Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among the institutions that supported photographers after WWII, the Still Photography Division (SPD) of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) distinguished itself by its inherently intermedial approach. Originally established as a service provider for federal government departments, the Division quickly mutated during the 1960s into a protean institution that simultaneously functioned as image bank, photo laboratory, gallery, publisher, press agency, and multimedia project incubator. The books it published thus functioned alternatively as exhibition catalogues, coffee table books, souvenirs, diplomatic gifts, artists’ books, or photobooks. This paper seeks to understand the cultural ramifications of the kind of photographic work that was championed by the SPD from the late 1960s to the early 1970s by asking the question: Why promote a specific medium, photography, based on its intermedial uses? I address this paradox through the case study of three co-temporal photographic SPD books: Normand Grégoire’s (b. 1944) Série 4 (1971), Judith Eglington’s (b. 1945) Earth Visions (1973), and John Max’s (1936–2011) Open Passport (1973). All three were produced in a period during which the SPD’s mandate was pivotally redefined away from holding a mirror to Canada and towards fostering contemporary artists. Each of these works was also produced simultaneously for multiple supports—together, they span the domains of book, magazine, portfolio, exhibition, movie, and slide show—thus de-centering and de-hierarchizing media in a manner germane to art and media schools, as well as amateur practices. The works of Grégoire, Eglington, and Max thus point at a long-term narrative of resistance to the museal division of labour between media in the Canadian context and show how photobooks constitute a field to which scholars of the book should more actively contribute.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".