My article on Jayce Salloum's remembering you (mute pictures) is featured in the National Gallery of Canada's Magazine. The early work, completed by Salloum between 1987 and 1988, is included in Photography in Canada 1960–2000, an exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Canada's Canadian Photography Institute and on view at the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery in Sarnia, Ontario.
Jayce Salloum, Untitled, from remembering you (mute pictures), 1987–88. Gelatin silver print, heightened with paint, 20.3 x 25.2 cm. CMCP Collection, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa © Jayce Salloum
Accompanied by a spoken word soundtrack, the work is comprised of a series of silver gelatin photographs that have been painted to both obscure and isolate elements of their images, inviting the viewer to uncover their meaning. Pages from a book produced in Nazi Germany are the source material for the work, but the manner in which Salloum has treated them renders them less recognizable and disrupts their original message, especially when viewed in combination with the rather oblique commentary provided by the accompanying voiceover. The series engages with the power of photography and the manipulation of propaganda, but by rendering the images more abstract Salloum at once implicates his audience and places them on guard. For the complete text of my article, published on August 14, click here.
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