Round Table: Street Photography Since the “Affaire Duclos”

Gilbert Duclos was born in Montreal in 1952. After studying photography at the Cégep du Vieux-Montréal, he became a professional photographer, producing photo-reportages and portraits of leading figures for Canadian and international magazines, and collaborating with a number of cultural and educational institutions. He has received several awards and distinctions for his work in photography and filmmaking.
Gilbert Duclos has been practising street photography since 1975. He published his first book in 2001 and is currently working on an upcoming monograph that will bring together the better part of his images from the last 50 years.
In 2019, the McCord Museum acquired 172 of Gilbert Duclos’s photographs of Montreal.

http://gilbert-duclos.squarespace.com

Jean-François LeBlanc has worked as a freelance photojournalist and press photographer since 1984. In 1987 in Montreal, he founded the notable photography collective Agence Stock Photo. Supported by grants from the Canada Council of the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, his work has been widely exhibited in Canada and abroad, including in Europe, Mexico, Haiti and France (at the Rencontres d’Arles). His photographs can be found in the collections of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Ville de Montréal (Art acquisition plan for the cultural centre network), the Cirque du Soleil and Canada Post, and in several private collections. In 2022, he launched and contributed to the book Le droit à l’image, a collective work intended to illustrate and defend street photography.

Sophie Bertrand is a freelance photographer, author and curator. She is interested in both contemporary photography and photographic heritage. In her artistic practice and other projects, she explores the way new visual narratives emerge when the image is placed in dialogue with the archive. She holds a master’s in museum studies and is currently co-editor of the magazine Vie des arts and a teacher at the Collège de photographie Marsan. In addition to contributing regularly to the magazine Ciel variable, she also contributed to the book Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes (Textuel, 2020) and co-edited the book Agence Stock Photo, une histoire du photojournalisme au Québec (Éditions du passage, 2024).

Freddy Arciniegas was born in Colombia and came to his adoptive home of Montreal in 2013. After training as a graphic designer, he decided to study photography at Dawson College. In street photography, he found the ideal medium for expressing his sensitivity to the nuances of design while capturing the inherent rhythm, form and composition of architecture.

Zoë Tousignant is a photography historian specializing in photography produced in Quebec and Canada. Born and raised in Montreal, she has been actively involved in the city’s art and photography communities for over two decades. She has previously held the positions of Associate Curator, Photography at the McCord Museum and Curator at Artexte. She also worked for several years as an independent curator. Her many curatorial projects have included close collaborations with photographers such as Serge Clément, Carlos Ferrand, Marisa Portolese and Gabor Szilasi.

Zoë Tousignant holds a PhD in Art History from Concordia University and an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Leeds, UK. Her doctoral research, which was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, focussed on the use of photography in popular illustrated magazines published in Montreal and Toronto during the Interwar Period.

Her research has focussed on examining print culture as a vital form of dissemination for photography; retracing the networks of people and institutions that constitute the field of visual culture; and elucidating the affective bonds created by photographs and photographic practice. She is a member of the FQRSC-funded research group Formes actuelles de l’expérience photographique: épistémologies, pratiques, histoires, based at Concordia University, the Université du Québec à Montréal, the Université de Montréal and Université Laval.

She believes that the Museum’s photography collection offers a fantastic opportunity to engage with the medium in all its facets—as art, propaganda, memorial device, social documentation, scientific data, and more. For her, the collection itself is proof of how the history of photography should be written.