The film by Lifeworldimage, entitled About Face – The Photographic Art of John Reeves examines the fascinating career of a truly multi-faceted visual artist. In this documentary, the emphasis is on the photographs themselves, supported in turn by personal anecdote and interviews with friends, acolytes and some of the subjects of his work whose commentaries serve to further highlight the diversity and proficiency of the photo-grapher’s vision. It is an intimate and searching look at an artist for whom the camera became, over a lifetime, a pure reflection of his own interest and engagement with social and cultural life, both as faithful witness and willing interlocutor while the medium of photography itself relentlessly transformed both the way we saw the world and imagined our place in it.
John Reeves has enjoyed a prolific and wide-ranging career as a photographer, writer and broadcaster and he as produced arguably some of the finest and most penetrating photographs taken by anyone this century. His work has appeared extensively in magazines such as Canadian Art, Toronto Life and Chatelaine and much of his magazine photography involved people from Pierre Trudeau to Oscar Peterson to John Polanyi.
John Reeves has lived and documented, in his own words, “the cultural beat” of the country, photographing musicians, artists and writers towards whom he has always felt a deep affinity and a passionate interest. Acting almost as if they were the visual memory of his generation, Mr. Reeves’ collections of images of musicians, artists and authors have found their way in book format as well as gallery exhibits which are now the staple of many Canadian institutions, including the National Archives of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Art Centre at the University of Toronto.
Some of the most compelling images produced by John Reeves are the result of two commissions to document the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative (in 1982 & 1998) producing portraits of the major Inuit artists and documenting the printmaking enterprises at Cape Dorset over a period of 15 or more years. Although the project began as a political document to provide visual support for government policies regarding aboriginal art in Canada, it became, somewhere between the lens and the darkroom, a most powerful representation of our Northern unconscious inscribed in monochromatic images which continues to haunt our collective imagination at the limit of any conception of time and space.
The early photographic essay by John Reeves for MacLean’s magazine about the work of Jean Vanier with the socially and mentally challenged became the model for an approach to documentary photography in which the photographer was also the author of the written sections of the assignment, creating, in the style of “new journalism” prevalent at the time, a sympathetic resonance between image and text rarely found in such expository works. One of John’s later projects entitled John Fillion – Thoughts about my sculpture, applied this approach to great effect to the artistic biographical genre.
