For many years, some images by Arthur Goss, Toronto’s official photographer from 1911 until his death in 1940, have been broadly familiar to Toronto gallery-goers and people busy with local history and tradition. The pictures most often chosen for public display have been of two kinds: first, poignant portrayals of slum-dwellers that Goss did for the city’s health department; and, second, images that document the construction of heroic public monuments such as the Prince Edward Viaduct.
Arthur S. Goss, Bloor Street Viaduct Photographs, General View – Railway Tracks, October 18, 1912. City of Toronto Archives, series 372, sub-series 10, item 48.
So it is that, over the years, a certain impression about Goss has been created by his curators–that he was, on one hand, an dauntless exposer of urban blight in the tradition of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine; or, on the other, that he was an enthusiastic celebrant of Torontos architectural transformation from a large Victorian city into a 20th century metropolis. To the best of our knowledge, he was neither.
Arthur S. Goss, Pier, 1928. City of Toronto Archives, series 372, subseries 1, item 898.
The pictures he took were done on assignments by this or that department in the municipal government, and their intention appears to have been nothing more glamorous than the capture of some quotidian fact in the visual environment for circulation in the city bureaucracy.
Arthur S. Goss, Telephone Pole, Victoria Lane, March 14, 1912. City of Toronto Archives, series 372, subseries 58, item 105.
What interested Blake and me most from the outset of this project was the highly routinized practice that produced the vast majority of Goss images in the City of Toronto Archives–images that embody perfectly the cool, rational urgencies typical of the institutions (such as city governments) created by cultural and social modernity.
Arthur S. Goss, News stand, Northeast Corner of Gerrard and Jones, 1937. City of Toronto Archives, series 372, subseries 58, item 1457.
I do not mean to suggest that there is anything ordinary, apart from the subject-matter, about these photographs. On the contrary: we found them fascinating documents of what happens when the ideological gaze of official power is turned on the city fabric, and the shutter clicks. Things that are below the threshold of artistic subject-matter become visible for the first time. Things and situations and places that one might think unworthy of representation become compelling. Blake and I invite you to share the intellectual and sensuous adventure that has resulted in Arthur S. Goss: Works and Days.
John Bentley Mays
*From the Opening Remarks, June 18th, 2013. The show is open June 19 – August 25, 2013 at Ryerson Image Centre, University Gallery, located at 33 Gould Street, Toronto. Gallery hours: Tuesday, Thursday & Friday 11 – 6, Wednesday 11 – 8, Saturday & Sunday 12 – 5 p.m.