For over three decades, Michel Campeau has explored photography’s dual function as document and means of individual expression. Throughout much of his career, Campeau has produced images that take a self-reflective approach to his medium. In some works, references to image-making are directly incorporated as subject matter. In others, photography is investigated for its ability to construct ideas of place, heritage and culture.
In his Darkroom series, Campeau focuses on the mortality of the photographic medium through intimate views of darkrooms, some of which appear abandoned or hopelessly antiquated in light of digital technologies and processes. For this series, Campeau visited darkrooms across Canada, as well as in Havana, Cuba and Niamey, Niger. In the photograph, Sans-titre 8277 (2005–2010), three sand-encrusted Rolleis sit on a shelf, their twin lenses staring blankly out at the viewer. The scene suggests that analogue photography is a crude and ancient form of image making, although less than 20 years ago it was celebrated as a highly sophisticated and contemporary medium.
Campeau has received several prestigious awards, including the 1994 Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Prize, in Hokkaido, Japan; the Jean Paul Riopelle Career Grant in 2009 and the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography for 2010, awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Born in 1948. Lives and works in Montreal.
Michel Campeau’s work has stretched over the past four decades of contemporary photography. Embracing an innerness at odds with the medium, and breaking clean away from the conventions of documentary, his work explores the subjective, narrative and ontological dimensions of photography. In 1994 Campeau received the international Higashikawa Prize for photography in Japan. Two years later, a retrospective overview entitled Les images volubiles—Travaux photographiques, 1971–1996 was staged by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa. DARKROOM, published in 2007 by Parr/Nazraëli Press, was the subject of an exclusive report in the magazine Aperture. Campeau’s work on darkrooms was selected by the photographer and guest curator Martin Parr for the exhibition New Typologies staged at the 2008 New York Photo Festival. Winner of a number of research and creative grants, he is the author of some ten books. He is the current holder of the Jean-Paul Riopelle scholarship from the Quebec Council of Arts and Letters and recently won the Canadian Arts Council’s Duke and Duchess of York Photography Prize. He is represented by the Simon Blais gallery and his work is part of many collections both in Canada and abroad.
