Evidence of Existence: A conversation with Toronto-based photographer Arnaud Maggs
The artistic life of Arnaud Maggs corresponds in familiar and occasionally surprising ways to others of his generation. Born in Montreal in 1926, he apprenticed himself to the graphic arts trade after doing service with the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II. There he learned and relished the minutiae of the guild industry as it was entering one of its greatest creative periods. . . .
In 1973, Maggs again took a radical turn, abandoning commercial work altogether to express himself simply and purely as a fine artist. . . . He opted to impose technical limits on his process, buying a used Hasselblad and a single 100mm lens that he has since used for all his portraiture. He started by making methodical studies of the head, picturing its shapes and variety, its presentations of profile and countenance, and its enigmatic revelations of personality. These series, which grew immense, defined Maggs as an artist on a parallel trajectory with Bernd and Hilla Becher, documenting subjects in a seemingly comprehensive and typological manner yet conveying deliberate complexity and ambiguity. Maggs understood himself to be extending a tradition of photography that could be traced through Julia Margaret Cameron, Eugène Atget, and August Sander. At the same time, he declared affinities to his iconoclastic contemporaries, such as Andy Warhol, signaling a layer of mischief behind his apparently earnest concentration. . . .
In 2006, Maggs received Canada's highest lifetime distinction in the arts, the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. "Nomenclature," a stunningly crystalline exhibition of his prowess and acuity could be seen recently at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. The following conversation occurred in Maggs' studio in Toronto.
Excerpt [for the full interview, read the print edition]
...Ben: In 2006, you made a related work titled Cercles Chromatique de M.E. Chevreul. Rather than being a reference guide for a naturalist, the subject was a creation of a color theorist.
Arnaud: Chevreul was a chemist, he was director of the dying division of the Manufacture des Gobelins in Paris, and they made tapestries and rugs. He began a series of experiments in order to verify complaints that the tapestries were not holding their colors. What he found out were not weaknesses in the dyes but rather a phenomenon, peculiar to vision, in which the eye sees color differently depending on its adjacency to other colors. Chevreul published these findings in 1839, which incidentally was the same year that photography was invented. He then went on to publish his color theories, which influenced many painters, including Georges Seurat and Sonia Delaunay. The piece I photographed, Cercles Chromatique, was published in 1861 and shows what occurs when black is added to the color spectrum in increments of ten percent. So it goes right up to ninety percent, which is very, very black. I'm fascinated by this document. It's a sequential work, which I'm drawn to, since much of my work is sequential. For me it symbolizes the passage from day to night, from positive to negative, and from life to death.
Ben: The "Nomenclature" exhibition has been traveling now for more than a year. What are you currently involved with?
Arnaud: I'm completing a new project called "Contamination." I found a book from the Yukon Gold Rush. . . .
Read more in the print edition>
