Stephen Waddell

At the Contemporary Art Gallery until June 1

Hanging on a wall of the Contemporary Art Gallery are three linked pictures. A large colour photograph of a resting road worker, lying on his back on the pavement with his hands behind his head, accompanies two small oil paintings that depict cropped and abstracted variations on the same subject. Much of Stephen Waddell’s history as an artist is encapsulated in this short series of works.

Waddell, based in Vancouver and Berlin, began his career as a painter who employed Polaroid photos—studies of the urban environment—as his visual notes. As the CAG’s 13-year survey of his work reveals, Waddell later supplemented the Polaroids with Super 8 film and, later still, replaced them with 35mm colour photos. Eventually, he relinquished painting altogether and transferred its pictorial devices and preoccupations to the full-time practice of photography for which he is acclaimed.

Unlike his former teacher, Jeff Wall, Waddell does not stage his photographs. As guest curator Roy Arden notes in his yet-to-be-published catalogue essay, Waddell walks the streets of whatever city he finds himself in—Berlin, Tokyo, Vancouver—until he encounters a scene that meets his pictorial requirements.

These requirements, Arden observes, include certain qualities of colour, light, and composition. But the found scenes must also suggest some correspondence to the history of art, especially realist and impressionist paintings of the mid and late 19th century.

Waddell’s pictures are usually understated, often focused on an isolated individual immersed in some everyday activity, such as labouring, sitting on a park bench, or descending a flight of concrete steps. Many of the photos are taken from behind, the faces of the unnamed subjects hidden from our gaze.

As Arden notes, a feeling of voyeurism attends many of these works. The 1998 Super 8 film Two Walks follows unknown pedestrians along city sidewalks; one woman, sensing she’s being stalked, runs away from the camera.

Voyeurism is also pronounced in three of the still photos. In Gate in Treptow, a woman in torn fishnet stockings bares her bottom in a grubby doorway while her unseen companion injects her. Man With Red Sash depicts a scruffy, bearded fellow leaning against a tree on a city street, clutching a crack pipe. Within the tangle of vegetation that partially envelops him, he is part displaced coureur de bois, part disabled Dionysius.

In Termini, two old women—bag ladies wrapped in identical plaid blankets—hunch beside their crazily overloaded cart. One woman is oblivious to the camera, the other looks unhappily at it. And so we find ourselves standing in the privileged environment of the art gallery, gawking not only at people walking, wading, and working, but also at the homeless, the ill, and the unfortunate. It’s an unsettling experience.