The Malcolmson Collection: A Passion for Photography, and its Evolution
Robert Frank Chattanooga, Tennessee 1956
Before photography, the Toronto collectors Harry and Ann Malcolmson bought other things, primarily paintings, prints and drawings, for some 25 years. By the time that this chapter in their collecting life was closing, they were seasoned but neither complacent nor satisfied as collectors. They were more like adventurers unable to resist the pull of a new challenge. They met photography with a sense of discovery as a new frontier.
“We didn’t collect photography, photography collected us,” Harry Malcolmson says, with the complete agreement of Ann, who adds, “Yes, I like that phrase.” Their collection, which now numbers more than 200 photographs, along with rare negatives, albums and books, is one of the most important private collections in North America. Its particular relevance as a collection that covers the entire span of the medium, from prints by William Henry Fox Talbot to a film by Mark Lewis, seems especially pertinent in Vancouver, where an exhibition of 110 photographs and objects closes December 20 at Presentation House Gallery. This first public-gallery exhibition of the collection affords particular insights into the work of Vancouver photoconceptualists in its rare juxtapositions of very early photographs and very recent contemporary art, and in a broader sense tells us how the medium’s history informs its present.
The Malcolmson collection might be the only one in private hands to produce an exhibition, expertly curated by Helga Pakasaar, in which a Charles Marville albumen print of a narrow cobblestone Parisian street, photographed in 1876 or 1877, hangs beside a mixed-media work by Vancouver photoconceptualist Ian Wallace, made in 2008, that is strikingly similar in subject matter and composition. Down the wall, there is a photogravure of Glasgow slums by Marville’s Scottish contemporary Thomas Annan, whose photographs were a direct influence on Wallace’s seminal work Poverty. In the same gallery, Ricking the Reed, an 1885 platinum print by Peter Henry Emerson, an important reference for Scott McFarland, is juxtaposed with his Empire 5, a colour inkjet print from a 2005 series on cacti at the Huntington Botanical Gardens. McFarland and Wallace have steeped themselves in the history of photography, which underlines their work in much the same relationship that it has other Vancouver photoconceptualists like Roy Arden, whose work is also owned by the Malcolmsons.
The couple began collecting around 1959, not long after they were married. Neither had collected art before, but together they had adventurous inclinations from the start. “I guess we didn’t know what we were supposed to do,” says Harry, underplaying their acumen and their attraction to the most current art. Their first purchase was an abstract painting by Montreal artist Paul-Émile Borduas, a leading member of the Automatistes, which they bought from Douglas Duncan. Ann recalls, “It was a major step.” They bought the work of young painters associated with the Isaacs Gallery, like Michael Snow, Rick Gorman and John Meredith. And they looked to the international scene, buying original prints by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman.
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Eugène Atget Le Confessional c. 1900 |
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