About

Hugh McBride is an image-based artist with a special interest in street and documentary narratives. He is fascinated with the power of memory, thought and imagination to mediate our relationship with others and our surroundings, and the corresponding power of a photograph to challenge, even disrupt, conditioned patterns of thinking and feeling to yield insight. Much that is great in photography, he believes, are expressions, ultimately, of irony. Images that seem merely representative take us on a journey past appearances, beneath the surface, from the perceived back to the perceiver, and to qualities of subjective experience that are, at once, mysterious and ineffable.

Of great interest to Hugh, as well, are the fragments of time in which the arrangements of objects, subjects, colour and texture, assemble and, in the next instant, disperse. The awareness employed in seeing and capturing arrangements before they vanish forever calls into profound question the matter of the photographer’s identity, even to the point of suggesting that, “I took a photograph” be replaced with, “A photograph was taken”.

Hugh lives just outside Canada's national capital, Ottawa.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography

Salon 44, 2016, 2017: Juried exhibitions of image-based work by members

365, 2016: Juried exhibition of image-based work by members

Island. Resident. 2016. A curated exhibition of photographs produced at a photography residency led by April Hickox at Artscape Gibralter Point, 2015

Photopia 2013, 2014, 2015: Exhibitions of image-based work by members

ScotiaBank CONTACT Photography Festival

Dark Room 4.0, 2015 and Dark Room 5.0, 2016: Annual juried group exhibition of analog photography facilitated and hosted by the 918 Bathurst Centre for Culture, Arts, Media, and Education

Open Exhibition, 2015 ScotiaBank CONTACT Photography Festival: Framing the Interior, Workshop Gallery, Junction Business Improvement Association

Awards

Best Figurative, Dark Room 4.0, a juried group exhibition of analog photography at the 2015 ScotiaBank CONTACT Photography Festival, 918 Bathurst Centre for Culture, Arts, Media, and Education

Residencies

Artscape Gibraltar Point, led by April Hickox, September 2014 and 2015

Study

Self-study and mentoring: Ian Campbell; Keesic Douglas; April Hickox; Meera Margaret Singh

Various workshops and courses at the Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2012 to present: Studio Lighting; Best Scanning Practices; PhotoShop for Black & White Photography; Darkroom Development and Printing; Traditions in Portraiture

Private instruction in darkroom practices with Marco Buenocore, Adolfo Fernandez, 2015

Ryerson University, Digital Capture 101, 2011

Membership

Member, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, a non-profit artist-run centre.