If you’re only going to see one exhibition this summer, then you’re not trying very hard. For those with efficiency on their minds, the current preponderance of clever group exhibitions invites the opportunity to see a lot of different artists in one go. There’s no better place to see a cornucopia of solid work right now than the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, but you’ll have to move fast because it closes at the end of the month. I’m kicking myself for sleeping on this exhibition that opened way back in May as a feature presentation of the Contact Photography Festival. Now that I’ve seen it, I want to take friends and neighbours – particularly those who might be unfamiliar with or sceptical about visual art – because it provides a perfect balance of smart, haunting, beautiful, challenging, personal and historical images that will please both the knowledgeable and the novice. 
LaToya Ruby Frazier, Huxtables, Mom and Me, 2008. gelatin silver print
With the evocative and open-ended titled Counterpoints, guest curator Jessica Bradley allows for any number of possible connections and narratives to be explored as you work your way through the two galleries that make up the Art Museum. One encompassing category is that all of the work was sourced from the coffers of local collectors. I don't usually look at the lender's credit on title cards, but this exhibition invites it. For the Toronto bound (as in those of us who are trapped here), certain names will provide insight into familiar faces and the things they have in their homes and their heads. This makes for some mild scuttlebutt, but should not be a distraction from the real rewards.
The line-up of artists on display reinforces this gallery’s status as a heavy weight contender in the museum field. Everyone from Dorothea Lange to Cindy Sherman to Vivian Maier is here. André Kertész to Seydou Keita, Edward Burtynsky to Peter MacCallum, Ed Ruscha to Christopher Williams: they’re all included. Every German you could think of – Höfer, Ruff, Struth, Gursky, and the Bechers– makes an appearance. And if you want Vancouver School, they got Vancouver School: Wall, Wallace, Douglas, and Graham. Plus a Herzog for old times sake.
The Barnicke Gallery is split in two, with one room dedicated to female artists (Rebecca Belmore, Meryl McMaster, Nan Goldin, Laurie Simmons) depicting bodies both real and constructed, while the other room is stacked with apartments and office buildings. There are no bodies here, just grids of glass and concrete that go from the elegiac (Hiroshi Sugimoto's World Trade Centre in blurry silhouette) to surreal (Thomas Ruff's queasy green night vision pics) with various degrees of objectivity thrown in for good measure.
The former U of T Art Centre opens with a self-reflective suite of photographs of cameras, photographs of photographers, and photographs of photographs that is a critical theory thesis waiting to happen. In a side room, Lee Friedlander's series of selfies avant le lettre add yet another layer of awareness to this most democratic and proliferous of media. 
Althea Thauberger, Ecce Homo, 2011, laminated digital chromogenic print
One large gallery is dedicated to landscapes that trace the impact of humanity on the planet (or, at least, that’s one way to read it). A social realism room opens with Richard Billingham's parents and looks back to Weegee, Lisette Model, and Lewis Hine. There's a William Eggleston scene of racial division that will stand as a history painting for America in the 20th Century and a series by Jim Goldberg that shows you how little has changed regarding wealth and poverty in the last thirty years. There are politics, biography, truth and fiction all on display, sometimes, as with Tracy Moffatt’s piece, all in the same image.
E.J. Bellocq's 1912 Storyville portraits are hidden away to one side. They show that right from the start photography revealed everything and kept it all hidden at once. The pictures are there to see and believe, but they also remain damningly silent. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle makes this point dramatic by including noise-cancelling earphones with his photograph. If only we were free to walk through the entire exhibition with them on.
The Art Museum: http://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/
Counterpoints: Photography Through the Lens of Toronto Collections continues until July 30.
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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Counterpoints at the Art Museum
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