In Faking Death Penny Cousineau-Levine examines the work of over 120 Canadian photographers, revealing important aspects of Canadian identity and imagination. Contrasting Canadian photography with American and European traditions, she shows that Canadian photographers are often preoccupied with a place that is "elsewhere," a doubling and duality that also occurs in Canadian literature, film, and political life. Subverting the documentary tradition and other stylistic idioms for their own distinctive ends, Canadian photographers exhibit an ambivalent preoccupation with death and dying, bondage, and entrapment. Cousineau-Levine argues that this is characteristically a 'faked' death that expresses a collective Canadian wish for a symbolic passage to national maturity. Faking Death includes 16 colour reproductions and 150 duotones by artists such as Raymonde April, Jeff Wall, Lynne Cohen, Charles Gagnon, Evergon, Michel Lambeth, Thaddeus Holownia, Geoffrey James, Geneviève Cadieux, Shelley Niro, Diana Thorneycroft, Jin-me Yoon, Ian Wallace, and Ken Lum. By bringing together this many Canadian works Faking Death provides a compelling visual introduction to one of Canada's most vibrant and internationally recognized artistic media. It is an invaluable tool for curators, artists, teachers, students, and scholars in art history, fine arts, Canadian studies, film, communications, literature, and cultural studies.

As partner, instigator, and voyeur in the lives of his subjects, photographer George Steeves explores the emotional terrain of the human psyche. Produced after years of collaboration with family and friends, Steeves's photographs transmute their secrets, scandals, and dilemmas into a visual representations.

A richly illustrated exploration of the imagination in photography featuring the work of over sixty international artists.

Atlantic Canada has a rich tradition of storytelling and creativity that has extended to critical and audience praise for films from the region’s four provinces. Until now there has been no comprehensive history of this diverse body of work. In Shooting from the East, Darrell Varga traces the emergence of art cinema in the 1970s and ’80s, and subsequent rise of a contemporary commercial feature film and television industry by way of representative examples of a great range of titles, including The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood, Life Classes, The Disappeared, and Trailer Park Boys. He provides analysis of documentary filmmaking to emphasize concerns such as the establishment of the regional National Film Board studio and the influence of broadcast policy, but also considers significant recurring themes including the environment, the body, race and First Nations, and the North. Through critical analyses of key films and interviews conducted with filmmakers from all corners of the region, Varga uncovers patterns of meaning across diverse productions and interrogates the concept of region in relation to prevailing notions of national cinema and transnational media culture. With a focus on short films and an extensive history and analysis of the filmmaking production co-operatives located in each province, Shooting from the East sheds light on the creative processes and local economic and cultural conditions for making images on the edge of the Atlantic.

Finalist: Raymond Klibansky Book Prize Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada (2008) Making a connection between photography and memory is almost automatic. Should it be? In Scissors, Paper, Stone Martha Langford explores the nature of memory and art. She challenges the conventional emphasis on the camera as a tool of perception by arguing that photographic works are products of the mind - picturing memory is, first and foremost, the expression of a mental process. Langford organizes the book around the conceit of the child's game scissors, paper, stone, using it to ground her discussion of the tensions between remembering and forgetting, the intersection of memory and imagination, and the relationship between memory and history. Scissors, Paper, Stone explores the great variety of photographic art produced by Canadian artists as expressions of memory. Their work, including images by Carl Beam, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Donigan Cumming, Stan Denniston, Robert Houle, Robert Minden, Michael Snow, Diana Thorneycroft, Jeff Wall, and Jin-me Yoon, is presented as part of a rich interdisciplinary study of contemporary photography and how it has shaped modern memory.

In this collection, E. Alex Pierce enters the territory of memory embedded in landscape where “language tied to the land” evokes the cadence of tidal rivers and creates a fluid world. She traces the fragmented childhood beginnings that lead to the formation of a young artist who moves from music, through theatre, to poetry. The passionate relationships and complex juxtapositions of art and performance that form an artist’s life find voice here in the symphonic structure of the long poem, the provocative individual prose poems, and the final stretched sonnet sequence that interrogates a lost love, “Still. Shimmering in the morning wind. And gone.” These fiercely poised works are layered and rich, with sensuous attention to line and breath: a major work from an accomplished poet. And in that space of summer afternoon, the image born of sound and light inhabits all her blood and bone, the mind ignites. She sees the fire – space for her is stage now, theatre is the flame. She sees it burning all the way back to the Sable River, the lamp, the voices, the two old people, in the dark, without wall or roof or post or beam – and even as her father buries refuse in the cellar hole, turns all this under, she seizes it, picks up her torch, and runs. —from the title poem