‘Proud Canadian photographer’ Clara Gutsche reflects on life behind the lens | Canada Voices

Montreal photographer Clara Gutsche, winner of the 2024 Scotiabank Photography Award, was an American student who fell in love with the city during a visit to Expo 67. She returned in 1970 and took up a camera as soon as she arrived. In one her first projects, she and partner David Miller photographed the Milton Park neighbourhood where they lived, part of a community effort to save it from demolition. In later series, using a large-format view camera, she has shot architecture, store windows, nuns, high-school students, siblings, her daughter and, most recently, her granddaughter.

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How did you first take up a camera?

I am a proud Canadian photographer. I started photographing when I moved permanently to Montreal in April, 1970.

I had a pent-up desire to photograph. I had been looking at lots of books and exhibitions, an exhibition of original prints of Albrecht Dürer’s in 1969. There was something about the precision of the detail, and the black-and-white rendering: It was just one of those moments of realization. So I arrived knowing that I wanted to photograph and as soon as I came I bought a camera and did some initial photographing that was kind of generic. Within months I decided to put my camera on a tripod: I started to make very careful compositions where I was really thinking about the lines and the shapes of the space. I was going inside almost immediately as well. I’ve always been really interested in interior spaces or how people live. I think one of the recurring themes in my work would be exploring the motivations of different people, what makes somebody tick.

How did you get involved with the Milton Park project?

In the U.S., starting in high school and then continuing in the college years, we were working with the civil-rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests. So both Dave and I were primed to participate in social and political movements when we arrived in Montreal. There was an active fight to save the buildings because the buildings represent the social fabric of the neighbourhood. So that’s how it started, having a project immediately, to save the neighbourhood using the photographs as a consciousness-raising device.

You work in series, and within those series you’re interested in serials, such as siblings or the nuns. What draws you to that?

That’s a hard question.

It’s partly just fascination with photography and I’ll usually keep photographing the same subject for a minimum of three years. The series becomes larger or more complicated in meaning than each of the individual photographs. And the end of the project is when the fascination evaporates, either with the subject or as a photographer interested in the light, the composition, the mood, the shape of the space. At a certain point, I’ll feel as if I’m repeating myself.

The images of Quebec nuns, both cloistered and in the community, are some of your most memorable. How did you come to photograph them?

I started the first photographs in 1980 for a small urban preservation project for Heritage Montreal. My projects often start in architecture. I had noticed the magnificent buildings in Montreal, the Congrégation de Notre Dame and the Grey Nuns building. This was the opportunity to go inside that building, which was saved by Heritage Montreal.

I did interior photographs without people. Around 1988-89, I realized that this was a fascinating subject that represented Quebec culture, historical and, I contended, contemporary. Most people of my generation had been educated by nuns and brothers and priests, but they were saying that it had no impact, they had totally left that behind. I found that an interesting denial or discrepancy.

By the time I really started taking a lot of the photographs, it was 1990, so 20 years after I had arrived in Quebec, and by then Montreal was my home. I make an effort to speak French, I listen to Radio Canada. I read the Devoir. I’m always aware of being an immigrant and a foreigner. I think if I’d settled in Toronto, I’m not so sure I would still think about that very often. So it was a project about exploring my adoptive culture, the differences between that and the American Midwest that I grew up in. Eventually I worked up the nerve to ask permission to include the nuns in the photograph.

I developed a huge respect for the women in the different communities, so I’m very careful about maintaining their dignity. The nuns themselves, they knew that the numbers were decreasing but each community saw itself as active with the potential to attract novices and continue their work.

One of your intriguing photos shows a group of young people in a classroom all wearing masks. Where does it come from?

It was from the high-school series. Our high school is from about age 12 or 13 to maximum 17. They are exploring their own social relationships or exploring different social norms as much as they are listening to the official teaching. That was something I was consciously interested in: My daughter was going through these specific years when I was photographing the high school.

So there’s that difference between the convents being about – to put it quite bluntly – my foreignness, about the perpetual difference that I feel in relation to Quebec culture, and the high schools, returning to a subject matter that came from my own personal experience or my daily routines or relationships that I’d already established.

You started in the days of chemical photography. How do you feel about the transition to digital?

I don’t do digital. I use a digital interface for printing but all of the photographs are taken on analog film.

I maintain a strict adherence to the photographs looking photographic. I don’t do changes that approach anything having to do with altering the images, collaging, adding, removing, but there are different methods of printing if you create a digital file.

Everyone has a camera in their back pocket now. How does that affect the professional photographer?

I do use my cellphone. I pull it out, and then you think about what you’re observing in a heightened, conscious way.

But if you’re working with a large camera on a tripod, it’s already a distinction. You are going under a dark cloth, you see the image upside down. It’s totally different. It can be a problem when I’m photographing the shop windows, because I’m standing on the sidewalk in public space. I’ll have store owners coming out aggressively and telling me they’re going to call the police. It’s a kind of irony: The surveillance cameras that are all over the place and people with their cellphones are constantly catching all of us in pictures that they probably post, but I’m working on my art.

Some activists have called for boycotts of cultural events sponsored by Scotiabank because of its stake in an Israeli arms manufacturer. How did you make the decision to participate in the prize?

If you’re an independent artist, your art is an act of resistance. Artists are questioning social and cultural and political norms. To do art is to do something progressive and funding to support the arts is a progressive choice on the part of the organization.

I have no reservations about being associated with the Scotiabank Photography prize. In fact, I feel quite proud to have been awarded the prize.

An exhibition of work by Clara Gutsche is showing in the Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University from May 7 to Aug. 2, as part of the Contact Photography Festival, which runs in venues across Toronto through May.