Jonathan Taggart | Photojournalist

Upcoming Exhibition: The Friction of Distance (Toronto)

admin — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:32:32 +0000

Upcoming exhibition at Toronto’s CONTACT Gallery as part of 2011′s Scotiabank CONTACT Photo Festival Portfolio Reviews Exhibition Award:

The Friction of Distance: The Lillooet River Valley

CONTACT Gallery
80 Spadina Avenue, Suite 310
Toronto, Ontario M5V 2J4

January 19 – February 16, 2012
Opening reception Thursday January 19, 6 – 9pm
Gallery hours Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm, Saturday 11am – 5pm

More info: http://scotiabankcontactphoto.com/contactgallery

Lasqueti Island for “Transfers”

Jon — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:51:26 +0000

A short video from last spring’s visit to Lasqueti Island, produced to accompany a journal article co-authored with Phillip Vannini for submission to the new journal “Transfers.” For the next two years Phillip and I will be traveling to every province and territory in Canada to research the off-grid way of life, producing articles and a video documentary as we go. Phillip has a blog on the Public Ethnography site that you can follow here.

Many thanks to Nova Scotia’s Corey Hinchey for letting me use his quirky ambient track in the video. I came across “They threw some stones in the brook” while looking for something fresh on the CBC Radio3 website, which just further goes to show how incredible Radio3 continues to be as a venue for showcasing new Canadian music.

Playing for Advantage

Jon — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 01:56:15 +0000

Poster and outtakes for Playing For Advantage, written by and starring the hilarious Noah Casey, and directed by my good friend Matthew Clarke. Playing For Advantage is showing at this year’s Vancouver International Fringe Festival. The show runs until Saturday, September 17 – check here for details.

From the Fringe site:
“You always start out with the best intentions: the competition’s just for fun and you play because you love them. But then there’s that one point that eats at you even after it’s over. You start trying to prove her wrong or to get him to see you’re right. In the end it’s not about the love of the game, or your partner. You know you should quit, or s/he should back down. But neither of you will. Somebody’s got to win, even when nobody can. Sometimes, you’ve just got to admit: you’re only playing for advantage.”

West Coast Modern with Said The Whale

admin — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 21:25:28 +0000

If you absolutely have to photograph a band in front of a fence, better make sure it’s an Arthur Erickson fence. Said The Whale in Vancouver’s Point Grey neighbourhood during a break in recording at Vertical Studios.

Dan Mangan | Oh Fortune

admin — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 20:39:17 +0000

From the cutting room floor: a composite image from last month’s shoot with Dan Mangan. Dan’s going on tour in October in support of his new record, Oh Fortune, out September 27th – tour dates and more album info is available at Arts & Crafts.

In the Studio with Said The Whale

admin — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:15:29 +0000

Off-Grid Living on Lasqueti Island

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:02:42 +0000

In a post a while back I made a dirty allusion to some bike trouble I was having on Lasqueti Island. I was on Lasqueti – an island off the east coast of Vancouver Island in the Strait of Georgia – for five days, doing ethnographic fieldwork with Dr. Phillip Vannini, Canada Research Chair in Innovation Learning and Public Ethnography and professor at Royal Roads University’s School of Communication and Culture. Our work on Lasqueti was just a small piece of a much larger project, and for the next year and a half Professor Vannini and I are going to be visiting every province and territory in Canada to research and document off-grid living with the support of both the Canada Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Councils. The intent is to describe, in words and pictures, the culture of off-grid dwelling and dwellers, and how and why they do what they do.

Lasqueti is the least developed of the major Gulf Islands. It has a permanent population of approximately 350, is accessible only by foot passenger ferry or private boat, and remains disconnected from BC Hydro, British Columbia’s provincial provider of electricity. As such, it is the perfect place to begin a long-term multimedia documentation of off-grid living – and by ‘off-grid’ I am referring to the freedom (or forced isolation) from any or all of the dominant hierarchies of resource (al)location: power, communication, water and transportation.

Lasqueti is a melting pot unlike any other I have visited: here, back-to-the-landers and hippies of all generations exist side-by-side (figuratively, at least, as Lasquetian land parcels are minimum 10 acres to manage density) with the kind of nautical roughnecks you might find in one of Mowat’s maritime epics. Although not natural islandfellows, any tension between the two factions is quite superficial, as the challenges of living on Lasqueti provide a communal undertone of cooperation and support. As one Lasquetian illustrated, “So-and-so didn’t like me, but he still spent two hours under my truck when it wouldn’t start”.

As mentioned, there is no car ferry to Lasqueti, and the cost of bringing a vehicle over by barge is enormous, so Professor Vannini and I travelled by bicycle. Yet another grid Lasquetians are removed from is that of the civic system of addresses, so our island explorations were guided by word of mouth. A typical set of cycling instructions on Lasqueti might sound like this: “So-and-so lives on Boat Cove Road. The driveway is marked with the sculpture made from old hubcaps and eagle feathers – you can’t miss it”. The roads are gravel and on an island where everything seems to be uphill from everything else, our bikes took a beating: broken pedals and snapped shifter cables benefitted from a little innovative bicycle repair – skills honed last summer will on tour with The Malahat Revue.

The video from our trip (and there is lots of it) has yet to be digested, but here are a few photographs of life on Lasqueti.

‘The Proof’ | Vancouver Is Awesome

admin — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 18:36:02 +0000

Here is a neat little interview piece run last week on www.vancouverisawesome.com as part of a series called ‘The Proof’, spotlighting local artists and artisans. You can read it here and there.

–

“Jonathan Taggart is like your new favourite band, except he’s not a band, he’s a photojournalist. If you could, you would buy his photos on iTunes, and you wouldn’t think twice about the $9.99. You’d even buy them on vinyl because you love them so much. You want to party to his photos, relax to his photos and make-out to his photos. If he went on tour, you’d have advance tickets the moment they went on sale, and you’d wait after the show to meet him and tell him how awesome he was. And you’d be humbled in his presence. And though he might not be a musician, every one of his photographs carries with it the importance and delicacy of a favorite song. This is only magnified by the fact that he is selective when sharing his images with the public, and precious with the words he accompanies them by. His photography is Broken Social Scene for it’s visual soundscape, Gord Downie for it’s commentary and Tokyo Police Club for it’s youthfulness. I’m proud to call Jon one of my best friends, and I’m excited to watch him rise through the ranks of elite Canadian photographers.
Now go buy his f**king album (of photos, that is).”

- Tyler Bancroft of Said The Whale

The Proof

01 Fish. If I had to take one food with me to a desert island (not a dessert island), it would be fish… lots of wild, local fish.

02 The Office. To the extent that I have an office, this is it. My home office looks out over a Dairy Queen and is far less inspiring. Also pictured: school work, a fairly new and unnervingly prominent part of my life.

03 The Part-Time Job. I work on a boat (see fig. 2), which is great because A) it pays the bills; B) the ocean is beautiful; and C) I can quote The Lonely Island ft. T-Pain and it’s usually funny.

04 UNYA (looks more like “NYA” in this photo, I agree). I volunteer once a week at the Urban Native Youth Association, teaching photography, making cool photo murals, going on nature walks and spelling things with shadows. I truly believe that volunteering is one of the best things you can do, ever.

05 Isabel. It feels odd to be highlighting a truck here, but Isabel has enabled me to do much of the work I do in remote parts of BC. I bought her for a song years ago and she hasn’t stopped singing!

06 Whiteboard. I’m a hopelessly visual person, and this surface is essentially and extension of my brain space. Projects, essays, exhibition plans, shopping lists – everything starts at the whiteboard. Unless they start with …

07 Notebooks. Like whiteboards, but portable! I am addicted to notebooks … rarely can I pass one without being tempted to take it home.

08 Camera bag. Like Amelie’s parents in the Jean-Pierre Jeunet film, I take immense pleasure in taking everything out of my camera bag, cleaning it out, and putting everything back in. Packing it is a true pleasure – as with camping, the challenge is always seeing how little you can get away with.

The Questions

What neighbourhood do you live in?
Kitsilano – walking distance from absolutely everything one could possibly need.

What do you do and where?
I am a photographer; some of my work is for non-profits in Vancouver, but I do as much as I possibly can working with rural communities in British Columbia. I also work part-time as a tugboat deckhand – that work takes place mostly out on the ocean.

What are you working on?
Right now I’m working on a number of things: preparing to go shoot a short video documentary on isolation and ‘the Friction of Distance’ with First Nations communities in the Lillooet River Valley; planning for an exhibition; working as a research assistant in support of a Canada Research Chair grant to help document life in off-the-grid communities in BC and throughout Canada; renovating an old garage into a studio space; constantly researching my own photo projects; and trying to keep my head afloat amid the flotsam and jetsam of literature reviews and research papers.

Where can we find your work?
This month I’m exhibiting some of my work with BC First Nations at The Network Hub (300-422 Richards Street, on view June 16th – July 17th, opening reception June 16th, 6-8pm) as part of their new art gallery initiative. I’ll also be in the Cheaper Show on June 25th, and you can always find my projects online at www.jonathantaggart.com and at www.borealcollective.com

Promo for ‘The Friction of Distance’

admin — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:37:40 +0000

A little in-studio promo video courtesy of Novus TV and the great folks at The Network Hub.

Lasqueti Bike Trouble

admin — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 04:58:32 +0000