Stan Douglas is the third annual publication celebrating the winner of the Scotiabank Photography Award, Canada’s largest contemporary photography award for an established Canadian artist.

During the celebrated career of this year’s award winner Stan Douglas (starting in 1983), photography has played a vital role in his artistic development. This publication highlights the significance of the photographic image in the critical and historical reception of Stan Douglas’ approach to art and media. The stories, sites and events that Douglas explores are populist, literate and timely. Frequently, his photographs describe the overlooked histories of cultural identity, displacement and injustice that reveal an uncanny resemblance to present-day events.

This is achieved through an insightful attention to photography as both medium and subject. Folding the spectator into the visual culture of memory and oblivion that photographs evoke initiates profound observations about the ubiquity of photography in contemporary culture. The photographs of Stan Douglas affirm the validity and volatility of the photographic medium at this decisive moment in the history of art and photography.

Stan Douglas, born in 1960, is a visual artist who lives and works in Vancouver. Since the late 1980s his films, videos and photographs have been seen in exhibitions internationally, including Documentas IX, X and XI and three Venice Biennales (1990, 2001, 2005). Douglas’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. Major museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Tate Gallery, London. Stan Douglas is currently Core Faculty in the Graduate Department of the Art Center College of Design in California.