Gagnon was a multidisciplinary artist who worked in media such as painting, collage, film, and sound in addition to photography. Many of his photographs represent natural elements—gardens, trees, plants—as disconnected from viewers or their surrounding environments, such as his Polaroid SX-70 images of a view from a window overlooking a garden. In 1979 he was one of the seven photographers selected for The Banff Purchase exhibition, which championed contemporary Canadian photography and sought to establish the Banff Centre as an important site for the study of the art in Canada.

Image: Charles Gagnon, SX 70, 1976, instant dye print (Polaroid), 10.8 x 8.8 cm; image: 7.9 x 7.8 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

For further reading, see:

Asselin, Olivier. “Le flâneur et l’allégorie : fragments sur les photographies de Charles Gagnon.” Journal of Canadian Art History / Annales d’histoire de l’art Canadien 20, no. 1/2 (1999): 182–203.

Banff Centre, The Banff Purchase: An Exhibition of Photography in Canada. Toronto: John Wiley & Sons Canada, 1979.

Cousineau-Levine, Penny. Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003, 76–78.

Godmer, Gilles, et al. Charles Gagnon. Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2001.

McManus, Karla. “Producing and Publishing The Banff Purchase: Nationalism, Pedagogy, and Professionalism in Contemporary Canadian Art Photography, 1979.” Journal of Canadian Art History / Annales d’histoire de l’art Canadien
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