memory. Their work, including images by Carl Beam, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Donigan Cumming, Stan Denniston, Robert Houle, Robert Minden, Michael Snow, Diana Thorneycroft, Jeff Wall, and Jin-me Yoon, is presented as part of a rich interdisciplinary study of contemporary photography and how it has shaped modern memory.

Somewhere between global and local, the nation still lingers as a concept. National art histories continue to be written – some for the first time – while innovative methods and practices redraw the boundaries of these imagined communities. Narratives Unfolding considers the mobility of ideas, transnationalism, and entangled histories in essays that define new ways to see national art in ever-changing nations. Examining works that were designed to reclaim or rethink issues of territory and dispossession, home and exile, contributors to this volume demonstrate that the writing of national art histories is a vital project for intergenerational exchange of knowledge and its visual formations. Essays showcase revealing moments of modern and contemporary art history in Canada, Egypt, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Romania, Scotland, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, paying particular attention to the agency of institutions such as archives, art galleries, milestone exhibitions, and artist retreats. Old and emergent art cities, including Cairo, Dubai, New York, and Vancouver, are also examined in light of avant-gardism, cosmopolitanism, and migration. Narratives Unfolding is both a survey of current art historical approaches and their connection to the source: art-making and art experience happening somewhere.

Somewhere between global and local, the nation still lingers as a concept. National art histories continue to be written – some for the first time – while innovative methods and practices redraw the boundaries of these imagined communities. Narratives Unfolding considers the mobility of ideas, transnationalism, and entangled histories in essays that define new ways to see national art in ever-changing nations. Examining works that were designed to reclaim or rethink issues of territory and dispossession, home and exile, contributors to this volume demonstrate that the writing of national art histories is a vital project for intergenerational exchange of knowledge and its visual formations. Essays showcase revealing moments of modern and contemporary art history in Canada, Egypt, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Romania, Scotland, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, paying particular attention to the agency of institutions such as archives, art galleries, milestone exhibitions, and artist retreats. Old and emergent art cities, including Cairo, Dubai, New York, and Vancouver, are also examined in light of avant-gardism, cosmopolitanism, and migration. Narratives Unfolding is both a survey of current art historical approaches and their connection to the source: art-making and art experience happening somewhere.

Collection Thinking is a volume of essays that thinks across and beyond critical frameworks from library, archival, and museum studies to understand the meaning of "collection" as an entity and as an act. It offers new models for understanding how collections have been imagined and defined, assembled, created, and used as cultural phenomena.Featuring over 70 illustrations and 21 original chapters that explore cases from a wide range of fields, including library and archival studies, literary studies, art history, media studies, sound studies, folklore studies, game studies, and education, Collection Thinking builds on the important scholarly works produced on the topic of the archive over the past two decades and contributes to ongoing debates on the historical status of memory institutions. The volume illustrates how the concept of "collection" bridges these institutional and structural categories, and generates discussions of cultural activities involving artifactual arrangement, preservation, curation, and circulation in both the private and the public spheres. Edited and introduced collaboratively by three senior scholars with expertise in the fields of literature, art history, archives, and museums, Collection Thinking is designed to stimulate interdisciplinary reflection and conversation.This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners interested in how we organize materials for research across disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. With case studies that range from collecting Barbie dolls to medieval embroideries, and with contributions from practitioners on record collecting, the creation of sub-culture archives, and collection as artistic practice, this volume will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered about why and how collections are made.