Arthur S. Goss: Works & Days, Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival

Taking place in Toronto, Canada, throughout May, the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography festival combines a symposium (“The 'Public Life' of Photographs”), book launch and various events alongside three exhibitions taking place at The Ryerson Image Centre.

One of the most interesting contributions to the exhibition programme during CONTACT is Arthur S. Goss: Works & Days curated by Blake Fitzpatrick and John Bentley Mays in collaboration with the City of Toronto Archives. Goss was the first employed photographer for the city of Toronto and worked for the government from 1911 to 1940. Due to the official nature of his employment, the photographs he produced were not based on Goss' own interests but rather commissioned by unknown individuals within the city department. This places the thousands of images produced by Goss in the fascinating and sometimes dispassionate zone of the 'civic photograph' which was so invested during the early 20th Century.

Goss was not just responsible for capturing the city and building-scapes of Toronto but also the humanistic angle that made up daily life and showed how the the city was expanding and changing with the times. Goss was often the only photographer capturing pivotal moments in the cities history and progression. One of the first projects he worked on for the city was around public health and living conditions and involved cataloguing the cities poor and slum areas. The resulting images, dilapidated interiors, toilets, kitchens are also joined by images of the improvements that were being made by the city. For example the implementation of dental treatment and regular health checks into the school's service and the introduction of two 'forest schools' which taught children in the fresh air and provided basic nutritional hot food for lunch in order to prevent diseases like tuberculosis. One shot, marked 'Board of Education, Toronto. Aug 20 1913' shows four school children at Park Forest School at the High either practising or being shown how to brush their teeth. Each girl clutches a white enamel mug and one beribboned child is being physically shown by the teacher and the others look on.

The curators have, for this exhibition, chosen to focus their attention on the less humanistic of Goss' work and show the way in which Goss' practice was necessarily systemic, practical and also mundane. Often Goss would be sent to photograph a subject as simple as a road or building and this exhibition shows these images in chronological order, showing different angles and attempts at the same view – revealing the way in which the photographer must work in order to convey a message or subject. This angle of Goss' practice, the curators say, has been the most overlooked by previous investigators into the photographers work and methods.

Arthur S. Goss runs from 1st May through to 2nd June and then from 19th June to the 25th August at Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto.

http://www.ryerson.ca/ric/exhibitions/Goss.html

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize - FOCUS on Broomberg & Chanarin

2013 is the seventh edition of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize which awards £30,000 to any living photographer, of any nationality, for a recent body of work, exhibition or publication that is judged to have made a specific contribution to photography in Europe over the previous year. This years finalists are Broomberg & Chanarin, Mishka Henner, Chris Killip and Christina de Middel.

Broomberg & Chanarin, from South Africa and the UK are nominated for their publication War Primer 2 (published by MACK in 2012), a limited edition book, that exists within the pages of Bertold Brecht's 1955 publication, War Primer. Brecht's original photo-essay consisted of 85 pages of found photographic imagery (mostly from Life magazine, cut out daily by Brecht in the GDR) placed next to rhyming epigrams – a form of Greek Classical poetry that was used for epitaphs – written by Brecht himself.

The original photo-essay was intended to expose and highlight the power of the images and how, in Brecht's eyes, they could be used as a “weapon against truth”. Brecht saw the photo-essay almost as a textbook for children, to teach them how to look at images critically. In one example from Brecht's essay, a seemingly inoccuous image of Hilter relaxing at a dinner table would have been used to promote the image of the political leader as an ordinary member of society with ordinary simple needs and taste. It is paired with the epigram “You see me here, eating a simple stew. Me, slave to no desire, except for one; World-conquest. That is all I want, from you. I have but one request: give me your sons'. Broomberg & Chanarin have overlaid the results of google searches for the Brecht poems over the top of the original photo-essay. They obtained 100 versions of the original book and both silk-screened and pasted images they found over the original pages. The new publications look at how the idea and image of war has changed since Brecht's time and the new images are all referenced in the back of the publications so the reader/viewer can locate the source. In one composition an image of the second plane hitting the world trade centre is superimposed onto an image of the bombardment of Dresden alongside Brecht's original poem which begins “A cloud of smoke told us that they were here”. The message is of course that nothing has changed, the date rolls on, the circumstances differ but, at its core, Brecht's original work is as relevant today as it was in the 1950's.

The artists have installed multiple versions of the book open on different pages in the Photographers Gallery, under glass in a desk-like manner. They say, in an interview available on the gallery's website, they wanted to create a “School-room” atmosphere, all of the books and 'desks' are facing the same way in the gallery. An overarching consideration in their work is the way “human suffering is depicted in photography” and how images made of this suffering become something to be circulated, a form of visual currency. This debate is an old one but no less relevant and ethically photographers must grapple with when it is right to capture and when not and the role of the passive and inactive observer. War Primer 2 is an artwork, or statement, on top of another and, by using the original copies of Brecht's work, the relevance and currency is increased. War Primer 2 forms a symbiotic relationship where the power of the original object, and not just its message, is entirely transformed.

Only 100 copies of Broomberg & Chanarin's augmented War Primer 2 exist but the artists have produced a special e-book of the composite publications which is available free at http://mappeditions.com/publications/war-primer-2

The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize exhibition runs until 30th June at The Photographers Gallery, London. The prize winners will be announced on the 10th June.