Hot off the presses, Visual Arts Department director Penny Cousineau-Levine’s newest tome on Canadian art photography is a work that at least one author says will be talked about and referred to for a long time.
“This eagerly awaited book is the culmination of Penny Cousineau-Levine’s many significant contributions to our understanding of Canadian photography,” says Martha Langford, author of Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums.
Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination, released in May by McGill Queen’s University Press, is the first book-length, in-depth study of contemporary Canadian art photography.
Cousineau-Levine took 20 years to complete the book, which discusses the works of more than 120 artists, contrasts them with American and European traditions, and shows that Canadian photographers are often preoccupied with a duality that also occurs in Canadian literature, film and political life.
“I conceived of the book when I began to teach the history of photography and realized students didn’t have any sense of what characterizes Canadian photography,” says the author.
Her book title stems from the title of a work by photographer Jeff Wall, a triptych which sets up a death scene.
“Quite a few Canadian photographers work with the subject of death and faking death. There are a lot of indications in Canadian photography that the culture is going through a rite of passage as it matures. The photographs are like X-rays of the culture.”
