The intention of Mois de la Photo à Montréal is to question certain current stakes in the contemporary image through the research of artists, exhibition curators, and image experts. The biennale offers a space propitious to exchanges and debates by encouraging encounters and allowing the public to see and understand contemporary photography and video. In addition to the general program, which provides an opportunity to view individual and group exhibitions, this year the event presents a series of exhibitions and public interventions on the theme The Power of the Image.

Ambitious, persuasive, seductive, sometimes insidious, authoritarian or violent, always fascinating - images abound. This proliferation no doubt explains the fact that our times are currently defined as a society of the image. With the generalization of live TV and the advent of the Internet, the image has now reached a new stage and is engaged with much assurance in the era of globalization. Images now circulate, in the industrialized world, at such a speed that they reach thousands of individuals, in all corners of the new map created by networking, simultaneously. If the era of telecommunications has allowed for the massive circulation of images, has the global village also ensured the universality of their content? Are images themselves tending to become “global”?
Today, everyone recognizes that the visual universe in which we are immersed helps to compose our mental representations. Images ineluctably shape us, and thus our perceptions, actions, attitudes, and behaviours are likely to be conditioned by them. The proof is the colossal investments made by the cultural industries and the media in marketing and the huge budgets devoted to advertising. As it takes global dimensions, the economy allows mega-corporations to fabricate images based on the expectations, desires, and aspirations of the majority. The messages, values, and ways of life that movie, media, and advertising conglomerates promote is becoming uniform. Of course, their images differ from each other’s, but many of them are based on similar structures and codes: they repose essentially on the comfort of repetition, immediate communication, and the rapid assimilation of meaning.
Pooling the research of artists, exhibition curators, and image experts, the biennale becomes an exceptional laboratory for understanding the mutations of the image in contemporary culture. A number of artistic practices today, in fact, are affected by these important issues. They bring to light the rhetorical strategies of producers of global images; take apart the formal codes and conventions of Hollywood cinema and television images; destabilize advertising images by parodying their tactics or imitating their slogans; restage images from political and sports news; or make ironic comments on the representations of masculinity and femininity widely used by fashion and advertising. No matter which attitude is adopted, however, what each of these practices demonstrate is how much the aesthetic experience still has the power to make us take a more critical and attentive look at all of these images that we consume so eagerly.

In addition to questioning the future of images, the theme “The Power of the Image” also questions power relations. A number of artists, fascinated by the phenomenon, have decided to infiltrate the public space, creating interventions that encourage spectators, city dwellers, and pedestrians who encounter them to become active in their questioning. For although the power of the image is usually recognized by its impact on the individual looking at it - activating a diversity of reactions, from desire and attraction to persuasion and denunciation, from iconization to stigmatization - we might well think that the movement of this power is reversed when individuals appropriate the image to give it a unique meaning.

The public is indeed the first to be mobilized by this manifestation, since it is from the viewers’ reactions to the images that we can learn about the true nature of those images’ power. Consequently, this thematic section of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, within which the greatest efforts are made to multiply interactions between the art milieu and the public, to facilitate encounters, exchanges, and debates, is perhaps even more than a laboratory, an observatory.

The public interventions and exhibitions are accompanied by an exhibition catalogue that contains the points of view of Ignacio Ramonet, Laurent Gervereau, and Arthur Kroker; texts by a number of artists and curatorsà; special projects by Robin Collyer and Ike Udé; interviews with Barbara Kruger and Ken Lum; and a selective bibliography on the power of the image. This thematic part of Mois de la Photo à Montréal will be complemented by happy hour lectures offering an opportunity to hear speakers from Canada and abroad.

by Marie-Josée Jean
Director, le Mois de la Photo à Montréal