Exhibitions: Documents, 1960s-1970s

Malick Sidibé, group of gelatin silver prints in painted glass frames, 1969–1986, framed 2003–2004. Art Gallery of Ontario, Purchase, with funds from the Photography Curatorial Committee, 2020 © Estate of Malick Sidibé. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

In the 1960s and 1970s, documentary photography took on new power and meanings. In the aftermath of the Second World War, interactions shifted between citizens and their governments, between colonizers and the newly independent, and between other groups as new sociocultural dynamics evolved. This exhibition looks at how photographers around the world—from Bamako to Mumbai, Pretoria to Toronto—used their medium to celebrate, to witness, and to critique their worlds in new ways during a time of change.

Be it through sharply recorded detail or dynamic blurring, in the photography studio or on the street, in single images or in deliberate sequences, the artists chose a range of aesthetic approaches to bring the personal and the political into dialogue. On now until December 5.