by MATTHEW WOODLEY

Had they been taken a few decades ago, Annemarie Crampton’s photos might have been shocking. The subject is public affection—girl-on-girl, that is, posed kissing in Montreal spaces from the grocery store to the opera house. We’re past the shock factor these days, and that’s not Crampton’s goal anyway. With her show Kiss Me: Public Spaces, she just wants people to think about their reflexes.

“There are probably a lot of people who find themselves thinking that they’re pretty accepting of [queer displays of affection],” she explains. “But if they see it in certain spaces, they realize they have a slightly different feeling.” She goes on to point out the power of context: “It’s okay in certain ways, certain places. But in the supermarket where I go every day and I push my kid along in a shopping cart and I pick up my milk, like no.

“You could make an analogy to homeless people,” she continues. “If you see homeless people on the street where people think they belong, that’s okay. But if you see them in the supermarket, well that’s a bit weirder, and if you see them in Ogilvy’s or the opera, even the bank… they’re not supposed to be there.”

Crampton has a background in psychology. Though she’s not overly analytical about her work, people’s different reactions to her project paint an interesting picture. A few findings in her tour of town:

In a metro car, two girls kiss and fellow passengers feign obliviousness. “They’re all staring straight ahead,” she points out. “And if you look in close you can see that one woman is looking with her eyes but not her face. I think there’s a lot of that going on.”

At Jeanne-Mance Park, the weekend beers ’n’ baseball boys voice their approval. “They were shouting things out like, ‘Have any of you ever had a man?’ and ‘Go baby go!’” she recalls. “That came the closest to making me feel weird about it—hoping that the guys there didn’t think it was for them.”

And at a downtown diner, the staff isn’t so down. “It was pretty extreme,” recalls Crampton. They wouldn’t stop staring at us and they brought us a cheque five minutes after we sat down. Basically they wanted us out of there. I didn’t include that one in the show because you see the two waitresses staring right at me… We obviously didn’t belong there.”

For the photographer and models, interaction with the public was a key part of the project. “It was kind of an act of resistance in itself,” Crampton says. “The photo was there to capture it, but half the experience was the actual act of doing that—going into the supermarket and having people kiss in front of the dairy section. I think that was good and challenging for both me and the couples in it.” :

Kiss Me: Public Spaces opens on Saturday,
Oct. 12, at Bar Magnolia (1329 Ste-Catherine E.)
and runs until Nov. 15