Tim Hetherington, Kelso, 2007 - 2008, © Tim Hetherington / Magnum Photos

While waiting for a bus on Lansdowne Avenue, a gritty strip in Toronto’s west end, I was struck by an image on a billboard (no small feat considering how often my nose is in the position of downward-facing iPhone). The photo was of a shirtless young man, his body curled up in what appeared to be a deep sleep.

There were no logos or messages attached to the image, although the warm light and raw wood-panelling on the wall behind him reminded me of vintage Calvin Klein ads. Whatever this photo was selling, there was something provocative, almost sensuous, about the relationship between the photographer and their slumbering subject.

It wasn’t until I was home that I connected the billboard to the work of Tim Hetherington, the British-American photojournalist who was killed in 2011 while covering the Libyan civil war. As part of the Contact Photography Festival, several of Hetherington’s Sleeping Soldiers photos appear on Toronto billboards, as well as ones in Vancouver, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Montreal and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where they can be seen until June 3.

The Sleeping Soldier series was originally presented as a multi-channel video installation, which juxtaposed the photos with video footage of their day-to-day combat work (a single-screen version of the video is available here). But by detaching the photos from the original installation, we’re left with only the soldiers’ vulnerability staring down at us.

Hetherington was one of those rare talents who had a successful artistic practice that co-existed with his journalism (a foundation has been set up in his name to assist struggling students and artists). After spending a year embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan, he turned his experience into several gallery exhibitions (including Sleeping Soldiers), co-wrote a book (Infidel) and directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Restrepo with U.S. journalist Sebastian Junger.

“The book and film are about the intimacy of war, and that’s what I see when I see the photographs of these guys sleeping,” he told the Independent in 2010. “We are used to seeing soldiers as cardboard cutouts. We dehumanize them, but war is a very intimate act. All of those soldiers would die for each other. We’re not talking about friendship. We’re talking about brotherhood.”

From “Studies in Sea Ice” (2009) by Roberta Holden. Image courtesy the artist.

Vast, impressionistic, and haunting in its sparseness, Roberta Holden’s landscape photography calls to mind the dark, faraway corners of memory and dreams. Taken from days in the Arctic, over the frozen oceans near Greenland, and during the long nights in Morocco, Holden’s work evokes nostalgia for landscapes untouched by human development—a phenomenon many of us have never experienced. Despite the fact that her work focuses on international subjects, her photographs feel distinctly Canadian in their quiet study of our connectedness with the natural environment and the unspoken effects of the land on us.

Holden, now 33, spent her childhood on a sailboat. her parents sailed frequently up the coast of British Columbia, often stopping in remote locations to hike and work. Taking breaks from life at sea, they would dock the boat in Vancouver’s Coal Harbour and spend seasons harvesting wild rice in rural Manitoba as part of a family business. Until she was 14, Holden worked in the rural landscapes she now documents in her work.

“I think a lot of traditional landscape art tends to romanticize the natural environment. And of course there are a lot of experiences where you can sit back and just appreciate the environment,” she says. “But when you’re actually living and working with the land, it’s just an everyday experience that takes more of the senses than just sitting back and gazing upon it. It’s not just a passive, peaceful thing to look upon, but there’s a struggle in just surviving the day-to-day hardships of the landscape.” Tensions of ancestry, colonialism, barren spaces and the vulnerability of a planet facing the effects of climate change play out in Holden’s most recent touring exhibitions, “Studies in Sea Ice” and “The Stillness of Motion: Changing Polar Landscapes.” Studies in Sea Ice is a series of archival images taken in 2009 by helicopter off the northwest coast of Greenland, a region that has undergone a significant warming trend in the past decade. The Stillness of Motion is a series of black and white images shot in Arctic Canada and Antarctica in 2007 and 2008. The series explores the intersections between humans and the landscapes they inhabit.

Both series have been part of six exhibitions in the Vancouver area during the first three months of 2011. In that time, Holden travelled for the second time to Morocco on a five-month photography trip, where she honed her skills as as photojournalist. As someone who hates having her own picture taken, she can identify with people who don’t like being photographed, an understanding which informs the way she interacts with her subjects.

“It’s taken a little longer to be able to bring a camera out in situations that didn’t create a barrier between people,” she says. “That’s what I see as a problem with a lot of photojournalism that focuses on different cultures.

There’s often a lot of that objectifying of people because you bring a camera to a situation.”

Holden brought her camera to a peaceful protest in Marrakech in late February after which the military ordered that she delete all but two images. Both of them depict a human barricade of soldiers.

Holden’s encounter in Marrakech stands in direct opposition to what she hopes to achieve in her photography—to break away from uni-directional, us-versus-them narratives and, in so doing, illuminate social justice issues, political tensions, and the grey spaces in between. “It’s more of a visceral experience,” she says of her work. “Something felt and not just seen.”

"Mike Clive, from Jamaica, Stacking Cabbage, Waterford, Ontario" (1987) by Vincenzo Pietropaolo. Image courtesy the artist.

In the fall of 1973, a young photographer arrived at the office of This Magazine with some remarkable photos of strikers outside a small Toronto factory called Artistic Woodwork. Immigrant workers, organized by the Canadian Textile and Chemical Union, were striking for their first contract. The photos were remarkable in both their intensity and intimacy. You were face-to-face with these men, solemn but determined, exercising their right to organize. You couldn’t help but share the photographer’s clear empathy for them.

This Magazine published some of his photos, launching the career of a gifted documentary photographer. For close to four decades, Vincenzo Pietropaolo has photographed the lives of the “invisible” in our society: workers, immigrants, and their communities, people living on social assistance, people with disabilities. He has also been the photographer for significant protest movements such as Ontario’s Days of Action during the Harris era. His hallmark is an engaged and respectful encounter with his subjects: he doesn’t just take their pictures, but appears to enter into a dialogue with them, often writing about them or recording their words and displaying them alongside his photographs.

Pietropaolo, born in 1951 in Italy, has had a long career as an independent, socially committed photographer ever since his first publication in This. He has exhibited around the world and won numerous awards, including the Cesar E. Chavez Black Eagle Award in 2010. His most recent publications are Harvest Pilgrims (2009), documenting the lives of migrant agricultural workers, and Invisible No More (2010), about the lives of people with developmental disabilities.

Eric Deis's large-scale photographic installation of Last Chance. Image courtesy the artist.

Even after all its Olympic-related world-class-city posturing, Vancouver remains very much at odds with itself. At once a bedroom community, a wannabe metropolis, and the centre of a long-running real-estate boom, the city is like a teenager who keeps changing her clothes, says visual artist Eric Deis. “Kids grow up, they push boundaries, they try different things. I think that’s what’s happening with this city,” he says.

We’re leafing through a collection of Deis’s photographs at his studio in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, a few blocks from his home. It’s a Friday morning in May, and the first signs of summer have cast a new optimism over the city like they always do at this time of year, as if challenging more restless residents to tough it out and stay. But if the 30-year-old Deis has his way, this could be his last year in Vancouver. Like any serious artist, he wants to go where the opportunity lies. Despite years of photographic work documenting the city, plus a large-scale public installation and a well-received gallery show this year, it’s just not here.

“I’ve explored all my opportunities in Vancouver, and I’ve kind of maxed out,” Deis explains. “Vancouver’s cost of living is so high, but I don’t think the return of what you’re getting out of living in the city is on par. Sure, it has mountains, you can go skiing, you can take your yacht for a spin. But as far as cultural stuff, it kind of pales in comparison to other places.”

Deis’s complaints are common. Provincial government cuts to arts funding in the last year have left British Columbia’s arts and culture sectors reeling, and an unstable real-estate market creates increasingly prohibitive conditions for young people to live affordably in the city. Deis’s work—mostly large-format photography of architecture and urban spaces—depicts Vancouver in the midst of this transition. His focus on construction sites, homes on the cusp of demolition, and tensions surrounding gentrification and real estate development also capture the conditions that compel people like him to leave town. His images often take on the character of dioramas in their forfeiture of single-subject focus for wide-ranging narrative studies of streetscapes and inbetween spaces.

In Last Chance, Deis captures a new condominium development on Richards Street. The street sits on the boundary of Yaletown, an upscale downtown neighbourhood that has grown rapidly over the last 15 years into a forest of high-rise condo properties. A small green bungalow stands beside the banners advertising the condominiums. The house, affectionately known by locals as “the little green house,” was eventually demolished in the condo construction process. Last Chance was installed as a large-format photograph on the wall of Vancouver’s CBC building in April, where it stayed for five months. Deis’s other works, such as the luminous Hipsters and Drug Dealer, inhabit similar moods of loss and transformation. Seen together, Deis’s photographs comprise an intriguing series that deftly captures urban history in a seemingly ageless and perpetually adolescent city.

Eric Deis. Photographed by Tomas Svab.

Deis is no stranger to transition himself. Born on a military base on B.C.’s Queen Charlotte Islands, he was raised in Red Deer, Alberta, attended art school in Vancouver, completed an MFA in San Diego, and returned to Vancouver in 2004. He’s not sure where he’ll move next, but like many emerging artists his age, survival as an artist in Vancouver isn’t likely. “They haven’t built an office tower [in Vancouver] in the last 20 years, because it’s three times more profitable to build a condo tower. That changes the dynamic of the city,” he says. “Vancouver, instead of becoming an economic or business hub, becomes a sleepy suburb.” Downtown’s suburban turn is rooted in condo marketing to baby boomers in search of a second mortgage, Deis says, not a first home.

Deis’s sharp eye and idiosyncratic photography—at once self-aware and critical of its surroundings—presents a brilliant reflection of a changing city at the end of a decade. Too bad he’s so eager to leave.

One of the most notorious images from Saturday was a Twitpic of a burning police cruiser, snapped by Alex Posadzki, which as of this morning had been viewed more than 18,000 times. As many commentators pointed out, the G20 saw four police cruisers burnt, compared to the 16 destroyed in Montreal by celebratory rioters after the Montreal Canadiens won a hockey game in April. But this has still become an indelible image, and footage of burning police cars quickly became a recurring motif of the television coverage over the weekend.

The sense of creeping anxiety didn’t start for most of us until Friday afternoon when Jeff Robson tweeted this photo of riot police crammed dozens deep in an alleyway as peaceful protesters went past on College Street. In hindsight, it was a harbinger of things to come:

The strange juxtapositions came hard and fast this weekend; while protests and a record 900 police arrests continued outside, reporters from the foreign press were a the international media centre at the CNE, where the Toronto Star‘s Richard Lautens found them watching the Germany-England match at the World Cup. For big-media skeptics (like us!) this photo says a lot about the failings of the mainstream media covering the G20.

And lastly, from the Department of Grimly Hilarious Symbolism came this Torontoist photo of the “eternal flame” at Metro Hall—a symbol of the “hopes, aspirations and triumphal achievements burning within the human spirit,” says its commemorative plaque—extinguished and encased in a plywood cover. It’s been lit since May 1996, but the G20 was enough to snuff it out:

Portrait of Jennifer Podemski, one in a series in Nadya Kwandibens "Concrete Indians" project. Image courtesy the artist.

Nadya Kwandibens

Nadya Kwandibens stepped off a Greyhound bus from Phoenix, Arizona, in Kenora, Ontario, in November 2006 with only her camera and her computer. During the two-and-a-half-day trip, her suitcase, containing all her belongings, had been misplaced at a transfer point in Omaha. She lost her clothing, her native powwow jingle dress, and sacred ceremonial items, like her smudge bowl and an eagle feather her aunt gave her.

“I was broke, tired, hungry, happy, angry, frustrated, and nearly crying,” she says. “I was standing there by the bus wearing only the clothes on my back.” Luckily, her camera and her computer were all she needed to propel her from that Kenora bus stop to a burgeoning career as an acclaimed photographer and a leading light among emerging First Nations artists.

Kwandibens, 30, is of Ojibwe and French heritage. She had moved to Arizona in 2005 to pursue a relationship with Native American photographer David Bernie, and that was when she first picked up a camera. Only one of those love affairs—with photography—survived. Feeling emotionally stuck in Arizona, she began to use the camera for healing: she took pictures during the day and taught herself new photography skills online at night.

This impulse to heal through art recalled the jingle-dress dancing Kwandibens had done as a teen growing up in foster care. Her biological family, with whom she had limited contact, had encouraged her to keep up the traditional Ojibwe dance; it was one of her only connections to her native culture while in foster homes, feeling isolated and lonely.

Feeling the same way again in Arizona, and unable to find work, she began contacting Indigenous people in the area, asking if she could take their portraits. Sharing those photos on MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr introduced a large new audience to Kwandibens’ photography, and helped build an online community of First Nations artists and supporters.

Portrait of Waawaate Fobister and TJ Henhawk, one in a series from Nadya Kwandibens' "Concrete Indians". Image courtesy the artist. Click to enlarge.

Back in Canada, Kwandibens turned her camera on this community with her Concrete Indians project, a series of portraits of the urban Indian experience. She asks her subjects, “Who are you as a Native person within the city?” The resulting photos are witty, meticulous, poignant. The second subject in the Concrete Indians series was Jennifer Podemski, a series regular on Degrassi High and Rabbit Fall. Podemski chose to wear her mukluks while texting on her BlackBerry in front of a Starbucks. It was this presentation of Native people in a modern, urban context that caught the eye of Ryan Rice, cofounder of Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, who was curating an installation called HOW: Engagements of the Hollywood Indian last year. Kwandibens was chosen as one of five featured visual artists in that show. “She captures an Indigenous spirit,” Rice wrote in the show’s catalogue, “and resuscitates characters overshadowed by the burden of false impression.”

Her recent photos have included portraits of fiddle virtuoso Sierra Noble, Juno winner Leela Gilday, sibling actors Jennifer and Sarah Podemski, and even Alex Meraz, who plays the hunky werewolf in the upcoming Twilight sequel.

“We all have something good to contribute,” Kwandibens says. “By sharing and being so giving with the Concrete Indians series, people really started to connect and find something they can relate to in the images. They are able to see these beautiful brown faces all over North America. We are all so connected.”

Steven May's "Daphne's Grandchildren"

The Hope in Shadows contest is changing perceptions of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) by giving residents an opportunity to document their stories through photographs.

This year marks the seventh annual Hope in Shadows photography contest. Every June, around 200 free disposable cameras are distributed to DTES residents. Contestants are allotted three days to take pictures, which are then submitted to, and judged by, a panel of professionals and peers. This year entrants submitted more than 4,000 black-and-white images. The winning photographs are exhibited throughout the province, and a selection of the best pictures appear in the annual Hope in Shadows calendar. On October 12, the winner of the 2010 Hope in Shadows — Portraits of the Downtown Eastside was announced to be Steven May for his photograph “Daphne’s Grandchildren.”

While the media tends to portray the DTES as a hotbed of criminality, drugs and prostitution, the Hope and Shadows contest cultivates a different image. The DTES, as portrayed by its own residents, is home to a vibrant and caring community filled with families, children, and individuals who have hopes, stories and dreams – and face struggles and hardship – just like all human beings.

By giving residents an opportunity to tell their stories, the Hope and Shadows project has generated a greater understanding of the DTES and empowered its residents.

Furthermore, by allowing homeless and low-income street vendors to sell the calendars, and keep $10 out of every $20 calendar sold, Hope and Shadows also provides a viable employment opportunity to those who need it most. Last year street vendors generated over $130,000 in personal earnings in this manner. As the Hope in Shadows Director Paul Ryan puts it, “While the photos, and stories that describe them, are positive portrayals of the people who live in the community, the project also creates accessible employment opportunities for local residents.”

16,000 calendars have been ordered for this year. To order online visit the Hope in Shadows website.

Here’s a Flickr slideshow of the images in the 2010 Hope in Shadows exhibition:

To my eye it’s a bittersweet collection of images: AC-AF, which provided these photos for us to post here, says these photos document the “courage and hope” of the next generation, and you can certainly see some optimism in these images. But the photo that won the contest portion of the program, by a 14-year-old named Warren in Ubungo, Tanzania, strikes me as awfully melancholy — a single student in an otherwise deserted classroom:

Click to see larger version.

There’s an ambivalence to this image—all those empty chairs—that just strikes me as sad. But the point of this isn’t to psychoanalyze every image to death, it’s to get a perspective we don’t often see: life as it’s lived by young people coping with the effects of an epidemic. Click through the jump to see some other images from the series, along with the statements from the kids that accompany their photos.

Click the thumbnails for full-size versions of the photos. Warren’s photo didn’t include a statement, but the other three do. In order, the photos were taken by Zainabu, Yasinta, Thobias, and Warren (last names were scrubbed because all the photographers are under 18)

From the statements that AC-AF took from the kids:

PHOTO 1
Name: Zainabu
Age: 13
What do your pictures show about HIV/AIDS in the future? If AIDS will increase, children will lose their parents and guardians and that will be the beginning of street children and orphans as well. The youth will leave and the country will be empty with only old men who are not capable of working. Animals will miss people to serve them food and water. Plants will wither away because they will lack water, manure and to be well taken care of. Manpower of the nation will disappear. SO IT’S THE DUTY OF EVERY CITIZEN TO PROTECT THE NATION AGAINST AIDS.

PHOTO 2
Name: Yasinta
Age: 16
What do your pictures show about HIV/AIDS in the future? Not discriminating the infected, they show that in the future there will be unity. People will not discriminate the people infected from HIV and AIDS. They will love them. They will know they can not transmit a disease by shaking hands, not even by hugging. And when parents give birth they will be educated for those who breastfeed their children to up to three months and when they are given medications for preventing the child from getting transmitted, the parent must tell the truth about her health so that when she is giving birth she should not share the tools when cutting the naval and they should all go for testing and the man should not refuse.

PHOTO 3
Name: Thobias
Age: 12
What do your pictures show about HIV/AIDS in the future? The picture shows that HIV and AIDS will increase in a high speed like water from the tap.