Paskievich’s parents were displaced persons from Ukraine who immigrated to Canada when he was a child. He grew up in Winnipeg and studied photography and film at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University). In the mid-1970s, after five years of studies and international travels, Paskievich returned to his childhood neighbourhood in the North End of Winnipeg, then populated by refugees, Eastern European immigrants, and Indigenous people, and was inspired to photograph his surroundings. He has worked as a street photographer in Winnipeg for over forty years, producing exhibitions such as A Place Not Our Own, 1978, and, later, The North End, 2007, and The North End Revisited, 2017, retrospectives of his early photography. His other works in photography and film explores community history and Ukrainian identity, such as his book A Voiceless Song: Photographs of the Slavic Lands (1983), documenting a 1980 trip to Eastern Europe and the then–Soviet Union, and a short documentary film exploring a well-established Ukrainian Canadian grocer, Ted Baryluk’s Grocery (Michael Mirus and Paskievich, NFB, 1982).

Image: John Paskievich, Untitled, from the series North End, Winnipeg, 1976, silver print on paper, silver halide, 30.2 x 20.1 cm, Winnipeg Art Gallery.

For further reading, see:

Osborne, Stephen. “Invisible City: John Paskievich and the North End of Winnipeg.” In John Paskievich, The North End: Photographs by John Paskievich, 11–12. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2007.

Paskievich, John, and Michael Mirus, dirs. Ted Baryluk’s Grocery. Montreal: National Film Board, 1982. Video, 10 minutes. www.nfb.ca/film/ted_baryluks_grocery/.

Penner Bancroft is a Vancouver-based artist whose work explores connections between memory, history, and place. In the late 1970s she produced For Dennis and Susan: Running Arms to a Civil War, 1977, an extended portrait about her sister Susan and brother-in-law Dennis, who had been diagnosed with leukemia. Penner Bancroft developed an approach to photography that emphasized relationships and daily life. In works such as Mnemonicon (The Screen), 1988, and Shift, 1989, she introduced sculptural elements as a means of investigating gender, identity, and memory as situated concepts connected to place. She is professor emerita at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and in 2012 won the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts.

Image: Marian Penner Bancroft, Mnemonicon (The Screen) (detail), 1988, silver gelatin prints on panel, 203 x 307.5 x 4.8 cm.

For further reading, see:

Arnold, Grant. Spiritlands: t/HERE: Marian Penner Bancroft. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2012.

Langford, Martha. Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art, 277–84. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.

Poirier was a prolific freelance photojournalist active from the 1930s through the 1950s. His photographs often pictured the lively street life of Montreal and the drama of sports. His work was published in several Montreal newspapers, including La Presse and the Gazette. His fonds are at the Archives nationales à Montréal.

Image: Conrad Poirier, Children. A Gym in Your Own Backyard, July 10, 1942, black and white film negative, National Library and Archives of Quebec, Montreal.

For further reading, see:

“Conrad Poirier, photo reporter [La vie de tous les jours de Montréal].” Action nationale 87, no. 4 (1997): 156.

Godin-Laverdière, Julie-Anne. “Montréal érotique : pin-up et imagerie de nus chez le photographe de presse Conrad Poirier, 1912–1968.” Revue de bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec 5 (2013): n.p.

Lessard, Michel. Montréal au XX^e siècle: regard de photographe. Montreal: Éditions de l’Homme, 1995.

Tousignant, Zoë. “La revue populaire et le samedi–objets de diffusion de la modernité photographique au Québec, 1935–1945.” Revue de bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec 5 (2013): n.p.

A nephew of Peter Pitseolak, Itee Pootoogook was an artist based in Kinngait (Cape Dorset) and best known for his drawings of contemporary life in the Arctic. However, photography was always important to Pootoogook’s practice, whether as final pieces or as a base for his drawings of people and places. His photographs were featured in the 1973 exhibition Animation from Cape Dorset, organized by the National Film Board.

Image: Itee Pootoogook, still from “New Photos by Itee Pootoogook,” in Animation from Cape Dorset, 1973, still image from a thirteen-minute video, National Film Board of Canada, Montreal.

For further reading, see:

Campbell, Nancy. Itee Pootoogook : Hymns to the Silence. Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2019.

Dyck, Sandra. “Itee Pootoogook: Drawing on Photographs.” Inuit Art Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 29–33.

Laurence, Robin. “Itee Pootoogook.” Border Crossings 36, no. 3 (2017): 132.