Ian MacEachern | Photographs

Exhibition Dates: May 29 – July 10, 2004

Opening Reception with the artist: Saturday May 29, 2-5pM

We are very pleased to present our first solo exhibition of photographs by Ian MacEachern.

Ian MacEachern was born in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, in 1942. He began his career as a cameraman in Sydney, N.S. While working in Saint John, N.B., he found himself devoting much of his spare time to still photography. Prompted by the many fires and impending urban renewal, he turned his camera toward documenting the changing face of Saint John in the mid 1960s.

After moving to Toronto in 1966, he worked as a freelance photojournalist for various magazines and as a studio cameraman for CBC Toronto, until he moved to London, Ontario, in 1968. From there he continued to freelance in photography as a magazine and industrial photojournalist.

Our exhibition will include images from the East Coast and Ontario, with a strong focus on the environmental portraits that take precedent in his work. In addition, we will be exhibiting images from his Asylum series, which was commissioned by Chatelaine Magazine in 1966 to illustrate the then-current state of facilities at the Queen Street Mental Health Hospital. The resulting portfolio is at times melancholy, but also extremely humanistic and moving in its portrayal of clients of the mental health system during that era.