WANDERLUST | Around the World in 80 Photographs

As the pandemic continues to thwart people’s propensity for travel, many are dreaming of visiting places far and wide. Continuously amazed at the way photographs transport us elsewhere, “WANDERLUST, Around the World in 80 Photographs” consciously looks at images made around the world to satiate a desire for travel. This exhibition holds French poet, playwright, and novelist, Jules Verne in mind via the carefully selected 80 photographs by the Bulger Gallery team that offer a circuitous journey around our globe.

The journey begins in Toronto through a collaborative vision of life in the city during lockdown by Rita Leistner and Don McKellar. Entitled “Infinite Distance”, this series was made at night during the city’s most heavily restricted–thus anti-social–hours, which became their stage and playground. The pandemic dictated the rules of engagement we are all familiar with now: two metres apart, masking after dark. Incorporating flash, long exposures, and other photographic techniques, Leistner and McKellar depict Toronto as dream-like and apocalyptic. Unpeopled iconic streetscapes and building-scapes, green spaces, parks and ravines, are both juxtaposed against the built environment and in conjunction with one another. In their work, Leistner and McKellar appear as the only people left: two friends in a stalemate of perpetual reaching, forever un-touching across time and space, frozen in a photograph, an infinite distance between them.

This milieu activates the proceeding journey, visiting countries through photographs made throughout the last two centuries and over the last few years. “WANDERLUST” includes black and white and colour photographs made by persons unknown, as well as those made by well-known photographers including: Eldred Allen; Dick Arentz; Alexander Artway; Bruno Barbey; Scott Conarroe; Lutz Dille; Elliott Erwitt; Wendy Ewald; Martine Franck; Gilbert Garcin; David Goldblatt; Sunil Gupta; Richard Harrington; Josef Hoflehner; Clive Holden; Frank Hurley; Mahtab Hussain; Alfredo Jaar; Geoffrey James; Sarah Anne Johnson; Ruth Kaplan; Minna Keene; André Kertész; Herbert List; Adam Magyar; Yamamoto Masao; Sanaz Mazinani; Donald Mennie; Joel Meyerowitz; Inge Morath; Deanna Pizzitelli; Joseph F. Rock; Rosalind Fox Solomon; Alexander Barton Thom; Larry Towell; Peter Varley; Alex Webb; Charles Devenish Woodley; George S. Zimbel.