At the beginning of 1970, years the newspaper The Press, the critic Normand Thériault denounces a stagnation and even a decline in artistic creation in Quebec. “Whether in painting, sculpture, engraving, the situation is disastrous”, he wrote then. For him, artists are no longer researchers or witnesses of their time, which they were still little previously. He explains that even Riopelle — a signatory of Global denial — is repeated and that he has fallen into a certain academicism. Thériault also dares to evoke the idea of the cultural decline of Montreal! And he also attacks a utopia, that of a – failed – encounter between art and the public…
At the beginning of June 1972, a group of four young photographers — Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Michel Campeau, Roger Charbonneau and Cedric Pearson — accompanied by two researchers — Maryse Pellerin and Ginette Laurin —, having received a government grant, came to settle in the small town of Disraeli, in the Chaudière-Appalaches region, where 5000 inhabitants then lived. For three months, they undertake a process of dialogue with citizens through an entirely new artistic and social experience in the country, establishing strong human ties with the population of this city that they are photographing. Charbonneau recalls how photography inhabited their lives at the time. “We photographed all day, we did the darkroom in the evening, the next day we showed our contact sheets to others… We ate photography. » Gabor Szilasi will stop by to see them and take his own look at the project… Pellerin and Laurin are busy recording interviews with Disraelois, their common goal being to put together an exhibition where images and audio tapes would dialogue. They may not fully realize what they are doing, but their project embodies one of the most innovative creations in art at this time, an experience that will mark our art history and even our society. An intense encounter between art and society.
The way we look at this work is no longer the same now. These images have become valuable documents. There is no other documentation of this importance on a Quebec town or village from that time.
On February 9, 1974, 550,000 copies of the supplement were published Outlook, notebook inserted on Saturdays in many newspapers of the time, an insert containing a six-page report on the Disraeli project. It contains only 18 images drawn up in the summer of 1972, but the beautiful photo adventure then takes on another dimension. Very quickly, a controversy arose, a controversy amplified by the publication of a first and especially a second article in The duty, both signed by author and activist Pierre Vallières. We see “The Disraeli affair” appear. The photographers are criticized for having been dishonest, for showing a negative aspect of this community… Michel Campeau summarized the situation well when, in the magazine OVO, in the fall of 1975, he wrote that “in the face of our refusal to reduce a reality to a simple physical tourist environment, postcard and advertising style, we will be accused of cheating and deception”. Moreover, as Maryse Pellerin will write, one can wonder if this project has not had an impact on a whole collective imagination and “a whole type of advertising that recovers the image of the man in the street”…
This debate on artistic ethics will take an important place in the media of the time, altercations which in fact relate to the idea that we had of Quebec, still poor and entangled in its past, or rather turned towards modernity ? A work which, as curator Zoë Tousignant says, highlights “the importance and social impact of photography”.
And half a century later…
“The look that we cast on this work is no longer the same now, explains Tousignant. These images have become valuable documents. There is no other documentation of this importance on a Quebec town or village from that time. This work embodies the most exhaustive documentary project that has been done on a community in Quebec. This even exceeds the scope of the work Gabor Szilasi has done on Île aux Coudres and in Charlevoix. »
So, how to name this work and this type of photo that this group of photographers made at the time? Documentary photography? If we want to put a precise label, says Roger Charbonneau, we should speak of a “social photo documentary author”. But, as Maryse Pellerin points out, “we don’t all agree on that”. She adds “that at the time, we didn’t ask ourselves too many questions about it”. Claire Beaugrand-Champagne responds by saying that she “doesn’t like labels. I love meeting people and telling their stories. It is curiosity that drives me to create, and not a definition of photography…”
For curator Zoë Tousignant, “we must change the definition of documentary photography, which”, for her, “is always subjective”. What is certain is that it was not a neutral photo, a photo at a distance from its subjects and the reality of its time. This can be seen as a committed approach. Especially since several of their images invited reflection on the society of the time… Beaugrand-Champagne remarked, for example, that “after the fact, I realized that I had nevertheless asked the priest to pose in his bedroom, and the policeman to stand in one of the prison cells…” Given the very social aspect of this project, one could evoke the idea of a “photograph of the encounter”…
We will remember from this exhibition that the Disraeli project made it possible to document a Quebec that was changing and that was looking for an identity, which then wondered what it wanted to offer as an image of itself.
It is therefore absolutely necessary that you go see this exhibition, one of the most important these days. Let’s hope, with Michel Campeau, that the Disraeli project finds “another life, one day, through a lasting publication”. Because by browsing this exhibition, the visitor will have only one regret…. To see this presentation led by the masterful hand of Zoë Tousignant, we will say to ourselves that it would have been really necessary to develop an important work in order to present the whole of this great project, which was one of the founding moments of our transition to modernity. . Who will have the intelligence to create such a book absolutely necessary for our collective memory?