Project description • Shaving Soap Death, Mar./55

"Shaving Soap Death, Mar./55" was commissioned by the Peel Art Gallery Museum + Archives as part of the group exhibition, Passages (Sept. 30, 2012 - January 2013) curated by Christine Boyanofski. Artist/photographer Meghan Rennie assisted me on this project.

This project focused on the collection of negatives in the Peel Archives of the work of local photographer, Russell Cooper. Over a 20-30 year period, Cooper seems to have photographed everything and everyone in the Brampton area as well as doing a stint as a news photographer for the Toronto Telegram and even travelling to Britain to photograph the Queen. While not all of his negatives are held by the Archives, what is there covers a substantial amount of his output.

The title of this work refers to an actual unsolved murder that occured in Brampton in 1955 in which the victims' mouths were found to be full of shaving cream.

What I wanted to get at was the social history of the town, as represented by the photography-worthy events covered by Cooper and, by extension, implying a kind of social history of news photography itself. What Cooper photographed was what was deemed newsworthy from the late 1940s to the 1960s in the Brampton area. Brampton was then a small town approximately 40 kilometres from Toronto. It is now considered a bedroom community of the city.

Project description • Conditional Report

In order to do this, I focused on the texts from Cooper's negative storage envelopes. These texts were written by Cooper at the time he filed his negatives and represent his organizational system which was alphabetical, alternating between events, places and people. Cooper re-visited his negative archive years later and annotated some of the envelopes with additional short texts that sometimes described an event further or commented on an individual who was pictured.

I decided that the archive had to be represented in its entirety and, therefore, produced an 8-hour video that represents the text from every one of his hundreds of envelopes. The only images seen in this video are sporadic and appear only at the points where he has annotated an envelope with additional commentary. A voice-over reads the annotated text aloud and the image of the envelope lasts as long as it takes to read the text. The video then reverts to the envelope texts. Excerpts from the video can be seen by clicking the above thumbnails.

What is revealed over the course of the video is the extraordinary range of Cooper's subject matter as it veers from Boy Scout jamborees and flower shows to ghastly suicides and murders. It offers an insight into what was "news" in a small town on the verge of being swallowed up in the postwar Toronto suburban sprawl.

The larger Passages exhibition also included my earlier work, "Attention: Mr. Inglewick", which appears on the small monitor in the above documentation.