- Repository Number
- Location
- Artist
- Title
- Date
- Medium
- Technique
- Dimensions
- Edition
- Description
- Provenance
- Inscription
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en-ca
SC0304-SVO-PH-1
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Yorkgate - Between Rooms YG205 & YG206
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Portrait of a Young Woman
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1977
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Photography
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Toned gelatin silver print
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18.2 x 14 cm
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2/25
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en-ca
"Knowing that Volker Seding's new exhibition of photographs from his Architectural Series consists entirely of vertical, black and white prints of the façades of old urban buildings in no way prepares you for their impact. The fact is, this virtuoso German born, Toronto-based photographer, whose latest work is now at the Stephen Bulger Gallery, can make you feel you've never looked attentively at a building before.
Part of it lies in the astonishing detailing afforded by Seding's high focus. And part of it lies in the way that detailing is delivered to the viewer by means of the photographer's truly exquisite printing. This is the kind of printing whereby the photo is somehow or other taken beyond the realms of normal vision to a point where there is now more to see in the photograph than was originally seen by the naked eye. This is probably impossible, but that's how it feels. A kind of strange surrealism haunts these brilliant photographs -- a surrealism that is close to the word's origins: sur-real, or more than real.
All this is probably far from Seding's objective which, presumably, is to document these burnished, sometimes genteelly down-at-the-heels buildings -- like Toronto's Massey Hall, The Cameron House on Toronto's Queen Street West, mouldering loft buildings in New York and Havana -- with a certain loving objectivity, and with the organizing and categorizing passion of an anthropologist.
The fact is, however, that gathered into the deep gaze of Seding's big camera, these venerable old buildings come on like human subjects -- unique, flawed, quirky, crumbling and yet indomitable. What presence they embody! And what stories they hold -- scarred at street level by their intercourse with the world (graffiti, signage, broken windows), and left quietly to themselves above ground (dark, silent rooms, tattered blinds, empty windows)."
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The Globe and Mail
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Purchased at auction from Waddington's on October 31, 2019.
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Signed bottom left corner, V.Seding - 77
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