Faking death

Penny Cousineau-Levine offers a reading of Canadian art photography from 1952 onward, treating it as one connected body of work and proposing a bold lens for understanding it. Setting Canadian practice beside its American and European counterparts, she finds a recurring fixation on a place that is 'elsewhere,' along with a sense of doubleness that also surfaces in Canadian writing, cinema and politics.

The author examines the uneasy fascination that Canadian photographers show toward death, dying, bondage and confinement. Her central claim is that the staged or feigned deaths in many of these images give form to a shared national longing for a symbolic move into maturity.

The study covers the work of more than 120 artists and includes 16 colour plates and 150 duotone reproductions. Among the photographers discussed are Raymonde April, Genevieve Cadieux, Lynne Cohen, Donigan Cumming, Evergon, Janieta Eyre, Charles Gagnon, Thaddeus Holownia, Geoffrey James, Michel Lambeth, Ken Lum, Shelley Niro, Gabor Szilasi, Diana Thorneycroft, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace and Jin-me Yoon. The book is aimed at curators, artists, teachers, students and scholars.