86-year old Arnaud Maggs Wins It All - Scotibank Photography Award
.
$50,000 Cash Prize. A Book Deal and An Exhibition Next Year2012 Scotiabank Photography Award L-R, MC and Arts Editor at the Globe Gabe Gonda, Janes Nokes, Exec. Dir. SPA with SPA winner Arnaud Maggs; and photographer Ed Burtynsky, Chair SPA. |
"To receive this award is an honour, and it too is an honour to be named in the company of my gifted peers, Fred Herzog and Alain Paiement," said Arnaud Maggs. "Scotiabank's work over the past years both through its involvement in the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and now the Scotiabank Photography Award is helping to raise the profile of Canadian photography and the people and stories behind the lens."
Best known for his multiple-grid, serial photographs of faces and collections, systems and historical ephemera, Arnaud began his career as an artist in the mid seventies at the age of 47, following success as a graphic designer and commercial and fashion photographer. Works, collections and exhibits include Complete Prestige 12" Jazz Catalogue, Charles Stainback's Special Collections and the Arnaud Maggs: Identification exhibition which opened at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa on May 3, 2012. Maggs is represented in Toronto by the Susan Hobbs Gallery.
"Arnaud Maggs has made a unique contribution to Canadian art and photography with his clear and original way of looking at the world around him," said Ann Thomas, Curator of Photographs Collection, National Gallery of Canada on behalf of the SPA jury. "Under his unswerving and affectionate eye, he brings to a new level of appreciation both the idea of human identity represented through the photographic portrait and the idea of cultural evidence garnered through the traces that everyday things leave behind. We are grateful to him for opening our eyes to the significance of ordinary things."
L-R, Stephen Weir, Arnaud Maggs,photographer Ed Burtynsky photographs by Tom Sandler |
"Arnaud is the master of the archival image," said Nokes. "His excellence as a photographic artist is a given, his extraordinary use of the ordinary is a wonder. Arnaud is all about archives, and as a professional archivist, I am in awe of his use of history to inform his work. His ability to bring the past into the present in a meaningful way makes him the archivist's hero as well as the art curator's dream."
The 2012 SPA jury:
- William Ewing, Director of Curatorial Projects, Thames & Hudson
- Karen Love, Manager of Grants and Publications and Independent Curator, Vancouver Art Gallery
- Ann Thomas, Curator of Photographs Collection, National Gallery of Canada
Comments