in the 1960s and 1970s. Only more recently has his
importance as a photographer and theorist been
recognized as photography has taken its place
front and center in contemporary art practice
with the emergence of a younger generation in
the 1980s. A good example is his pieceWalking
Woman, which occupied him between 1961 and
1967 when he showed eleven sculptures in the
Ontario Pavillion at Montreal’s Expo ‘67. The
silhouetted, formulaic figure Snow presented in
various media, including drawings and sculpture,
took and gave meaning from how the figure was
positioned, whether in print or in public spaces.
Created during the ascendancy of Pop Art, the
Walking Woman was a Pop Art icon in which
subject and object are one; it was also a dense,
highly experimental work that had its detractors.
TheWalking Womanphase concluded Snow dis-
covered a sheet of newspaper, exposed to sunlight,
had taken the imprint of a small cutout he had
casually left laying atop it. This convergence of
human intervention (the creation of the cutout)
and the vagaries of the larger world which have
no intention or meaning unless humans ascribe
meaning to them was for Snow a perfect expression
of what he had been striving for. Thus began his
search for an autonomous photography containing
nothing outside of itself. However, the autonomy
of Snow’s work is always supplemented by auto-
biography, by his idea of photography as ob-
jectified memory, by self-conscious references to
intentionality and spectatorship, all of which
anticipates the major debates around art in the
last decades of the twentieth century.
Born Michael James Aleck Snow in Toronto,
Ontario, Canada in 1929. His early interests were
in music, which he explored during visits to Chica-
go’s legendary jazz clubs in the late 1940s. He
played piano with various Toronto groups while a
student 1948–1952 at the Ontario College of Art
and took up the trumpet in the early 1950s. He
lived and traveled in Europe in 1953 and 1954,
playing jazz. He made his first film in 1955, an
animated work calledAtoZ, made while working
at Graphic Films and painted in an Abstract
Expressionist style, showing these works at the
Isaacs Gallery, Toronto beginning in 1957. He
played with Dixieland trumpeter Mike White
1958–1961 and formed his own bebop groups in
the late 1950s and early 1960s. He married film-
maker-artist Joyce Weiland in 1959.
Snow relocated to New York in 1962, where
experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas and the
Cinematheque he had founded provided stimulus
and encouragement. Snow made his best-known
workWavelength, a 45-minute slow zoom across
a studio, only occasionally interrupted by other,
quasi-narrative footage in 1966–1967. The film
and its movement conclude on a still photograph
of waves.Wavelengthwas revelation and catalyst
not only for filmmakers (it surprised Warhol who
went on to make his own famous films where
‘‘nothing happened’’) but for leading protagonists
of minimalism in other areas, such as avant-garde
musician and composer Steve Reich and sculptors
Donald Judd and Richard Serra. In its mediation
on the act of seeing, it questioned conventional
narrative forms and anticipated many of the con-
ceptual investigations artists were embarking upon
in the 1960s.
Snow continued to question the authority of
conventional modes of depiction (and thus percep-
tion) in works such asAtlantic(1967), in which a
grid of different black and white photographs of
waves is presented in recessed reflective metal
boxes, encouraging but then curtailing perspectival
viewing.Authorisation(1969) accumulates a record
of the sequence of exchanges between the eyes of
artist, camera and viewer.
The limits of the authority of the artist’s eye are
further exposed inVenetian Blind(1970), in which
Snow holds the camera at arm’s length, its eye
looking at him. Closing his eyes, he pulls the trig-
ger. The camera sees, blurrily because the hands
holding it wobble, the ‘‘sightless’’ artist intercut
with a sequence of renowned Venetian sights. The
work encapsulates, with characteristic economy,
the agency implied by vision. It is a theme which
has dominated his work to the present. Another is
the vacillation between representation and reality.
Midnight Blue(1973–1974) sets within the framing
conventions of a painting, a photograph of a can-
dle which illumines the picture and has left the wax
traces of its real existence on the shelf.
Other work from the period, although not made
by the camera, was about camera-determined
vision. His pivotal 1968 exhibition at the Poindex-
ter Gallery in New York made the spectator, peer-
ing through apertures in its contrived spaces, into
the embodiment of vision and induced the power
that comes with surveillance. As the artist is not a
machine, however, so photography is never a
purely mechanical process. ‘‘I’d like people to
learn how to see and hear so they can always see
and hear...and know the truth,’’ Snow says, while
his work seems to demonstrate the contingency of
visual truth (The Michael Snow Project–Collected
Writings, 1994). Snow, also a prolific writer, makes
many glancing references to ‘‘religious inklings’’
and the shamanic powers of the artist throughoutSNOW, MICHAEL