Facing Canada: portraits in Toronto

This paper discusses Facing Canada: Portraits in Toronto. This project is both an investigation of the visual representation of culture and a methodological exploration of ways to visually speak out and speak together, in multiple collectivities, about: Canada, national identity, self-identification, belonging and multiculturalism. The photographs are at the nexus of a web of official and remembered histories that have been represented overwhelmingly through official or nationalistic imagery and through the (re) use of colonial, often ethnographic, photographs and stylistic conventions. The vehicles of this exploration are photographs and the photographic process. Moving beyond the usual photographer-subject relationship, I experiment with a photographic engagement that recognizes "subjects" as research partners whose contributions are integral to the content and impact of the resulting image.