From Head To Toe
Nina Raginsky's Portraits 1972–1977

September 24, 2009 – February 28, 2010
RBC Lobby West, Eric Harvie Theatre
Curator: Leah Turner
Opening Reception: September 24, 4 – 6 p.m.

Nina Raginsky Mr. Charlie Abbott going for a walk in James Bay, Victoria, 1974. Gelatin silver print, sepia toned and heightened with colour, 1974 Collection of The Banff Centre.

Throughout the 1970s, Canadian photographer Nina Raginsky documented the residents of Victoria and Vancouver that she encountered while riding her bicycle. Part of a larger body of work, these portraits were first exhibited at the National Film Board of Canada, Ottawa in 1977, where Raginsky worked as a freelance documentary photographer for nearly twenty years.

Personal relationships were of primary importance to the artist, and this is evident in her ability to capture subtle moments of quiet self-consciousness and charming idiosyncrasy.
Imbued with the visual iconography of sentiment, these whimsical, willfully nostalgic images reflect, in Raginsky’s words “the innocence, the awkwardness and the fragility in all of us.” Delicate hand-tinting and sepia toning evokes Victorian-era portrait photography, while the 1940s fashions of her subjects further obfuscates the actual date of their creation. Raginsky’s titles are annotations of name, place, and date, mimicking the act of archiving snapshots in a family photo album. Though the artist’s composition is straightforward –full frontal posing set against sparse background- her perspective renders her subjects shorter and stouter. The overall effect is one of preciousness, and an indication that each photograph is an object to be cherished.

Like the photo album’s idealized version of family history, Raginsky’s portraits present a tender, compassionate view of the human condition. In recent years, sentimentality has acquired negative connotations, and the sentimental image associated with commodity kitsch. What then is the value of sentiment, or of nostalgia? Do we look to art for escapism or to reveal existential truths? Raginsky’s portraits are perhaps situated in between, as small acts of commemoration, and as reminders of the poignant brevity of memory.