PHOTO: Stan Douglas-Revealing Narratives

Through photography, film and installation, Stan Douglas has, since the late ‘80s, examined complex intersections of narrative, fact and fiction while scrutinizing the constructs of the media he employs and their influence on our understanding of reality. In his films, photographs and installations which use new and outdated technologies, the tropes of cinema and TV, the conventions of various Hollywood genres and classic literary texts, examines the intersection of history and memory.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: PHI Foundation Archive

The exhibition “Revealing Narratives” present the Canadian premiere of Douglas’s most recent photo series “Penn Station’s Half Century” (2021) and “Disco Angola” (2012), a series of photos that will be presented in Québec for the first time. “Penn Station’s Half Century” was commissioned by the Empire State Development in partnership with Public Art Fund, on the occasion of the dedication of New York City’s new Moynihan Train Hall. Douglas worked with a researcher who rifled through thousands of newspapers and periodicals to select nine historic moments that took place in New York’s original Pennsylvania Station between 1914 and 1957, before it was demolished to make way for Madison Square Garden. Among these selected events is March 1, 1914, when a large number of vaudeville performers staged an impromptu show after being stranded at the station by a severe snowstorm. Another was August 7, 1934, when liberated Black labour organizer Angelo Herndon, who had been arrested for the possession of Communist literature arrived at the station to the greeting of thousands of well-wishers. Made with a hybrid of CG imagery and staged photography, these scenes were re-created by Douglas over a four-day shoot in Vancouver, which involved over four hundred actors who were scanned and redressed in one of five hundred unique period costumes, before being posed digitally. Douglas arranged these nine vignettes into thematic panels, which are presented in the Foundation’s 465 Saint-Jean Street galleries. To select the individual moments for re-creation, Douglas enlisted a researcher to comb through thousands of newspaper and periodical stories and pull out those that mentioned Penn Station, which were eventually narrowed down to the final group of nine single days taking place between 1914 and 1957, for example: On the evening of Sunday, March 1, 1914, a severe snowstorm blanketed New York City, grinding rail traffic to a halt and leaving scores of travelers stuck at Penn Station, a travel hub that connected many destinations. Among those stranded were a large number of vaudeville performers, who typically transferred venues on Sundays and Mondays before beginning a new week of shows. Before the introduction of silent feature films in 1915, live performance was the primary source of mass entertainment for many Americans. By combining traditional cinematic techniques with new technologies, Douglas has expanded the experiential space of photography in Penn Station’s Half Century. As Douglas notes, the span of half a century provided a large time frame to look at how Penn Station, as a social space, affected people’s lives in New York City and beyond.

For the photographic series “Disco Angola”  (2012) Douglas has again assumed the fictional character of a photo-journalist, this time a regular in the burgeoning disco underground of the early 1970s New York. For Douglas’s alter-ego, the new scene offered a cathartic respite from urban grittiness in a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Evolving out of funk and soul, the disco lifestyle mobilized the gay community in particular, and its self-conscious embrace of glamour and fashion represented a departure from the previous decade’s counterculture. Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango is widely credited for writing the first disco hit, the song “Soul Makossa” from 1972, and the movement as a whole took much of its inspiration from the African continent. Douglas’s photographer traveled frequently to Angola, where civil war broke out in 1974 following a bloodless coup d’état to end Portuguese rule. His photographs reveal subtle parallels between the burgeoning disco culture and the Angolan liberation struggles. The series presents eight works four based in Angola, and four in the photographer’s native New York. Researching archival photographs, period costumes, and decor, Douglas has meticulously recreated “snapshots” from the two locations diagonally separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Each work reveals a choreographed narrative with body language and props assuming the function of clues to the historical moment: there is an elevated view of Portuguese colonialists awaiting evacuation with their boxed belongings and pets, most of which would be left at the shore in “Exodus 1975”, and another of a group of rebel fighters encircling two comrades performing capoeira, the Brazilian martial art which originated in Angola in “Capoeira 1974”. In a goldpaneled ballroom in New York, a seated, motionless couple faces the dance floor, bemused by what they are watching. They may be some of the many newcomers to the scene during the mid-1970s, when disco was rapidly becoming popular in “Two Friends 1975”. In “A Luta Continua 1974” a woman in striking green t-shirt and bell-bottoms stands in front of a wall painted with the flag and logo of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola), one of the key belligerents in the Civil War. The early years of the Angolan conflict and the development of New York’s disco scene are linked not only by an historic time frame but also by the introduction of outside elements that transformed the respective environments. Disco, an initially underground music scene, was rapidly co-opted by commercial interests that brought the scene into the mainstream, alienating many of its early adherents. In Angola the agendas of foreign governments, expressed indirectly through covert support of the warring factors, tragically prolonged the resolution of the Civil War by over three decades. The video “Luanda-Kinshasa” depicts a six-hour jam session. Through intense research into archival photographs, period costumes and decor, Douglas crafted “snapshots” from each of these locations. The series consists of eight, large-scale panoramic photographs, four based in Angola and four in New York, which Douglas arranged into specific pairings that put forth a multitude of contrasts and comparisons.

Photo: Stan Douglas, 22 April 1924, 2021, Digital chromogenic print mounted on Dibond aluminum, 68 x 118 1/2 inches (172.7 x 301 cm), Edition of 5, Signed Verso, © Stan Douglas, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

Info: PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, 451 & 465, Saint-Jean Street, Montréal Quebec, Canada, Duration: 19/2-22/5/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://phi.ca