Ryerson Alumni - Winter 2013 - (Page 15)

the Black star collection brings image art scholarship at Ryerson to another level. a destination for academic research and teaching, the Ric is also an exhibition gallery featuring photography, installation art, film and new media. eter Higdon looks with satisfaction at the temperature and humidity control panel beside the door to the photography vault on the second floor of the new Ryerson Image Centre (RIC). The longtime collections curator takes pride in the complexity of it all – the sophistication of the technology that keeps the university’s treasured print collection within a constant climate. While the new facility is radically different than the small resource room that Higdon has overseen for the past 30 years, it is the product of decades of advancement within the School of Image Arts. When Higdon first came to Ryerson as a photography student in the mid-1970s, he benefited from a shift in curriculum and resources. New faculty members were expanding the program to emphasize the scholarly and creative dimensions of the medium. Higdon was there for the school’s first lecture series in 1975, where he crammed into a crowded auditorium to listen to famed Second World War photographer W. Eugene Smith speak about his art. He also remembers holding an original Smith print that was part of the early School of Image Arts collection – an iconic image of three uniformed members of Franco’s Guardia Civil – in a visit to the small resource room. “I could actually look at a masterpiece from the medium in my hands. Not behind glass, not with a security guard hanging over your shoulder because you’re looking too long,” he says. The modern incarnation of that resource room is part of the new RIC, a chilly 700-square-foot vault filled with rows and rows of shelving carriages, which slide apart on floor tracks and hold hundreds of beige photography storage boxes. Higdon wheels a unit over and inspects a few labels before finding the Smith prints. He pulls purple nitrile gloves over his hands, gently takes off P the lid and shows me print after print, pointing out spots where Smith had used bleach to lighten up sections of the photo. He recounts the story of how company goons at a chemical plant in Japan had beaten up Smith during the course of his well-known Minamata project, where he’d taken photographs showing the effects of mercury poisoning from the facility on the local population. He takes out the Smith print he had first examined so many years before and admires the composition of the portrait of Franco’s soldiers. After showing prints from a few more photographers, including French photographer Eugène Atget, and large contemporary works by Edward Burtynsky, Photographic Arts ’82, he slides a carriage along the tracks and looks down at a long row with brown boxes filling the shelving on both sides. “This is all Black Star,” he says, looking down the aisle. “It’s one of my favourite sights.” * * * The Black Star Collection consists of more than 291,000 black-and-white photographs from New York’s Black Star photojournalism agency. Ryerson received it as an anonymous donation in 2005 — the most significant gift of cultural property ever made to a Canadian university. The collection, started with a few thousand prints that the agency’s Jewish founders brought when they fled from Nazi Germany in 1935, documents major world events and famous personalities from about 1910 to the 1980s. Many were published in the picture magazines of the time, such as Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post. Higdon’s purple-clad hands sift through a box of these prints. He holds up photographs of Martin Luther King Jr., Charlie Chaplin and Glenn Gould. From war photographs to images of presidents, celebrities and civil- rights leaders, the collection is a veritable visual legacy of the 20th century, with extraordinary artistic and documentary value. It wasn’t mere coincidence that Ryerson came by the Black Star Collection and its accompanying prestige. A group of dedicated faculty and staff had been quietly toiling for years, building the framework that made this all possible. When Higdon began working with the print collection at Ryerson in 1978, he acquired prints by Francis Frith, Frederick Evans, Nicholas Nixon and others. In the 1990s, he was a core player in securing for Ryerson the renowned Toronto art dealer Mira Godard’s private photograph collection through the federal government’s cultural property donation program. In the ensuing years, Higdon facilitated more than 20 of these donations, acquiring hundreds of original prints. As the university’s photography collection grew, the faculty members in the School of Image Arts developed the academic program and built relationships within the local and international photography and art scenes. Ryerson graduates like Ed Burtynsky, Ruth Kaplan, Photographic Arts ’81, and Robert Burley, Photographic Arts ’81, were gaining fame as successful photographers. Students exhibited their work at an off-campus gallery, and travelled to Paris and Rochester to work with other significant photography collections. The university launched graduate programs in Communication and Culture, Documentary Media, and Photographic Preservation and Collections Management. “Prior to the early ’90s, Ryerson was an undergraduate-only teaching university,” says photography professor Don Snyder, “but no one had any idea how great it would become.” Snyder twice served as chair of the School of Image Arts, and worked hard to contribute to this achievement. W I N T E R 2013 • Ryerson University Magazine 15

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Ryerson Alumni - Winter 2013

Ryerson Alumni - Winter 2013
Table of Contents
President's Message
Showcase
Gould Street
Picture Perfect
Photo Essay
Feels Like Home
From the boardroom to the delivery room – midwife Jasmin Tecson follows her passion
Flying with the Snowbirds – Capt. Iain Cummings realizes lifelong dream
Alumni Diary/VP Viewpoint
Class Notes
Remember When?

Ryerson Alumni - Winter 2013