Tag: Thomas Gardiner

Thomas Gardiner is my favourite Canadian photographer you’ve never heard of. A busy man, he doesn’t spend much time pushing his wares, although he should, because they’re really good. Like Tupperware from a trade convention, everyone could use it. A son of the Prairies, photographer Thomas Gardiner was born and raised in Western Canada. After a few years away from home, he returned to reflect upon and react to the landscape and its inhabitants through photography. Placing an appraisal on Gardiner’s work beyond one tempered in pure aestheticism, i’d argued his images empower a narrative of expanse and pastoralism that is particular to the Canadian West. And similar to much of the work conducted on Canadian identity and environs, Gardiner’s work raises more questions about the relationship between land and inhabitant than it settles and I like that.

I don’t know what it is about large format work (in this case and 8×10).  There is another level of emotion, of light quality, of detail that makes photographs more evocative.  Perhaps it’s the slowed down nature of image making, where everything is considered over time and the ability to capture the work is limited. Thomas Gardiner brings all those qualities to his project, Untitled USA (2011-2012) but he also brings the ability to explore “human desire and the interior dramas within individual lives”

Thomas Gardiner left Canada to pursue an education in New York in 2005. But soon enough, his thoughts turned to where he grew up, in the western part of the country. “Being a foreign citizen living in another country, you think back to where you came from,” Gardiner said in a phone interview.