PHOTO ESSAY

Northern Exposures

Lovers of Canadian photography get Carte Blanche

By Alec Scott

April 20, 2006

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John Jackson, 1980. Photograph by Andrew Danson Danushevsky.

Back in the late 1970s and early ’80s, whenever Halifax-based art photographer Andrew Danson Danushevsky ran into someone whose face interested him, he asked if they’d take him home and let him shoot them in their own habitat. “You’d be surprised, most people agreed,” he says. “It was a different, less suspicious time.” Now a teacher at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Danushevsky has always been inspired by Diane Arbus’s dictum about a celluloid portrait being “a secret about a secret.” Danushevsky can’t – or won’t – say much about this photograph’s subject. “I met him at a party and later went by his place, which had that painting of the revolver in it. I honestly don’t know how important guns and gun culture were to him.”