Stan Douglas produced his “Midcentury Studio” series in 2010, staging a series of photographs under the conceptual premise that they were the work of an anonymous Vancouver photographer practicing between 1945 and 1951. Work in the series includes studio shots of fashion and hair models, promotional shots for entertainers, candid street scenes, and film noir-like snapshots of possible crime figures caught in the glare of a blinding flash bulb, destined for the newspaper pages. Guilty, 1950 (2010) is of this latter category. Reminiscent of the crime photography of Weegee (Arthur Fellig), the work depicts a man walking up a narrow stairwell, covering his face with his open palm against the ambushing flash of the photographer. The photograph is an example of the artist’s practice of re-examining historical, site-specific milieux, particularly the imaging of postwar North American diversions from cabaret to sports. The photograph speaks to notions of history and reproduction and offers a partial portrait of a specific place and time.
Stan Douglas, Guilty, 1950 (2010), 2013, digital fibre print mounted on di-bond aluminium, edition 5/25. SFU Art Collection. Gift of Fiona Bowie, 2020. Photo courtesy of the artist
Title
Guilty, 1950 (2010)
Artist
Stan Douglas
Year
2013
Medium
Digital fibre print mounted on di-bond aluminium,
Edition Info
Edition 5/25
Collection
SFU Art Collection
Donor
Gift of Fiona Bowie
Year Acquired
2020
Artists
Stan Douglas is a Vancouver based artist whose multidisciplinary photo, film and video-based work has been exhibited and presented internationally over the past 30 years. Douglas’s work has been included in four Venice Biennales; documenta IX, X and XI; and was the 2016 recipient of the Hasselblad Prize. Douglas represented Canada in the 2022 Venice Biennale. He is one of Canada's most significant contemporary artists, whose work takes up the history of literature, cinema and music, while examining the failed utopias of modernism and technological progress.
Douglas has been the recipient of notable awards, including the Audain Prize for Visual Art (2019); the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2016); the third annual Scotiabank Photography Award (2013); and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (2012). In 2021, Douglas was knighted as a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2023 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Simon Fraser University, Greater Vancouver. Douglas was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2024.
Work by the artist is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Pérez Art Museum Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Vancouver Art Gallery; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Douglas lives and works in Vancouver.