Griffintown – Evolving Montréal

Video produced as part of the exhibition Griffintown – Evolving Montreal.

Follow Montreal street photographer Robert Walker in Griffintown and learn more about his artistic insight.

Robert Walker

Born in Montreal in 1945, Robert Walker graduated in visual arts from Sir George Williams University in the late 1960s. It was not until 1975, after attending a workshop given by American photographer Lee Friedlander, that Walker adopted street photography as his mode of artistic expression. Wanting to break away from the black and white trend, he turned to colour, which was considered less “artistic” at the time.

In 1978, he moved to New York City where he pointed his lens at Time Square on numerous occasions for almost 10 years. He contributed to various publications, including Color is Power (Thames & Hudson, 2000), in which he published street photographs taken over three decades in Montreal, New York, Warsaw, Paris, Rome, Toronto and Provincetown.

Evolving Montreal

With the exhibition Griffintown as seen by Robert Walker, the McCord Museum is launching its new program of photographic commissions titled Evolving Montreal. To document Montreal’s ongoing urban transformation, in the next few years the Museum will be commissioning well-known local photographers to explore the changes occurring in a neighbourhood of their choice.

Direction, camera editing: Tomi Grgicevic (2018)