Peter MacCallum
"Material World" published by yyz books & museum london

Reviews

Peter MacCallum "Material World" published by yyz books & museum london
Photographs
Interiors 1986 - 2004
Concrete Industries 1998 - 2004

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Canadian Architect
The National Review of Design aid Practice/
The Journal of Record of the RAIC
Peter MacCallum: Material World
Edited by Rebecca Diederichs. Toronto: YYZ
Books and Museum London, 2004. 160 pages,
$39.95. Review by Andrea Picard.

The idea might not sit so comfortably with Toronto photographer Peter MacCallum, but a recent monograph of his work makes espe-cially clear the photographer’s gifted artistry. Though ostensibly a documentary photogra-pher. MacCallum’s works are rich with narra-tive suggestion, historical play and the stylistic sophistication of an art-informed practitioner. Peter MacCallum: Material World catalogues two series: “Interiors:’ from 1996 to 2004 and “Concrete Industries:’ from 1998 to 2004, project titles suggestive of the artist’s significant engagement with vernacular archi-tecture. Indeed, when viewing the “Interiors” photographs of cluttered and claustrophobic Toronto commercial and factory spaces, one senses a manifest taxonomic impulse, guided by certain formal conditions inherent in those chosen places. His taxonomy is one of classi-fied industries like hardware stores and tex-tile outlets, but also of grids (aisles, shelves, beams, bricks, lockers, windows, drawers, gird-ers, layers, pipes, and strata)—this modern badge of abstraction, which MacCallum ably shows us. very much exists in the material world. His photography achieves a consum-mate intersection between art and social real-ism, where observation finds voice through carefully composed and printed photographs born out of empirical appreciation. Mac-Callum, Rebecca Diederichs tells us in her editor’s note, continues to develop, process and print all of his work, finding gratification in the methodical nature of his medium, not unlike the laborious routines of industry. This medium-sized book does justice to his de-tailed depictions, with luminous plates con-veying the gradations and tonalities of black and white and his remarkable depth of field, which in turn, allow us to see the ceaseless continuation of these material patterns.

Mining the aesthetics of industry. Mac-Callum employs an economy and literalness dictated, he says, by the material itself: his sub-ject matter, shifting states of geology threaten-ing to be transformed by time and the ele-ments, Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the “Concrete Industries” photos, with large, im-posing machinery and preserved ruins appear idyllically pastoral with dappling natural light, and the “Interiors” are darker in mood despite being more contained and controlled. Here we find anachronous photos of factory workers— some captured in frontal, stoic poses, others classically lit—while performing their arduous tasks. Where the “Concrete Industries” photos lead us into the detached beauty of Becher territory, “Interiors” evokes Walker Evans. It is difficult to make out the commentary or even to decide if the artist is providing one, rather than simply observing the environmental con-ditions of concrete and tanning industries. It is this unique ambiguity, which makes Peter Mac-Callum’s work so intriguing, but not one of the accompanying texts in the book allows for this potential slippage, arguing instead for his linear, “concrete” approach. They do, nevertheless, provide some well-written, thoughtful, and ap-plicable contexts within which MacCallum’s work can and should be considered.April 2005

AZURE

MATERIAL WORLD
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER MAcCALLUM

Peter MacCallum is very much of this concrete world.
1 hat is a great plea-sure, considering that so many contemporary photographers give us images that are too often spectacular, fetishistic, and even moralistic. MacCallum’s photographs — hardware store interiors, concrete mixing drums, a worker unloading an injection moulding press — are documen-tary art. In their display of the products and detritus of our cities, they are saturated with Bruegel-esque intricacy. They demonstrate a fascination with harsh quotidian beauty and are, above all else, respectful of their subjects. This book contains photographs from two series — Interiors. 1986—2004; and Concrete Industries. 1998—2004 — as well as various texts, including an interview with the artist. Writer Terence Dick refers, in his text, to the ‘grail of authenticity.’ It is this grail, this labyrinthine mould, that MacCallum examines and presents.

YYZ BOOKS & MUSEUM LONDON ISBN 0-920397-82-4

The art of falling to pieces
VISUAL ARTS
by Gary Michael Dault

Toronto photographer Peter MacCallum began learning his trade back in 1969, when he spent a year’s apprentice-ship in a commercial photography studio. Not long after, you could be-gin spotting his name in tiny type at the bottom of many of the photo-reproductions in Canadian art magazines: He was beginning to make his living documenting the work of other artists. It was a long sojourn in alternate sensibilities — indeed he still accepts such com-missions — and it no doubt served to temper and discipline the mak-ing of his own photographic oeuvre.
.MacCallum’s photographs — modest in scale and usually square (he rarelyprints larger than 38 by 38 centimetres), and almost always in black and white — are as studiously real and pointed as his commercial work is, of necessity various. His subject is Toronto’s retail, industrial and construction history, and espe-cially~ during the last decade, the documenting of the concrete in-dustry in Ontario.

The trajectory of this now-epic photographic progress has recently been incarnated in a handsome book called Material World, co-published by YYZ Books (the pub-lishing wing of Toronto’s YYZ Art-ists’ Outlet) and Museum London, which is currently hosting an ambi-tious exhibition of the MacCallum photographs.

The book is divided into two sec-tions, with the first part, Interiors 1986-2004, offering a kind of arche-ology of the present— or, at least, of the very recent past.
Following the lead of documen-tary photographers he admires, such as Walker Evans and, to some extent, Robert Frank (as well as the almost unknown Toronto docu-mentary photographer Arthur Goss, whose achievement — fea-turing photos from 1910 to 1930— he honoured in a 1998 exhibition for the Art Gallery of Ontario), Mac-Callum has assiduously photo-graphed the teeming clutter of the textile shops on Queen West; the visual cacophony of the old hard-ware stores; and the sweaty infer-nos of such buildings as the Nation-al Rubber factory, and the Wickett and Craig Tannery. (The latter was featured in Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 novel, In the Skin of a Lion, and was finally closed by the city in 1990.)

Unlike most of MacCallun~s sub-sequent photographs, these factory photos portray not only the grim, febrile world of industrial process but quite often show the workers la-bouring in what novelist and Globe

Work Bench, John Garde Co., SpadinaAve., 1994 is one of MacCallum’s most stunning monographs.

Peter MacCallum’s factory photographs reveal the grim, febrile world of industrial process and Mail columnist Russell Smith calls, in one of several essays in-cluded in the book, these “Dicken-sian environments.” Smith com-ments on the Karchaic.quality to the factories to which MacCallum had been drawn,” noting that “leather, rubber, cement — these are dumbly industrial products we continue to depend on, even in the cybernetic age; they are resistant to digitaliza-tion,”

And so is MacCallum himself~ who is among the most deliberate and exacting of photographers, carefully making “straight photo-graphs” (that is, without employing digital correctives or enhance-ments of any kind) from big nega-tives, which he (naturally) prints himself. This exquisite care and ele-gant sense of quiet deliberation is everywhere in evidence, but espe-ciallyso in the photographs making up the second part of the book: the Concrete Industries photos (1998-2004).

Beginning, as he explains to pho-tographer Blake Fitzpatrick in an interview in the book, with sites in Toronto “that were related to con-crete production or use, or recy-cling” and then branching out “to photographliznestone quarries and cement-powder manufacturing plants,” MacCallum eventualiy moved beyond the city to docu-ment the province!s cement plants and quarries, many of which had fallen into disuse and, thus, disre-pair — and which were, photo-graphically speaking, little more than ruins.
It is in the documenting of these outcroppings of dead industry in particular, that MacCallum’s photo-graphs are positioned where histor-ical research, social history and the pleasures of pure visuality inter-sect.

Absorbed by the interrelation-ship between the industrial and the social landscape, MacCallum is nevertheless as interested in what makes a photograph aesthetically good as he is in what makes it his-torically or culturally important. Crisp, lean, subtly composed and aglow from within, as if the pearl-escent cement dust that floats through the photographs were made up of particles of airborne light, MacCallum’s Concrete Indus-tries photographs are effulgent with radiance —albeit in the serv-ice of documentary truth.

“I’m not a historian,” he tells Fitz-patrick. “I’man artist.” A good pho-tograph, he insists, “has to stand for what can’t be shown, because you can’t show everything unless you want to show it in a non-artistic way” And I can’t imagine Peter MacCallum, even at his most archi-vally alert, doing that.

Peter MacCallum’s Material World shows at Museum London to Feb. 27. 421 Ridout Street N., London, Ont., 519-661-0333.

CONCRETE EVIDENCE - CONCRETE INDUSTRIES
Peter MacCallum
Museum London
Toronto Feb. 27,2005

Peter MacCallum is standing in the Ivey South Gallery at Museum Lon-don stamping his feet. It’s not a temper tantrum — the soft-spoken Toron-to photographer is definitely not the type. MacCallum is proving the im-portance of concrete. “It’s the founda-tion of society!” he says, his own exu-berance almost surprising himself. “I mean literally! We’re standing on it!”

We’re here to talk about Concrete Industries, MacCallum’s exhibit of his trademark pristine black and white photographs, all of them relat-ed to the very active and, until now, very undocumented concrete industry in Ontario.
Concrete and MacCallum weren’t al-ways this close. He first became inter-ested in the subject through a series of photographs he did of sites in Toronto related to concrete production — the Gardiner Expressway, London Ma-chinery~ interiors of buildings on Queen Street West. From there, he started photographing limestone quarries and cement powder manu-facturing plants. Shots of condomini-um construction followed and with them, interest in the supply of raw materials. That led him to quarries, which led to an interest in the history of the plants, which led him to, well, the middle of nowhere. With camera and tripod in tow, he was hunting for the first cement plants in the province — sites that, to the untrained eye, look like piles of abandoned brick.

“Many of them are on the Bruce Trail,” he says, pointing to stunning images of sites in Limehouse (near Acton), Maribank (near Napanee) and Point Anne (near Belleville).
“These are forgotten places. They’re some of the earliest cement plants in Canada,” he says, launching into a detailed explanation of the cement-making process of the 1890s, the in-vention of the rotary kiln and the im-portance of the shift from the wet to dry process.

Not only does MacCallum don masks and white work suits, climb into still-hot kilns, cross corn fields, scale quarries and enter spray booths for the perfect shot, he also can’t help but become an expert on his subjects. His encyclopedic knowledge means his images are not only things of great beauty, but are also extremely learned social, histor-ical and environmental studies.

Still, a good photograph will always take precedent over the historical value of a shot. “I still stop at pho-tographing things that won’t make good photographs,” he says in an in-terview with Blake Fitzpatrick in Material World, the book published by YYZ Books and Museum London to coincide with the exhibit.

For Museum London curator Melanie Townsend, MacCallum’s mul-tiple roles put him between both the traditional and contemporary ap-proaches to industrial photography. While the former tends to glorify in-dustry and the latter prefers to vilify it, MacCallum’s photographs do both. She writes, “[He] successfully situates himself in the middle by juxtaposing a sequence of oppositions: interiors and exteriors, inhabited and abandoned, monumental and ruinous, landscapes shaped by manufacturing and the re-mains of manufacturing reclaimed by the land. The result is a record of an industry in flux, poignant re-minders of the complex transactions required to grow and sustain cities.”
For the artist, the result is also all about impulse. “I always try to show something ubiquitous that is not normally recognized as being important.” He pauses. “I think I’ll be photographing industry forev-er.” Julia Dault

Peter MacCallum: Material World is published by YYZ Books and Museum London and contains photographs not included in the show. Museum London is located at 421 Rideout St. N., London. 519-661-0333 www.museumlondon.ca

PREFIX PHOTO
Number 11, May 2005
www.prefix.ca
PETER MACCALLUM: MATERIAL WORLD
Edited by Rebecca Diederichs

This volume of Peter MacCallum’s black-and-white photographs offers a sample of his work from two series: Interiors (1986-2004) and Concrete Industries (1998-2004). The Toronto-based photographer documents industry, workplaces and workers in images that inform us of the materials and physical effort that underpin our contemporary lives. Though the images are contemporary, they resonate of another time and generate something like longing for an engagement with the actual and tangible instead of the virtual and disembodied, however messy, smelly and potentially toxic. With his timeless approach, the photographer reminds us that modernity is as much a conceit as a fact with an artistry so disciplined that it serves only to illuminate the subjects and not itself.
Interiors takes the viewer into spaces and processes through a kind of industrial portraiture notably free of commentary on environmental or health effects rendered with clear respect both for the work and workplaces. Those photographs without people are imbued with humanity, as if the workers have left behind a ghostly trace element of their labours. That most of these images belong in a narrative series is oddly evident: the tale of leather tanning at Wickett and Craig Tannery, for instance, is only partially told in Material World. Nevertheless, they tell us much.
Concrete Industries narrates the story of concrete processing, portraying the monu-mental structures created by concrete and the equally monumental structures required to process cement. Poignant photographs of humbled ruins of the once-robust lime-processing industry offer a glimpse into the future awaiting even the most massive of our contemporary constructions.

In his essay “Concrete Concretely,” Terence Dick speculates that “the complicity of photography in the twentieth century’s loss of faith has to do more with the prolifer-ation of reproducible imagery than with the creation of an individual image.” The capacity of MaCCallum’s work to regain our faith — which it does brilliantly — may be rooted in the work’s objectivity. It is not compromised by manipulation of the images, post-exposure, and neither are we. - LAURIE DAVIS

YYZ BOOKS AND MUSEUM LONDON, 160 PAGES, 109 B+W ILLUSTRATIONS, HARDCOVER, $39.95 CAD, NOVEMBER 2004