Phyllis Lambert :<\/strong> You took what, seventy or sixty-nine photographs from the book? And in the book they are paired, but you organized it in a different way. It was a different medium. How did you think about how you wanted to put things together?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Adad Hannah :<\/strong> I pulled the images out thinking of them as single images, and then I had this kind of constellation of images, so we could play with these little points and move them around. I created some groups of three, four, or five photographs. I think a few of them, though, did make it back to their original pairs. In the book, the logic of pairs really makes sense because of the way the pages open. But in the exhibition, I wanted more\u2014I don\u2019t know, like, a different rhythm of images. Some of the pairs are still there from the book, because they just made so much sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong> What were your criteria for choosing the images?<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong> It was tough. Obviously, the images are already a subset of your archive. Already they\u2019re a pretty good selection. I didn\u2019t want to focus on portraits of people or architecture too much. I wanted to make sure that the different parts of your photographic practice were addressed. I like the photographs that have some kind of mystery. You\u2019re not sure what\u2019s going on, or you\u2019re not sure what you\u2019re looking at. And those say more\u2014to me anyway\u2014about how you are looking at things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong> That\u2019s true for me. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong><\/strong> And then, we looked at a floor plan. I\u2019m used to visually laying things out, rather than starting from a theoretical thesis. It was tough when we had to cut some images. You know, you pull some, and then you feel like there\u2019s something missing, so you bring a couple back in. I enjoy that push-pull. I remember at first we had these little postage-stamp-size cut-outs on a plan of the gallery.That\u2019s a fun way to visualize work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> Something I learned from that, which was very interesting, is that the different cameras all had very different aspect ratios. I never fully realized this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong> And now, with Instagram, everything\u2019s vertical, right? A vertical image used to be a rare thing. Now, I would say they\u2019re the majority of images, or certainly many of them. I was thinking about that in one of my later questions here for you. Because I think you called yourself a lens junkie?<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> Instagram junkie. I also called myself a camera junkie. At one point I was changing from black and white to colour, and I was using single lens reflex cameras. I\u2019d go around with two of them slung over my shoulders; one with black-and-white film, one with colour. And then, I was also recording sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong> You used to be so into changing lenses and cameras. Now it\u2019s much more instantaneous, but you don\u2019t get to pick your lenses, right? You just have the lenses that are on the camera. I was wondering if at the beginning, when you first started, you were taking photographs and not thinking of it as an archive. Now, obviously, you know when you take an image that it\u2019s going to become part of your archive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> I\u2019ve been doing it for so long, just taking photographs, because I really enjoy doing so, and they just went into my archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. But when I started Instagram, they became photographs that a public is going to look at. Before that, they never were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong> You don\u2019t remember a moment when you went from just making photographs to thinking, \u201cI\u2019m a photographer and this is a body of my photos\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> I\u2019m not a photographer in the sense that I have a theory about what I\u2019m doing. I\u2019m really somebody who just enjoys looking through lenses. They\u2019re more snapshots, I never set up or rearrange anything. Occasionally, I move something. I work with what I have in front of me, and it\u2019s about the framing of the view. With Instagram, during the pandemic, when one couldn\u2019t go anywhere, you\u2019re sitting somewhere and you see something. I take a photograph for some reason. But when I\u2019m at home, I see something and say, Oh, that\u2019s pretty interesting. And then I experiment with how I look at things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong> I think of myself the same way. I\u2019ve never taken a photography course in my life. I feel like I take pictures because I enjoy it, or without a real plan. But I think smartphones kind of freed people up a bit to take photos of the everyday, like a different kind of snapshot.Another step.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> It was amazing, the first photographs that were taken in the nineteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, you needed to have a tripod and a large-format camera. And then they used to actually develop the negative on site. So, they had to carry huge amounts of equipment with them. And for portraits they had all those instruments that look like torture instruments. They held your head still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong> A lot of the armatures and apparatuses in my photographs are based on those historical tools. More recently there used to be video cameras and still cameras. But in the last twenty years, they\u2019ve really merged. When you\u2019re aiming a camera now, youalways have a choice between a still and a moving image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> There were the little eight-millimetre cameras, and they got to the point where you could actually put sound and film on them, moving film on them. But I wasn\u2019t really interested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I like that series on Sounion in the exhibition where I walk up to the temple and turn, go one way, then the other way, to walk up the hill. They\u2019re all single images. I really enjoy that. You look at one thing, then you look at another thing. It\u2019s like when you could use the dissolve in projection that created a kind of movement. But you can get some of that movement with the iPhone camera\u2019s \u201clive\u201d function.It gives you the possibility of actually choosing. Because the live function gives you a whole series of images. When you edit it, it shows each frame. You can choose the frame that you like better than the one that was chosen for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong> What I like in the photographs of the temple when you\u2019re moving around is that each photograph tells you about the person taking the photograph and where they are in relation to the world around them. It\u2019s the same, actually, with your slideshows, which I think was part of the reason to want to include more images at a smaller scale rather than fewer at a larger scale in the exhibition. The exhibition almost could be seen as a slideshow that you operate yourself as you walk through it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> This is the first time I\u2019ve had an exhibition of my photographs. I never thought of it until some people on Instagram said, \u201cHey, why don\u2019t you make a book?\u201d I think a lot of them were thinking of Instagram because that\u2019s all they knew. But I have that big backlog of so many photographs that were just always there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong><\/strong> Do you see your images as individual images each with its own meaning? Do you think meaning is accumulated over multiple images? I find that the individual photographs work on their own, but there\u2019s a different kind of meaning that builds up from the accumulation of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> Yes. The movement in looking at the temple, because of all the columns … you want to look at it in different ways. Just the whole process of approaching it, because I didn\u2019t do it to get different angles as much as I did, really, just to document how the temple changes as you approach it. And I\u2019ve done that quite a few other times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong> I\u2019m doing some 3D scanning now, with photogrammetry that\u2019s used for architecture. You take a series of photos around an object and then the computer calculates what\u2019s where, and the shape of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong> That\u2019s mechanical, sort of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong><\/strong> We\u2019ve talked about this with cell phones. But I find your social media posts quite light and playful. I think there\u2019s less judgment involved, because it\u2019s so easy, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> Often it\u2019s because you see something and you frame it immediately. Usually, you work around framing and you\u2019re taking, for example, the great theatres in Greece, and I would take them very specifically so that I could make three screens to make a panorama. You can do that with the iPhone too, but I don\u2019t find them very satisfactory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong><\/strong> Do you ever feel pressure when you\u2019re making photographs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> I had to learn to keep the camera straight. It\u2019s not so key a problem with the phone because you take a photograph at night and it turns into day, so it\u2019s able to allow the light to come in. Whereas with the lenses on a single lens reflex, or even the Canon that I used, you can\u2019t move because it\u2019s fairly slow. You get that greater depth of field, of course. I had to learn to do that. I think that a lot of those eighty thousand photographs are probably not very good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong><\/strong> When I\u2019m at your place looking in your library there, what always strikes me in your area on photography, behind the couches, is that you were there and very active\u2014and collecting photographs as well\u2014 during the period when photography moved from a way of documenting the world and documenting art to a kind of art discipline in itself. The first photography exhibitions and things like that at MoMA. I can\u2019t help but think that that moment made an impression on you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong> Yes, but that was before that I started photographing. I can\u2019t think of when John Szarkowski\u2019s earliest exhibitions were, I can\u2019t think of the dates. But it was all sort of at the same time. And that was also the period in which the photographs were coming up at auctions. And they started to really roll in. It was a period for consciousness of photography. And now it\u2019s getting back again. I think I\u2019d be more influenced now that I\u2019m thinking more about photography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we go back to the question we had about still photographs and moving films, you take still photographs with a video camera, not a still camera. So, why do you do that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong><\/strong> I was thinking about film, about early trick photography in film, when they would make ghosts appear and that sort of thing. And then I just pulled everything away from what makes a video a video. Then I made these videos of people standing still and doing nothing. Tim Clark, a professor of mine said, \u201cOh, you\u2019re doing tableaux vivants<\/em>.\u201dI didn\u2019t know what a tableau vivant <\/em>was. When I started to do research, it just opened up a whole world. He kind of opened my eyes to the relationship between my work and history paintings. And then I guess that I was fascinated that tableaux vivants were kind of at their height of popularity at the exact same moment that photography was starting to become popular. And when I was doing my PhD, I was reading about this idea\u2014I think by Geoffrey Batchen, the Australian author\u2014about how many different people had simultaneously kind of invented photography and come up with the technology for photography in different ways. And so then the question is, did the technology lead to the ability to make photographs? Or was it the desire to make still images that led to the technological advances?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was having trouble remembering why I decided to do this project of restaging Degas\u2019 The Absinthe Drinker<\/em> several years ago. Then I remembered that it was because this painting looked so much like a photograph, right? And you see so many paintings that are inspired by photography or technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong> Degas very much was. Because all those photographs he took, with just an arm coming in, you know, the way you\u2019d frame with the camera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong> In my still videos, I did a lot of that as well, actually. It\u2019s funny because it was probably before I was aware of Degas\u2019s use of that kind of photographic framing, but I would have videos where someone is just coming into a frame, but then they\u2019re not moving and they\u2019re still, right? Creating these snapshot moments, kind of faking them, I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you look at your own photographs, especially because you\u2019ve been making photographs for so long, do you recognize all the images as you saw them? Or do you think you see them with fresh eyes as an outsider, an observer of your own work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong> For the book, I had to give captions, so I remember the moments. And when you\u2019re with friends, you pretty well remember the moments. I remember my intention, when I loved looking through the lens. It took me a long time to get away from the hundred-millimetre lens, because you could get very, very close, just two or three inches away, which you can do, of course, with this little thing [the phone] very easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I find myself photographing now, after the exhibition, in a different way than I was photographing before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can see it on my Instagram images. Maybe they\u2019re less formal, and more formal\u2026 I\u2019m not sure. I\u2019m using the wide angle quite a bit now. On the iPhone you can go to 0.5, the wide angle. And I find that quite interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong><\/strong> I guess you\u2019re working on your next show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong> David Cyrenne, who actually chose the images and worked on them, went patiently through all them. He knows the photographs, and he\u2019s found some new ones. Most of the images had been put in some order, but some had escaped the process. So he\u2019s finding all sorts of new things. We’ll see what happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong><\/strong> Do you feel any difference between when you used to take pictures? You\u2019d have to capture the image and then send the film off to be developed\u2014waiting in suspense until it came back.And then you\u2019d get pictures and flip through them. But now it really is instantaneous. Do you have any thoughts about it now, looking back?<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> I didn\u2019t want to go back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong> I see your lack of fascination with that change as being an indication of your project of observing the world around you. You\u2019re capturing it, and you\u2019re actually not that fetishistic about the tools you\u2019re using to make the images, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> Yeah. You wrote in the little sheet that accompanies the exhibition something about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong><\/strong> The choice of scale – of what size to print the photos was a hard one. Were you satisfied with the scale of the photographs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> I think when you look at photographs on a screen or in a book, you see them one after the other. When you put them on the wall, you start to see them in relation to each other, which I think is the interesting thing about an exhibition. You can do that on a projected screen, of course, to a certain degree, but not that many at the same time. You\u2019re not showing images on one side of the room that somehow have something to do with the images on the other side of the room, as you can when you\u2019re doing an exhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong> I would do it as a slideshow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> Oh, yeah. I actually did a huge one on the construction of the Saidye Bronfman Centre. I had three screens, and I had music with it, because that\u2019s always great. You had to push a button at the right moment to have the music coordinated with the change of the slide. It was really difficult, but it was fun.I found them very exciting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong><\/strong> Do you remember what music you used?<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> Yes, sure. I chose it very carefully. For the slideshow on Guatemala, I did two kinds of music. One was\u2014I recorded some of the flute playing and the drummers there. There were some records of that. But for very dramatic moments, like the volcanos or the funeral cortege or the sacred oil in front of the cathedral, I would use a\u2014well, I guess he was a nineteenth-century Spanish composer whose music was very symphonic and dramatic. And some of the Greece things. I had recorded the crickets! They were very, very typical of the sound you hear around you there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong><\/strong> What\u2019s also interesting is the shift that happened with COVID. A shift into a more interior world. Because there are images from within your living spaces in the exhibition, from before cell phones and before COVID. During COVID, everybody\u2019s sense of vision got a bit more limited. Like, everybody\u2019s depth of field was reduced!<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> It\u2019s a spatial thing, because what you\u2019re doing is photographing the same thing in the same environment over and over again. You\u2019re playing with the light, the seasons, the time of day! It\u2019s marvellous because you get to observe that much more closely\u2014and be more conscious of it\u2014than you had before, which also involves a whole process of thinking about why you\u2019re going to do it. As I said, some of it might be, I\u2019m just sitting here like this and I\u2019ll say, \u201cOh, that looks interesting over there,\u201d you know? And I wonder how I can frame it in a photograph. That\u2019s a kind of conscious way of wanting to do things. A conscious idea that you just wanted to make photographs of what you see, capture what you see. It\u2019s a way of looking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AH :<\/strong> I feel the exact same way, but I also feel frustrated about it, because there\u2019s something about needing the mediation of the phone that frustrates me, that I can\u2019t just do it like this … if that makes sense. I\u2019m exactly the same, I take a million pictures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I take my phone everywhere and take pictures of things as a way of understanding what I\u2019m looking at. But, to me, there\u2019s some frustration\u2014like, you should be able to understand what you\u2019re looking at without a camera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PL :<\/strong><\/strong> You could, but then you have to frame your way of thinking differently.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/web_Hannah_Phyllis-Lambert_Vuedinstallation-Observation-2023_1.jpg\")
Observation\u2014Phyllis Lambert<\/em>, exhibition view, Pierre-Fran\u00e7ois Ouellette art contemporain, Montr\u00e9al, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of Pierre-Fran\u00e7ois Ouellette art contemporain, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/web_Hannah_Phyllis-Lambert_JantarMantarObservatory-NewDelhi-India-1999.jpg\")
Jantar Mantar Observatory, New Delhi, India, 1999.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/web_Hannah_Phyllis-Lambert_TempleofPoseidon-CapeSounion-Greece-1971-.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/web_Hannah_Phyllis-Lambert_TempleofPoseidon-CapeSounion-Greece-1971.jpg\")
Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sounion, Greece, 1971.
Photos: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/web_Hannah_Phyllis-Lambert_LesHalles-Paris-France-circa1967.jpg\")
Les Halles, Paris, France, circa 1967.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/web_Hannah_Phyllis-Lambert_London-England-1961.jpg\")
London, England, 1961.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/web_Hannah_Phyllis-Lambert_CCA_Observations_Book_pp.108-109.jpg\")
Observation Is a Constant That Underlies All Approache<\/em>s, interior pages, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/web_Hannah_Phyllis-Lambert_Vuedinstallation-Observation-2023_4.jpg\")
Observation\u2014Phyllis Lambert<\/em>, exhibition view, Pierre-Fran\u00e7ois Ouellette art contemporain, Montr\u00e9al, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of Pierre-Fran\u00e7ois Ouellette art contemporain, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n