Form and Legacy: Jane Corkin’s Vision of Photography as Fine Art

A display wall from Between Life and Light at the Jane Corkin Gallery.

The Jane Corkin Gallery’s 45th-anniversary exhibition, Between Life and Light, begins with the space itself: a historic tank house in Toronto’s Distillery District. The oak floors and wooden beams, reimagined in 2003 by architects Shim-Sutcliffe, create a gallery of light and levels that feels both expansive and intimate. This architectural transformation mirrors the exhibition’s premise—photography as a continuum of history and innovation, spanning nearly two centuries from 1857 to 2024.

Curated by Dr. Stephen Brown, an anesthesiologist at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and a collector whose empathetic approach informs the show’s structure, the exhibition examines resilience, identity, and artistic evolution through carefully considered pairings. Diane Arbus’s Masked Woman in a Wheelchair (1970) is placed alongside Michelle Forsyth’s Grips (2023)—sculptural works moulded by hand from plasticine by an artist navigating life with Parkinson’s disease. This pairing invites viewers into an intimate dialogue about vulnerability, strength, and how artists transform personal challenges into creative expression.

Thematic walls within the gallery explore gaze and representation: women contemplating the male gaze, men observing men, and queer identity. These sections provide a framework for understanding how photographers engage with their subjects while challenging societal norms. George Platt Lynes’s Fire Island portraits from the 1930s—intimate studies of male nudes—are placed in conversation with later works by photographers like Richard Avedon and Herb Ritts, whose depictions of male bodies expanded on Lynes’s legacy of sensuality and form.

Another display. (The largest photo is by Herb Ritts.)

Dance photography emerges as another cornerstone of the exhibition. Barbara Morgan’s portraits of Martha Graham (1935) and José Limón (1944) capture movement as both abstraction and expression. This exploration transitions seamlessly into André Kertész’s Scales of Justice (1939), a defining highlight that distorts everyday objects into symbols of imbalance and inequity. Corkin describes this image as one of her personal favourites—a work that transcends its era through its surreal manipulation of form and incisive social commentary.

Margaret Bourke-White’s Machine Dance (1930)—a rare print borrowed by institutions such as the Tate in London—depicts dancers statically linked together, their poses forming a striking tableau. Within the exhibition’s exploration of abstraction, the photograph stands out for its ability to transform human figures into sculptural forms that merge art and design.

Throughout the exhibition, Corkin’s curatorial vision unintentionally foregrounds a diverse array of women photographers whose works are woven into various thematic sections. Artists such as Margaret Watkins, Lisette Model, Germaine Krull, Sheila Metzner, Sarah Moon, Nan Goldin, Carol Marino, Deborah Turbeville, Sondra Meszaros, Barbara Astman and Lori Newdick contribute to this narrative. Newdick’s self-portraits examine individuality through fashion and queerness while drawing on her connection to Astman, who was her professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Linda McCartney is also represented here; her photograph The Hurts (1986) blends intimacy with psychological insight, adding another layer to this exploration.

Thaddeus Holownia’s feather photographs offer yet another perspective—quiet studies that transform natural objects into meditative compositions. These works invite viewers to slow down and consider the tactile beauty of materials often overlooked.

Gallerist Jane Corkin.

What distinguishes Between Life and Light is its ability to connect photographic traditions across time without losing sight of individual vision. Corkin’s decades-long curatorial practice redefines photography as a medium that transcends documentation, exploring the complexities of human experience through an eclectic range of works. As she remarked during a private walkthrough of her extraordinary show: “Each work in the show says something particular to itself that isn’t like any other work. It’s very hard to be an artist—and the further we go on in history, the harder it is to be original.”

And yet, originality resonates throughout this exhibition—not as an overt declaration but as a quiet insistence on photography’s capacity to reinvent itself across generations.

– Deirdre Kelly is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at The Globe and Mail newspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for Dance Magazine in New York, the Dance Gazette in London, and NUVO in Vancouver, and is a contributor to the International Dictionary of Ballet and AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds. The best-selling author of Paris Times Eight and Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York University as Editor of the award-winning The York University Magazine where she is also the publication’s principal writer. In 2023, she published her latest book, Fashioning The Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World.