Speakers Series

Bill Jeffries

Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and the Sacrifices Made in 1942

The focus of the talk will be on the qualitative aspect of the photographic record in Canada and the United States. Nineteenth-century photographs from the U.S. are usually of much higher quality, especially when landscape is the subject. This dichotomy carried over into the documentation of the internment in 1942. Whether this image-quality split mirrors the differences in the treatment of internees in the U.S. and Canada in the 1942 to 1945 period is to be discussed.

Bill Jeffries is the Director/Curator at the Simon Fraser University Gallery. From 2001 to 2005 he held the same post at Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver. At PHG he curated a 2003 exhibition that looked at the relations between quarantine and internment through the photographic history of Japanese Canadian internment in 1942 and Eileen Leier's images of the immigration processing centre at Gross-Ile in Quebec, through which immigrants from Europe had to pass in the 19th & first part of the 20th centuries. The Ansel Adams photographs on view at JCNM were made for that exhibition.