It's become somewhat of a cliché to refer to photography exhibitions as meditations on mortality, but after a month of so many prominent people dying it's difficult to wander the galleries of the Ryerson Image Centre and not see the inescapable passage of time all around you. The thing about photography and death is that they are both so particular. The person in a photograph is someone specific who had a life and a mind. The person who died is uniquely that person and when they go, things will never be the same. That's why death is so tragic. It's why we can easily absorb deaths in huge numbers, but a single figure, even one we don’t known in person, be it Alan Kurdi or David Bowie, shatters our world (at least for a moment). While the many famous musicians who’ve died of late have meant something to me to varying degrees, the passing of José Villanueva Talavera on the weekend affected me more than most. He wasn’t a rock star, but he was a bit of a minor local celebrity. As the gallery attendant at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art for over two decades, he was a familiar face who stood out from the recently graduated art students who usually sit in galleries. It’s a further tragedy of death that only by someone’s absence do you appreciate their presence, and now that I’ve read José’s obituary I finally recognize what an exemplar of dedication to the arts community he was. 
Spring Hurlbut, Airborne, 2008, video installation
I can think of no better evocation of the concrete loss occasioned by the death of another than Spring Hurlbut's video currently on display at the RIC. Like many of my favourite works of art, it’s disarmingly simple in concept, but seemingly endless in interpretation. In a single slow-motion shot, the artist opens a container of the cremated remains of someone identified only by their first name. This happens half a dozen times and each time tendrils of dust lift into the air and disperse into the surrounding darkness. In that short span, my mind reels with thoughts from Plato’s eternal soul and Descartes mind/body problem to ghost stories and the point on the Leslie Street Spit where we (illegally) tossed my father’s ashes. It's not just the body that turns to dust, losing all form and sense of identity, floating away until the motes are spread so wide as to be indistinguishable from the surrounding air (and then possibly even inhaled by us); it is also the memory that floats free and loses shapes, so much so that over time we struggle to recall a face and perhaps only remember a gesture or expression. 
Wendy Snyder MacNeil, Stephanie and her Sisters, 1973, gelatin silver print
The RIC’s survey exhibition of American photographer Wendy Snyder MacNeil's many portrait series is less elegiac than Hurlbut's raising of the dead, but in her efforts to imbue her medium with timelessness – by rephotographing photo album images or printing her portraits on vellum – she too wrestles with loss. However, when she isolates her subjects from all context like in a passport photo, they ironically become harder to identify and end up as faces in a crowd. She's much more effective when her relationship with the person she is shooting is revealed (as with her pictures of her husband) or when she keeps them in a familiar place (as with the far too few pictures from her series on the students at a school for children with special needs). I wanted to see more of these because they were about people in the world who would otherwise be forgotten. That's what a picture can do – keep someone alive.
Ryerson Image Centre: http://www.ryerson.ca/ric/
Spring Hurlbut: Airborne continues until April 10.
Wendy Snyder MacNeil: The Light Inside continues until April 10.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Spring Hurlbut & Wendy Snyder MacNeil at the Ryerson Image Centre
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