Factual depression, the desolating absence of upheaval and surprise, is emblematic of the new phenomenon that constitutes the deployment, at an almost planetary scale, of thousands of Webcams. We are all now witnesses to depressed, flat, featureless events – anti-events, we might say: the swerving to the right of a Pontiac at an intersection in some suburb, the dance of an alga at the bottom of Loch Ness, a shadow behind some window in an office building. The visual corollary of insignificant “chat,” the video-web cultivates anticipation of an impossible, improbable, microscopic, or phantasmic event. An avatar of tele-surveillance, cinema verité, paparazzi, and even “snuff” movies,” it draws its main attributes of authenticity in the formal repertoire of media representations of violence: precarious lighting, chance framings, jerky camerawork, fuzzy focus, and so on. But it is in fact in the apparent aesthetic “poverty” of these images that all the violence of a deliberately stoic technique is recorded before the hypothesis of tragedy. But where is the accident, the monster, the suicide? The anticipation of a spectacle: this is definitively what the “visual essay” in this exhibition intends to produce.

A historian of photography, Vincent Lavoie holds a doctorate in aesthetics from Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). He has been a guest lecturer in international art institutions, and in 1998 he received the Lisette Model/Joseph G. Blum grant from the National Gallery of Canada to be assistant curator of photography collections for a specific period. His bibliography includes more than fifty entries (specialized magazines, catalogues, collections, reference books), published in Canada and abroad, including the monographs Man Ray : Ce que je suis (Paris: Hoëbeke, 1998) and L’instant-monument : la photographie, du fait divers à l’humanitaire (Montreal: Dazibao, 2001).