Provenance:

Courtesy of the artist; Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto.

The Work & Artist Bio

Geoffrey James has been an active photographer since 1970. When he sees a landscape, a park or a garden, he sees things that are overlooked by mere mortals. Then when he photographs them, we all become Olympians of careful looking. The Aqueduct Claudio, 1989, a gelatin silver print in a digital edition of 5, is part of a series of photographs taken in 1989 and called “La Campagna Romana.” (The series was reproduced in a limited edition artist’s book published by Editions Galerie Rene Blouin in 1990). The Aqueduct Claudio was started by Emperor Caligula in 38 AD and was completed by Emperor Claudio fourteen years later. The real structure ran for 41 miles underground, but James’s image runs on the surface, and seems like it will never stop. It is an image of exquisite foreverness.

Geoffrey James, born in Wales, read history at Oxford and immigrated to Canada in 1966. He is a self-taught photographer and is the author or subject of more than a dozen books and monographs that engage a wide variety of man-made landscapes, from European formal gardens to the US-Mexico border, from portraits of cities (Paris, Toronto, Lethbridge) to a report, in photos, on the last 6 months of the Kingston Penitentiary. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Governor-General’s Prize for Visual and Media Arts, Geoffrey James was Toronto’s first Photo Laureate. A book of photographs of Canada which will include an epistolary exchange with Peter Galassi will be published by Figure 1 in the Fall. Geoffrey James has exhibited internationally including the Architekturzentrum Wien; Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Salzburger Kunstverein; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palazzo Reale, Naples; documenta in Kassel, Germany; Palazzo Braschi, Museum of Rome; the Vancouver Art Gallery; the Art Gallery of Ontario; the Remai Modern, Saskatoon; The Power Plant, Toronto; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal; and the National Gallery of Canada, to name only a very few. He is in numerous public and private collections including: Musée Carnavalet, Paris; the AGO; the National Gallery of Canada; the Royal Institute of British Architects, London; the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts; the Cleveland Museum of Art; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto and Equinox Gallery, Vancouver.

Looking at Jože Plečnik - Photographs by Geoffrey James, Border Crossings Issue 138, 2016

Inside 1835-2013 Kingston Penitentiary, Border Crossings Issue 133, 2015

View Finder: The Photography of Geoffrey James, Border Crossings Issue 81, 2002

Stephen Bulger Gallery

Equinox Gallery