Street photography provides two rewards that are at odds with each other. On the one hand, there is a voyeuristic thrill in spying on the lives of others. When otherwise we'd avert our eyes, instead we peer intently at the strange figures and faces that pass quickly from our sight. We examine clothes and gestures to measure ourselves against those around us or those who live far away in time and/or space. We learn what we can from them or simply recognize them as fellow humans and, in this way, learn something about ourselves.
At the same time and on the other hand, we see the street as a form of theatre and project a narrative on what we see through the frame of the camera’s lens and the selection, developing, and cropping that happens in the darkroom. A skilled photographer turns the everyday into drama and isolates the moment that looks cinematic.
One reading relies on veracity, the other artifice. 
Viktor Kolář, Montreal (Place Bonaventure), 1972, Gelatin silver print
I just finished reading local writer (and occasional art critic) Kyo Maclear's new book Birds Art Life before I visited Stephen Bulger Gallery to catch Viktor Kolář’s exhibition of photos from the late sixties and early seventies when he lived in Canada. Maclear's memoir is about finding an anchor to battle her artistic dissipation by birding with a fellow lost soul (musician, photographer, writer, etc. Jack Breakfast). It reminded me of my own meandering through the urban forest and the pleasure I derive from identifying familiar features in the cityscape like an amateur naturalist. Maclear and Breakfast resist the urge to turn birds into metaphors and instead find a greater truth in recognizing them as they are (among other things). The same lesson comes through in Kolář’s photographs: we see the world as it is, not as we imagine or want. 
Viktor Kolář, Montreal, 1972, Gelatin silver print
Seen through another filter, these same pictures acquire a patina of make-believe. The skill in Kolář’s snap is to isolate the moment of maximum suggestion, thereby telegraphing the drama within the shot into a range of possible narratives. The time and place of these works puts them within a particular historical and cultural context: that moment in the early seventies when hippies were shifting into a standard uniform but the square styles of the fifties still lingered and cross pollination between the two resulted in the uniquely unsettled fashion of the decade. The dominant architecture of the age was a commercial brutalism that turned every street into a location shot for a dystopian movie sets minutes into the future. JG Ballard mined this landscape for his speculative psychodramas where consciousness abutted concrete. I recently watched Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of Ballard’s High Rise and the costumes and set design could have come right out of a Kolář photograph. Urban dread was still shocking and a perverse affection for apartments and underpasses made for a natural response. This truth is equally resonant and the exhibition fluctuates between the two possibilities to scintillating effect.
Stephen Bulger Gallery: http://www.bulgergallery.com/
Viktor Kolář: Canada, 1968-1973 continues until February 18.
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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Viktor Kolar at Stephen Bulger Gallery
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