Donigan Cumming's Iconoclastic Ethnology of Quebec Photography

Donigan Cumming reinforces the identity and richness of Quebec photography with an immodest, ruthless, and provocative body of work that blends grotesque and derision. In The Stage, a series from 1987 to 1990, about 150 photos assemble compartmentalized lives of unclassifiable individuals, from quasi-marginal proletarians to lost petty bourgeois, in the form of tableaux vivants. In Pretty Ribbons, the photographer adopts Jankélévitch's view that aging is comparable to a garment whose weave becomes increasingly apparent. Featuring a emaciated Nettie Harris, he plays on her decay, making the body a symptom of social rot.