“Only in Canada, eh?” A Browser’s Guide to Photo-illustration

Friday, March 27 at 12 pm EST • 9 am PST • 5 pm GMT

Event held via Zoom • Registration Link

Photography Network membership is required to attend.

Image caption: Bert Beaver, illustration for Jacqueline Moore, “Do You Hate Yourself?” Weekend Picture Magazine (1 November 1952), p. 15. Photographic reproduction.

Please join us on Friday, March 27 at 12 pm to hear from scholar Martha Langford as she explores the use of photography as illustration.

Photography studies has followed institutional tendencies to divide the world between photographic art and documentation. My research toward A History of Photography in Canada has turned up a third, and arguably as important, category of images: illustration. Specialists’ downcast eyes on this “commercial” activity may be uplifted, as myriad examples from across the spectrum of photographic activity and spectatorial experience show. This presentation draws on all three volumes of this history, with a particular focus on mid-twentieth-century print culture where an “idea” photograph or a photomontage was readily integrated into hybrid visual forms, then starts to ask questions about realist social documents and conceptual art works, coming up to the near present.

About the speaker:

Martha Langford C.M. FRSC is a Distinguished Professor Emeriti at Concordia University, Montreal. Her longstanding interests in photography history and theory, especially modes of consciousness – perception, memory, and imagination – and social interaction, have led her to this current project. The first volume, Anticipation to Participation, 1839-1918 was published in 2025; the second, A Medium Unleashed, 1919-1969 will appear in fall 2026; the third and final third volume, Momentous Indecision, 1970-2010 is slated for 2027 – all from McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Photography Network membership is required to attend. To become a member, sign up here.