Paul Roth talks 10 years of focus on photography at The Image Centre

The Image Centre celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Formerly the Ryerson Image Centre, the Toronto institution is world-renowned for its groundbreaking photography exhibitions, robust research program and photography collection of nearly 375,000 objects spanning the medium’s history. Paul Roth, director of The Image Centre since fall 2013, gives us a snapshot of the centre’s impact and future.

What impact has The Image Centre had on the City of Toronto?
The centre has helped consolidate Toronto's position as an important place for the study of photography. Everyone is a photographer now, and we learn from photographs all the time, because we all have cameras and the internet in our phones and connect to one another through our images.

Photography has been used for reportage, documentation, identification, advertising, artistic expression and on and on—countless uses. So I think that study of this medium is critically important. Over the last 10 years, Toronto has become one of very few cities with a world-class photography centre.

What can you tell us about the new name?
As we neared our 10-year anniversary, the university was in the process of changing its name, and we saw that as an opportunity to enter our next chapter with a renewed commitment to our mission, which is to explore the diverse uses and meanings of the photographic image in society.

Our new name reflects this: the word “image” is key, as the unfolding history of photography includes still images in analogue and digital, and moving images too. And we wanted to emphasize our status as a “centre:” not only a museum with a collection, or a gallery with exhibitions, but at the heart of it all, a centre for new and cutting-edge research about the cultural impacts of this incredible medium, an integral mode of communication and expression all over the world.

How does The Image Centre provide educational opportunities on campus?
Predating The Image Centre is The Creative School’s Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management graduate program, in the School of Image Arts. So Toronto Met has been graduating master’s students trained to care for photography collections for some time.

Our graduates go all over the world and work in different museums. For example, I’ll be travelling to New York City next week and going to the Museum of Modern Art. I’ll be doing research for a future exhibition at The Image Centre and the person who will be showing me photographs is a graduate of our program. That happens to me a lot.

For the last several years now, we’ve also had a scholarly imprint with MIT Press, and we’ve published five books on photographic history and have another one on the way. And so our impact in the academic world of photo history is growing.

Additionally, the centre offers five annual fellowships to support research related to our collections, bringing scholars from our own F+PPCM program and from around the world to the centre’s Peter Higdon Research Centre. Research in our collections has been extensively published in books, academic journals and included in panels and conferences on photography, furthering conversations that begin on campus.

Can you share some highlights from the past 10 years?
Our opening exhibition was called Archival Dialogues. We invited a number of artists, local and international, to take our marquee Black Star Collection and use the images as inspiration for new artworks. That was a great start that established how we see the medium.

So from the very beginning, in a variety of exhibitions that we’re really proud of, we’ve been able to show how historical photography can lead to contemporary knowledge.

Our shows set the tone for what we always want to do, which is to help people understand how photography—and history, as told through photographs—can be of great importance to people today who are reflecting on the past in order to understand the present.

What’s something lesser known about The Image Centre?
The importance of our always-growing collection, and the research that we conduct and facilitate. These things are less evident to the people who visit our galleries, but they are the basis for our reputation as a world leader in photo history.

A great number of photo historians, both emerging and established, come to Toronto to visit our collections and exhibitions, so the word is spreading. I’m also really proud of our great team—fully half of our staff went through the university’s photography collections management program.

Is there an upcoming exhibition that you’re particularly excited about?
In the fall of 2024, we’re mounting an exhibition of portraits by Richard Avedon that is all about ageing. It’s a thematic survey of his career, focusing on portraits where he specifically tried to document the experience and challenges of aging in the faces of his subjects—the resilience and struggle necessary at this stage of life. We’re doing this in collaboration with the university’s National Institute on Ageing and will have great programs addressing the subject. These pictures are some of the greatest portraits Avedon ever made, and I hope audiences will come see the show.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For more information, visit the Image Centre's website.

Paul Roth talks 10 years of focus on photography at The Image Centre

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Paul Roth talks 10 years of focus on photography at The Image Centre

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