Stan Douglas Parallax @ Jeu de Paume

Stan Douglas, Hastings Park, 16 July 1955, 2008

The fall shows are now well underway, and I began the season with a visit to the Stan Douglas exhibition at the Jeu de Paume. The title of the exhibition, Parallax, so perfectly captures the spirit and conceptual problems explored by Douglas in his photograph and moving images. Shifting vision and perspectives are everywhere within individual images as well as in their relationship to the way that history is told. Douglas is a master of the parallax.

Take the image that accompanies the exhibition's publicity material, for example, Hastings Park, 16 July 1955. The photograph shows a crowd at the races, and most striking of all is the isolation of each figure. Those in conversation either do not have the attention of their listener or whatever they are saying draws disapproval. The man in the bottom left talks to the woman on his left who is either disinterested or unimpressed, a man in the upper left pulls a face and the woman to his left has a similarly ambiguous response. In the middle, a woman in a blue dress communicates with a man to her left, but his mind is elsewhere. Everyone is dressed up for a day at the races, but being together is not their priority. Being at the races in 1955 is about getting dressed up, placing bets, and being seen. 

Stan Douglas, The Secret Agent, 2012
Installation view @ David Zwirner, 2016

In this show and in Douglas's images in general, we find split and double screens, public spaces representing histories appropriated into private memory, photographs presenting as film developed over time, the skewing of reality through canted frames and events continuing beyond frames that deliberately leave us wondering. In The Secret Agent, a six channel video installation, Joseph Conrad's novel displaced to the terrorist events in Portugal in the summer of 1975, perspectives change over time. The installation includes three sets of double screens, each showing a different perspective of the "hot summer." Administrators, the street, and everyday life events such as a cat walking down a street, go about their business paying little attention to the threat of terrorism. Like all of Douglas's videos, over time, history unfolds in the articulated spaces of each screen, ultimately revealing the difficulty of breaking away from social structures without an event such as a terrorist attack.

Stan Douglas, 2 March 1914, Penn Station's Half Century, 2021 

There is always something visibly artificial in the photographs: up close we see the outline of objects, the human figures standing out from their background which are often abandoned or empty places and spaces. The large format photographs look like images made from film footage, taken out of a series, not just a frame, to give the impression of events unfolding over time. This plasticity also draws attention to the impossibility of the photograph, not just its illusion and its deception, but its impossibility. This is presumably Douglas's desired effect, created through the synthesis of multiple images — taken at different times — emphasizing fabrication.

Stan Douglas, Birth of Nation, 2025

In one of the most exciting works in the exhibition, Douglas re-visions history through a re-presentation of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, 2025. In a five channel video with the Griffith film as the central image, Douglas alters, mirrors and replays the original film from different perspectives. He focusses on the sequence in which Gus is wrongly lynched for Flora's death. Douglas includes two new black characters, Sam and Tom, both freed Confederate captains, who are visions of the white men's racist imaginations every time they encounter Gus. Douglas accentuates the technical achievements of Griffith's film—pioneering narrative coherence through parallel editing, close ups, slowing down the image for important emotional resonance. In his multi-channel, multi-perspectival version, Douglas uses the same strategies to accentuate the racism, misrecognition, and to expose what official history does not show. The final frames of the video on the bottom left are in colour, showing Douglas bringing the past into the present. As viewers, we are left reflecting on the racism of today.

Stan Douglas, Abbott and Cordova, 7 August 1971, 2008

Most of Douglas's photographs are conceived within a series of images, and one disappointment I had with this otherwise stunning exhibition was that there were often only single images from the series. That said, there were other rewards for a French audience. In a photograph that had particular resonance for Paris viewers, Abbott and Cordova, 7 August 1971 is an eerie image looking down at an empty street with people on the fringes. The title refers to the "Gastown Riots" in Vancouver when police charged peaceful demonstrators in Maple Square, Vancouver. The protesters had gathered in response to increasing tensions between police and hippies. Although present, but not emphasized by Douglas, similar to current events in France, police were overly aggressive. Arrests and injuries from violent confrontations with the police are clearly not only a thing of the past.