Co-curated by Gabrielle Moser and Lorna Brown, the exhibition features photographic works from the Belkin’s permanent collection, the private collection of AHVA professor John O’Brian and the research archive of Marcia Crosby. Focusing on practices of photography as simultaneously art and document, the exhibition is ordered around several themes: propositions for the use of public space, whether through buildings, artworks or social activities; the surveillance of the public and performances for the camera; and the way that photographic records create potential histories for Vancouver.

The photograph – as an encounter between the photographer and the photographed – offers a way to re-read the past as unfinished, in flux and not yet normative, and to imagine a future that might produce a different set of relations between social subjects.

– Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery