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Art Perry (photographer and writer)
Arthur Ralph Perry (born 07 October 1948) is a Canadian writer, photographer, and educator. Known for his street and documentary photography, Art Perry’s publication The Tibetans received the $50,000 Roloff Beny Photography Book Award and Perry also received the Artmagazine (Toronto) award for the best newspaper or journal article on art' for his Vancouver Province'' review of artist Robert Rauschenberg's exhibition of Captiva Island works. Perry's gritty, raw, black-and-white photographs are primarily informal portraits, and similar to his writing style, these portraits appear spontaneous, uncontrived and unstaged, as if the viewer is sharing a stumbled upon moment from someone else's life. As one reviewer noted, Perry has an inexhaustible curiosity about other people, subcultures and world cultures.

Early Years
Art Perry was born in 1948 in Canada's capital city Ottawa, Ontario, The attending obstetrician, Dr. John Puddicombe, had become an international celebrity a few years earlier when he delivered Princess Julianna of the Netherland's baby, Princess Margriet Francesca, in Ottawa's Civic Hospita l. Dr. Puddicombe had placed a shovel full of Dutch earth beneath Princess Julianna's bed, so Julianna's daughter could be born on Netherlands soil. This is why Ottawa has so many Dutch tulips. Art Perry has two siblings, Stephen (b. 1943) and Mary (b.1945, d. 1945), who died shortly after her birth. Mary's gravestone in Ottawa's Pinecrest Cemetery reads as 'infant daughter 1945,' with no name added.

In 1959 Perry developed an incapacitating illness of continual vertigo, due to the onset of encephalitis and Ménière’s Disease. He was admitted to Montreal's Neurological Institute for a year under the care of noted neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield, who at that time was labeled 'the greatest living Canadian.' With the help of new experimental mind-altering Sandoz medications, including LSD-derived UML (methysergide or 1-methyl-D-lysergic acid butanolamide) 'known 'on the street' as a substitute for LSD,' as well as the long-since abandoned brain scan procedure pneumoencephalogram, which was made infamous in the 1973 horror film The Exorcist, Perry's vertigo subsided after many months of hallucinations and pain. In describing the now-banned pneumoencephalogram procedure, neurologist Dr. Allan M. Block says, 'In more recent memory was the dreaded ventriculogram, or pneumoencephalogram: A painful procedure in which a lumbar puncture was done in order to blow air bubbles into the spinal fluid.' Perry's horrific experiences in Montreal's Neurological Institute at age 11 were instrumental in shaping his philosophical and creative mandate to live each day in the eternal present, a belief he later augmented with the Zen-oriented writings of the Beat Generation.

From an early age, Art Perry wanted to be a cartoonist and collected Mad (magazines), copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland and Walt Kelly's Pogo books. In 1958, a year before the onset of Perry's vertigo, The Ottawa Journal newspaper held a contest to draw a rendering of a 'purple people eater' from Sheb Wooley's popular song. A cartoon drawn by 10-year-old Perry won the contest and his drawing was published in the newspaper. Later, in 1964-1965, Perry became the resident cartoonist (at age 15) on CJOH TV 's teen dance show Saturday Date, where on April 24. 1965, Perry presented his caricatures of The Rolling Stones to the band backstage during their YM-YWCA Auditorium show in Ottawa. Perry's interest in cartooning continued in the late-1960s and early-1970s when he was the political cartoonist for the Carleton University student newspaper The Charlaton.

Academia
In 1972, following his graduation from Carleton University with a Bachelor of Arts (Magnum cum Laude) majoring in literature and art history, Perry worked as a lecturer of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada. The following year he backpacked throughout Europe and settled on the Greek island of Corfu in the small hillside village of Pelekas for a few months where he began writing an unpublished novel entitled The Sour War of the Portlies. While in Pelekas, the Aegean light and village's unfamiliar but lively Greek culture initiated Perry into his lifelong love of documentary photography. Returning to Canada in 1973, Perry entered Graduate Studies in art history at the University of British Columbia where he was employed as a teaching assistant for undergraduate students. At this time Perry began work as the editorial cartoonist for The Vancouver Province newspaper, a job that quickly shifted into Perry becoming the Province 's full-time art critic, a position he kept from 1974 to 1995.

In 1976 Perry's childhood vertigo returned. The neurosurgery that was required to alleviate this recurrence was not available in Canada, so Perry went to Los Angeles to the House Institute for a left vestibular nerve section (the cutting of the balance nerve via cranial surgery. ) The operation was performed by famed neurosurgeon William E. Hitselberger.

In 1977, while Perry was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, he was hired as a full-time lecturer of contemporary art history at the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where he remained until retiring in 2023 as an Associate Professor Emeritus. Perry's professorial areas of research and lecturing are Beat Generation poetry, Space Age and Cold War popular culture, documentary photography, and the adaption of literature into films. One popular seminar Perry developed shortly before his retirement was based on Rebecca Solnit's writings in A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Photography
Art Perry is best known for his photographic work. His first solo exhibition was in March 1989 at the University of British Columbia Fine Art Gallery (now the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery.) More recently Perry's 'black-and-white portrait of Lou Reed lying on the floor with his little terrier Lolabelle in his arms was exhibited at The Polygon Gallery and at the Red Gate Arts Society. As John Mackie noted in The Vancouver Sun, 'Yes. Art Perry has a photo of Lou Reed - the man who wrote rock classics like Heroin and Walk on the Wild Side - nuzzling on the ground with a little terrier.' This same Perry portrait of Reed with Lolabelle was placed at the end of Laurie Anderson's Oscar-nominated film Heart of a Dog. Perry's exhibition 'Hip! Portraits of Cool,' was shown in both Montreal and Vancouver, Reviewing Perry's 'Hip!' exhibition in The Vancouver Sun, John Mackie said, 'The 46 counterculture icons in the show range from Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson to Dizzy Gillespie, Werner Herzog, Allen Ginsberg and David Hockney. It may be the only photo show in history where Lady D i hangs between Keith Richards and Nick Cave.'

Commenting on Perry's series of counterculture photographs of Joe Strummer, Patti Smith, Shane MacGowan, Marianne Faithful l, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Rudolf Nureyev, and Louise Bourgeois, one critic observed, '' Art Perry is not only one of Canada’s best-kept underground secrets, he’s also a bonafide bohemian guru. … Perry’s silver print portraits of counterculture icons carry an empathy and deep passionate commitment to creative bohemian outlaws.’ Much of Perry's connection with the artists and musicians he photographs comes via his expertise as a cultural historian, and also via his personality. Reviewer Grady Mitchell noted of Perry that his 'personality lends his images vitality, makes them both urgent and contemplative, whether he’s freezing a rambunctious group of Irish youth or a making a quiet portrait of Nick Cave, smoking at his piano with a half-eaten ham sandwich in front of him. His easy nature disarms people, frees them to relax.'

This same easy nature is imperative for Perry's years-long documentary photographic projects, most notably within the cultures of Tibetans and the Irish. Quoting Grady Mitchell, 'Whether it’s a titanic personality like Werner Herzog or a monk in a remote Tibetan village, Art approaches his subjects the same way. He strives to distill on film the inherent dignity in every person.' Perry's Viking Studio publication The Tibetans is the result of five years travelling to Himalayan Buddhist and nomadic communities in Tibet, Ladakh, and Nepal.  'Perry has paralleled this photographing and writing about oppressed world communities with his ongoing religious belief in and valuing of the holiness within outsider culture ... culture that goes counter to the mainstream.' The Washington Post included Perry's publication The Tibetans in its best books of the year, and Perry gave lectures on his book at New York's Tibet House and at Washington DC's Smithsonian Institute. Subsequently, the Smithsonian acquired a number of Perry's Tibetan photographs for its permanent collection. Robert Thurman, Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Columbia University, wrote in his introduction to The Tibetans, 'These beautiful photographs of Tibet and Tibetans could only have emerged from the eye and hand and heart of a man who made every effort to share the life and feelings of the extraordinary individuals who live on the highest plateau on earth.'

Perry's Irish portrait series, entitled Facing Ireland, is the result of his lifetime intrigue with Irish culture. (Perry's grandmother was from Belfast and she worked as a seamstress outfitting the staterooms on the Titanic before its 1912 sailing.) Perry's Facing Ireland series was exhibited at Vancouver's now-defunct SMASH Modern Art Gallery and prompted one reviewer to write, 'Art Perry’s Irish portraits are not touristy reaffirmations of the quaintness and picturesque verdure of Ireland. ... The people in Art’s photos, the Irish, come from a cross-section of Travellers, clergy, farmers who have lived on their land for five generations, artists, writers, long-rooted manor owners, kids playing, seventy-year-old cabinetmakers, and small-town dancers. ... Many of the Irish (who) Art encountered still mentioned the Great Famine. Others had utterly mythic accounts of their own family’s survival within the last few decades. These stories are carried in their expressions, on their worn hands, and in the landscapes and homes that form their backdrops.'

Philosophy
Having lectured on documentary photography and Beat Generation poetry for over 40 years, Art Perry has much to say about his personal Zen-like nonintrusive aesthetic when taking his photographs. He does not use added lights or encourage posing, preferring to experience encounters as they naturally unfold. ‘It’s like jazz,’ Perry says. ‘You take the spontaneity of the moment, but you put in all the discipline and the awareness you get from the study of what you’re doing.’  Perry labels the philosophical stance behind his black-and-white, and often blurred or gritty photographs, as a 'poetic position.' 'You’re not given everything,” he explains. “A poem is just a few words, and those words are just black scatterings on a page. You read that and all of a sudden you fill it in. It’s making the momentary monumental. Poetry is your personal epiphany of experience.'