Stan Douglas: Scotiabank Photography Award

Introduction by Edward Burtynsky and Jane E. Nokes. Texts by Robert Bean and Dieter Roelstraete

Stan Douglas is the third annual publication celebrating the winner of the Scotiabank Photography Award, Canada’s largest contemporary photography award for an established Canadian artist.

During the celebrated career of this year’s award winner Stan Douglas (starting in 1983), photography has played a vital role in his artistic development. This publication highlights the significance of the photographic image in the critical and historical reception of Stan Douglas’s approach to art and media. The stories, sites, and events that Douglas explores are populist, literate and timely. Frequently, his photographs describe the overlooked histories of cultural identity, displacement, and injustice that reveal an uncanny resemblance to present-day events. This is achieved through an insightful attention to photography as both medium and subject. Folding the spectator into the visual culture of memory and oblivion that photographs evoke initiates profound observations about the ubiquity of photography in contemporary culture. The photographs of Stan Douglas affirm the validity and volatility of the photographic medium at this decisive moment in the history of art and photography.