PHOTO ESSAY

Northern Exposures

Lovers of Canadian photography get Carte Blanche

By Alec Scott

April 20, 2006

• 1
|
• 2
|
• 3
|
• 4
|
• 5
|
• 6
|
• 7
|
• 8
|
• 9
|
• 10
|
• 11

Untitled (from the series In Place). Photograph by Robyn Cumming.

“I always wanted to be in the theatre,” says Burlington, Ont., native Robyn Cumming. “But not on stage. Maybe directing, or stitching the costumes or building the sets.” This shot, one of a series of portraits posed on a mock, curtained stage, features Cumming’s boyfriend. He has a photo album open on his knees, with photocopies of shots of Cumming’s family – particularly her father – pasted on the wall behind. “My dad was dying then,” says Cumming, a York University student featured in Carte Blanche’s Emerging Talents chapter. “We were gathering photos that meant something to him, to us, like you do – sort of an inventory. I wanted this shot to be about that process of trying to remember, about nostalgia.”