Donigan Cumming, The Stage, 1991, featured in Books on Books #19, Errata Editions 2014
Courtesy Errata Editions
In his 1991 photobook The Stage – documented in Errata Editions’ Books on Books #19 alongside an essay on the project by Robert Enright – Donigan Cumming takes aim at the cheery do-gooderism of documentary photography. Photographs seldom make the world a better place, and the intentions of their makers are as seldom as clear-cut as they might admit publicly or privately. Cumming thought the best way to make plain these contradictions was to adopt them at their most insidious extreme. He took to wandering the streets of Montreal, accosting people with suitably documentary-like profiles, and offering a photograph of their pet or apartment if he could stage a photograph with them. Once on set, he would goad his subjects into contorted poses and fill their private spaces with strange props (including his favoured brand of beer) to create a sense of excessive, confounding detail. His directing presence is also foregrounded through the use of heavy flash. The resulting images, Cumming thought, were not only more transparent about what was really going on between photographer and subject, but also in a sense more real. “People act themselves all the time,” he told Time magazine in 2014, “but it is not a theater that is false. It is a theater that leads to insight and a provisional truth.” ◉