User:Freshacconci/Stan Douglas/Photography

Photography
Douglas' use of photography has a different purpose than others in the Vancouver School. He works with not just photography and video, but film and television as well and his photography often addresses the history of the location of one of his installations and as well, the creation of those installations themselves. Installations such as Win, Place or Show are often complemented by large-scale photographs taken of the film set, showing behind-the-scenes. Douglas' works, as installations,

"trouble the material and spatial boundaries of the cinema and museum (for instance, his recent Klatsassin premiered at the 2006 Vancouver International Film Festival and then in 2007 played at the Secession Gallery in Vienna) and, perhaps more importantly, thematically disturb these distinctions as his art occupies a transitional zone that interrogates perception, narrative comprehension and modes of visual and aural storytelling."

Writer Lisa Coulthard discusses Douglas' concern for this collapsing of boundaries in the essay "Uncanny Memories: Stan Douglas, Subjectivity and Cinema" stating that "although predominantly approached within the purview of fine arts, Douglas's work invites interrogation from film studies insofar as it not only utilizes the medium but also actively modifies and references the canonical texts, orientations and histories of cinema."

Recently, Douglas has moved to photographic works which do not depict the history of the site of the narrative in an installation but rather are used as a contrast to a different work. His photographic series Every Building on 100 West Hastings from 2001 is a depiction of a stretch of a run-down section of Vancouver that is about to be gentrified. The photographs accompanied the installation Journey into Fear (also 2001), which is based on Norman Foster's 1942 war-time thriller of the same name and its remake, shot in Vancouver in 1975 and directed by Daniel Mann. Douglas compares the events of World War II with the oil crisis of 1973.

In 2008 Douglas completed Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, a 30 by 50 foot photographic mural depicting the Vancouver Gastown Riots of 1971, which will become the central focus within the atrium of the Woodward's building redevelopment in Vancouver designed by architect Gregory Henriquez.

Douglas' reading of Gilles Deleuze's essay "Humour, Irony and the Law" about the arbitrary nature of law and law enforcement influenced Douglas to reconstruct "forgotten incidents of social confrontation between local Vancouver police and members of the public at various times throughout the last century." Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 depicts an event in which the police

violently intervened in a public protest against undercover police tactics and in favour of the legalization of marijuana. The composition was realized using cinematic staging and digital compositing techniques to assemble 50 different images taken with the camera in the same position. Striving for historical accuracy, Douglas undertook extensive research, collecting archival photographs and conducting interviews with witnesses and participants to recreate the scene in painstaking detail. Using complex production methods similar to those of the film industry, the details of local businesses, commercial signage and period clothing were carefully replicated to represent the past. The combined use of theatrical and digital processes enabled a heightened form of realism. A focus on individuals in the crowd reveals the reactions on their faces.