Raymonde April

April, Raymonde

 Raymonde April, photographer (b at Moncton, NB 23 June 1953). Since the early 1970s, April's practice has influenced the development of photography in Québec and Canada as she has explored the influence of narrative on photographic images. Long photographic series constructed in an evocative mode, micro-events taken from everyday experience and transformed into fabulous storylines, and series of familiar portraits and landscapes make up her body of work. If the photographer tackles the main genres of photography (portraiture, landscape, still life, travelogues and the private journal), it has been in order to subvert them, to create affinities between them and to reinvent other modes of association that are new and disconcerting. April transforms these familiar scenes and characters of the everyday in a desire to transcend such experiences. All of April's work is thus articulated around a dialectic between near and far, appearance and disappearance, making distance a key factor in mapping the territory of the symbolic and the imaginary.

April's work has been exhibited regularly in Canada (MUSÉE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN DE MONTRÉAL in 1986; Presentation House, Vancouver, in 1993; Galerie Jean-Claude Rochefort, Montréal, in 1993; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa, in 2003; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, in 2005; Ottawa Art Gallery, in 2007) and in Europe (Credac, Ivry-sur-Seine, in 1989; Fondation La Caixa, Tarragone, in 1992; Rencontres lnternationales de la Photographie, Arles, in 1993; Galeria The Box, Turin, in 1994; Netherlands Foto Instituut, Rotterdam, in 2000). It has been the subject of various publications, and is included in museum collections in Canada and Europe. In 2003 she was awarded the Prix du Québec, Prix Paul-Emile Borduas.

See alsoPHOTOGRAPHY.