Additional Details:
B.C. Almanac(h) C-B is an anthology of 15 West Coast Canadian artists' booklets, and an exhibition. Commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada in 1970, the project was created, designed and produced by Jack Dale and Michael de Courcy.
Contributing artists:
Jack Dale, Michael de Courcy, Christos Dikeakos, Judith Egglington, Gerry Gilbert, Glenn Lewis, Taras Masciuch, Michael Morris, N. E. Thing Co. Ltd., Roy K. Kiyooka, Jone Pane, Timothy Porter, Peter Thomas, Vincent Trasov, and Robertson Wood.
“A big fat book of photographs from Vancouver – it went all over the world. It was like: Ah ha! In modern photography there’s Vancouver – the BC Almanac. It accepted everything from salon photography to a poet’s snapshots.”
– Gerry Gilbert describing the BC Almanac to students at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1989
The BC Almanac or, as it was officially, bilingually referred to, the B.C. Almanac(h) C-B, was an exhibition/publication project commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) Stills Division as a survey of photography on the West Coast of Canada. The NFB was a cultural arm of the Government of Canada, whose mandate was to record through still photography and moving pictures an image of Canada and Canadian culture in order to enhance a collective sense of national identity and project a positive image of the uniqueness of the country and its inhabitants to the world. The West Coast photo project that would evolve into the BC Almanac was initiated by Loraine Monk, then executive director of the Stills Division. It was intended as number 8 of 10 of the Image book series on contemporary Canadian photography published, by the NFB, between 1967 and 1972.
When Jack Dale and I were asked by Ms. Monk to be the regional producers of the West Coast survey, we insisted and she assured us that as curators, designers and artists we would retain complete creative control throughout all stages of the projects development. From the beginning Jack and I felt that the project should be reflective of the attitude of cross-disciplinary exploration, vital to much of the contemporary art, including photography, being made on the West Coast in the late 1960s. To this end many of 13 fellow artists who we invited to participate in the project weren’t exclusively photographers. The diverse community of participating artists included a painter, a poet, a sculptor, a dancer etc., the common thread was “artists with cameras”.
Each of the contributing artists was simply asked to design and produce a 20 or 40 page camera-ready manuscript of photographs on whatever subject they themselves chose— there were no other guidelines.
Highlighting the connection between the publication of artists’ photography and the idea of consumer accessibility which we associated with popular media items such as comic books and magazines, our artist booklets were printed on newsprint and published both individually with unique covers and titles for the news stand, and simultaneously as a bound compilation under the inclusive title B.C. Almanac(h) C-B. for sale in bookstores nationally.
Compiling as it does such a broad range of photographic styles and approaches, from traditional pictorial to documentary to conceptual, the B.C. Almanac(h) C-B democratically forms a collective vision of a West Coast mid-century artist lifestyle.
In celebration of our access as artists to the generally unreachable apparatus of the printing and publishing process, references in the form of photographic evidence was incorporated directly into the design of both the book and the gallery installation. The images on the cover, spine, back cover and common title pages highlighted stages of the production process. On the cover, tons of sheeted raw newsprint was depicted stacked on the factory floor, prior to being shipped to the printer; the spine bore an image of a printer’s greyscale, universally used to decode the photographic image and adapt its range of tones to that of the offset printing process; inside, on the title pages and endpapers, an image of the wilderness forest represented where the pulp for the newsprint originated, along with the smiling portrait of our printer, Robbie Brown, sitting at his desk (this image doubling as the somewhat controversial promotional poster for the exhibition), and group picture of the 15 artists; and finally on the back cover, a picture of a pile of printed booklets.
In mid November, 1970, by train, plane and automobile from Vancouver, Jack and I along with a crew of several other Almanac artists converged on Ottawa for installation of the multi-media B.C. Almanac(h) C-B show, at the NFB Stills Division photographic gallery.
Armed with numerous cans of custom grey-toned paint, state-of-the-art portable video equipment and a 15 channel, Dennis Vance-designed sound system, this for-the-most-part friendly intervention at the “Little Gallery” on Kent Street transformed the space into a floor-to-ceiling greyscale environment complete with interactive sound while Gerry Gilbert video-documented the entire process for his version of “the making of” movie. The content of the audio montage and the looped video presentation was created by the contributing artists in the show. Up to the very opening of the exhibition there was a tense, ongoing, government-level discussion centred around obscenity issues triggered by the avalanche of frontal nudity featured in the book/exhibition and strangely enough the, apparently “offensive” to NFB execs, poster image of our smiling printer Robbie Brown. Finally, though at the 11th hour, we were given the green light to proceed as planned (without the poster).
The opening was as much a book launch as it was an exhibition. Apart from several examples of the camera-ready manuscript pages there were no original photographs in the show. The art on the walls were systematic, scaled down reproductions of the pages of the book while the central space of the gallery was given over to a large stack of cardboard boxes containing hundreds of the printed Almanacs.
The exhibition subsequently traveled to The Edmonton Art Gallery and The Vancouver Art Gallery. The B.C. Almanac(h) C-B, 435 pages, 1600 photographs, originally sold for $6.95 in bookstores across Canada. A recent online search for the book came up with an average price of $600US for a copy in reasonable condition.
Michael de Courcy
September 2015