Publication

  • James Bay Cree Culture & Architecture
    George Legrady
    Author
    Damiani, 2020
  • GRANTEE
    George Legrady
    GRANT YEAR
    2019

James Bay Cree, Fort George, James Bay, 1973, Quebec, Canada. ©️ George Legrady.

A monograph of documentary photographs created in four coastal Cree First Nation villages in sub-arctic James Bay in 1973. The publication is to consist of introductory texts, approximately 180 black and white photographs of everyday scenes in the Cree communities just prior to their legal negotiations over infrastructure autonomy and land rights in response to the construction of the James Bay Hydro-electric project on traditional hunting lands. The photographs are grouped in two ways: as diptychs and also organized into clusters of three-by-three groupings. Sixty-three images feature indigenous structures and vernacular housing, eighteen show indigenous practices, seventy-two photographs document portraits and social rituals, and twenty-seven are of water travel in nature. The audience for this publication reaches across multiple audiences including, the James Bay Cree communities, architecture specialists, fine art photography, Native American, indigenous and ethnographic specialists, northern environment, and global warming specialists, academics, and the general public.

George Legrady is distinguished professor in the Media Arts and Technology program at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he directs the Experimental Visualization Lab. His practice and research explore the intersections of digital media, interactive installations, data and computational photographic visualizations. A pioneer in bringing computation to issues of photographic representation, his contribution to the field has been in intersecting cultural content with data processing to create new forms of representations. His artworks are in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, musée d’art contemporain in Montreal, Philbrook Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, ZKM (Center for Art and Media), 21c Museum and others. His work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship Fine Arts, Creative Capital Foundation, National Science Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, and Canada Council for the Arts.