by MATTHEW WOODLEY

The fear in the man’s one eye as he’s held at gunpoint is enough to make time stop for a second, sucking you into in a shot about as arresting it gets. Taken in September, 2002, during the military and rebel-group uprisings in the Ivory Coast, the photo is part of a brutal series taken by Agence-France Presse photographer Georges Gobet that won him first prize in the World Press Photo competition in the Spot News Story category.

Just one exhibition of more than 20 that make up this year’s Mois de la Photo, World Press Photo contains no shortage of similarly dismal captures. A woman hostage from the Moscow theatre siege, overwhelmed by gas, slumps glassy- eyed over a seat on a hospital-bound bus. A portrait of a 12-year-old Sierra Leonean “bushwife” (the local term for abducted cook/sex slave/etc.) reveals her scars from caustic soda burns received after she tried to escape her captors. And the grand-prize winner of the competition, by Iranian-American Eric Grigorian, depicts a young boy surrounded by people digging graves for those killed in an earthquake that had hit Iran that morning. He clings to his dead father’s pants next to the grave where the man is about to be buried.

Two hundred photographs make up the WPP exhibition in Montreal, this year’s touring show of award winners from the 46-year-old, Dutch-based organization. Fortunately the odd break from the stomach-turning stuff can be taken, thanks to categories like the arts, science and sports, where Shaolin monks walk on walls and smash bricks over their heads, gelada baboons flash their gums, and, in an image that graced the cover of the New York Times Magazine, poor Leonardo DiCaprio looks like he just got his heart broken.

FROM JOLTS TO AVERAGE JOES

Photojournalism figures prominently in the Mois de la Photo, which for the first time in its eight bi-annual editions has a theme running through it. “Now: Images in Present Time” focuses on the way we represent and see current events through imagery. Twenty or so artists take different approaches on the theme through symbolism, satire, staging and un-sensationalism. While, for example, Georges Gobet’s harsh photos are one take on the powers that be, Paul Shambroom takes a different tact.

Shambroom has sat in on more than 100 rural-U.S.A. town-hall meetings, documenting American democracy in action through panoramic shots, mostly of regular folk sitting at head tables in bright rooms. As far as action goes these are boring as hell, which is exactly their charm. The photos in Meetings have a dry, objective air; they figure like “The Last Supper” starring the people you just saw at Wal-Mart, where power in the most powerful country in the world is coloured common. “The documentary practice of exposing society’s unseen ills has come to be regarded as a form of cultural colonialism,” writes Shambroom, “largely because of class differences between the viewer and the viewed.”

DETAILS, DETAILS

If Meetings steers clear of shock value, check out Alain Pratte’s À rebours. Once upon a time, the Montreal-based artist happened upon a jar in a neighbourhood junk shop that was full of bits of negative. The images turned out to be documentation that served a not-so-public purpose: possible insurance-claim adjuncts, legal stuff and the like. One shows a hand pointing at a scuffmark on a ’60s-era car. Another is a close-up of a man pointing at a zit-like dot on his neck. Yet another’s a curious close-up of a topless girl with a ruler held under her breasts stretching all of nine inches across her torso. Pratte, who has an affinity for linking still photography and cinema, created a video out of the photos that puts photojournalism across, not as a carrier of ongoing news, but as purely functional documentation—more interesting, though, because he found this stuff in a jar and from there you’re pretty much left to the bounds of your imagination.

Galleries can give a space for such fancy to flourish, certainly in contrast to image and info-crammed newspapers and magazines. At least that’s the idea behind French photographer Luc Delahaye’s History. His panoramas of global-issue media hotspots have a certain reserve to them, as if he’s taken a few steps backward from the in-your-face news vantage. A Taliban soldier lies dead in the mud with enough background in it that he almost blends into the landscape, making for less crash, more contemplation. Delahaye shoots the Slobodan Milosovic tribunal with the defendant sitting well in the background. The generic-looking guards who stand in one corner somehow figure as prominently, if not more, than the mass-genocide leader sitting behind the mic giving us all the silent treatment.

SOCIALISM SYMBOLIZED

Moving from the über real to the set up, Chinese photographer Wang Qingsong’s Épopées du present is a playful, but serious portrayal of China’s messy shift toward capitalism. Through kitschy, pop-arty studio shots, he creates simple icons such as an Asian man reaching out to a Cosmo-looking Western woman as she walks away brusquely with a purse full of greenbacks. Another photo has a group of doll-like Chinese women posed above a disproportionately small, half-naked man clutching a stuffed tiger. The consumer-culture invasion would make Castro cry.

Which he does, actually, in Jiri David’s No Compassion. Manipulated headshots of Fidel, Vladimir Putin, Ariel Sharon, and a handful of other weeping world leaders hark back to the days when events were often accompanied only by portraits. Mere faces don’t convey a whole lot in newsland, of course, but seeing these presidents all red-eyed is even a bit moving. Poor Putin. n

THE WORLD PRESS PHOTO EXHIBIT RUNS AT THE MAISON DE LA CULTURE PLATEAU MONT-ROYAL (465 MONT-ROYAL E.) UNTIL SEPT. 28; MEETINGS IS AT THE MDLC NOTRE-DAME-DE-GRACE (3755 BOTREL) UNTIL OCT. 5; À REBOURS IS AT OCCURENCE (460 STE-CATHERINE W., #307) UNTIL OCT. 18; HISTORY AND NO COMPASSION SHOW AT QUARTIER ÉPHÉMÈRE (745 OTTAWA) UNTIL OCT. 12; AND ÉPOPÉES DU PRÉSENT IS THE LIANE AND DANNY TARAN GALLERY (5170 CÔTE-STE-CATHERINE) UNTIL NOV. 9. FOR INFO ON THE REST OF MOIS DE LA PHOTO PROGRAMMING, VISIT WWW.MOISDELAPHOTO.COM