Episode 28 / This Is What We Saw: The Disraeli Photography Project

In the summer of 1972, four photographers and two researchers spent three months in Disraeli, Quebec, making a collective documentary portrait of the town. They spoke with residents, photographed everyday life and developed friendships. When eighteen photographs appeared in Perspectives in 1974, some influential residents objected. How could this be the town they knew?

In This Is What We Saw, Philippe Guillaume begins with Michel Campeau’s photograph of musicians and two boys walking through a cemetery. Drawing on Zoë Tousignant’s research and his own experience photographing people, he considers the disagreement between making a photograph and recognizing oneself in it. Fifty years later, residents went out with cameras to photograph Disraeli again. The episode moves between these moments, asking how people who spent time together could come away with such different pictures.

We were together, there. But we weren’t necessarily seeing the same thing. And now we’re looking at the same photographs, with very different pictures in our minds.

Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Michel Campeau, Roger Charbonneau and Cedric Pearson made the photographs for the Disraeli project during the summer of 1972. Ginette Laurin and Maryse Pellerin recorded interviews and sounds. Supported by the Canadian government’s Opportunities for Youth program, the six participants spent three months making a documentary portrait of the Quebec town and its people.

On February 9, 1974, eighteen photographs appeared in Perspectives, a supplement distributed with French-language newspapers. Some influential residents felt the selection made Disraeli look poor and stuck in the past. The disagreement reached the pages of Le Devoir, where Pierre Vallières defended the photographers and Henri Barras considered both their subjective vision and the residents’ grounds for complaint.

In 2022, the McCord Stewart Museum’s exhibition Disraeli Revisited, curated by Zoë Tousignant, brought unseen photographs and recovered recordings back into view. A workshop also invited residents to look at the older images and photograph the town themselves. Tousignant’s research distinguishes the Disraeli collective from the Groupe d’Action Photographique, to which the project has often been attributed.

This Is What We Saw begins with people walking through Campeau’s cemetery photograph and returns to residents going out with cameras fifty years later. Between those moments lies a disagreement that familiarity alone could not prevent. Being welcomed, spending time together and making photographs did not mean that photographers and residents understood the pictures in the same way.

View Michel Campeau’s La garde paroissiale, Disraeli, June 18, 1972.

Sources & Further Reading

Images & Works

Michel Campeau. La garde paroissiale, Disraeli, June 18, 1972. Gelatin silver print. Collection of the artist.

Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Michel Campeau, Roger Charbonneau and Cedric Pearson. Disraeli, une expérience humaine en photographie. Les Publications de l’Imagerie Populaire, 1974. Loose-leaf photographic book in a box, edition of 1,000. Graphic design by Jorge Guerra; English text by Doreen Lindsay.

Collectif de l’Imagerie Populaire de Disraeli. “Disraeli en images.” Perspectives, February 9, 1974. Portfolio of eighteen photographs.

McCord Stewart Museum. Disraeli Revisited: Chronicle of an Event in Quebec Photography. October 28, 2022–February 19, 2023. Curated by Zoë Tousignant.

Texts & Ideas

Zoë Tousignant. “Le projet Disraeli : idéaux et limites de la collaboration en photographie.” RACAR, vol. 49, no. 1, 2024.

Pierre Dessureault. “Retour sur l’aventure Disraeli.” Ciel variable, no. 121, Déambulations, autumn 2022. Excerpt available online.

Alexis Curodeau-Codère. “Disraeli – Le pouvoir de se souvenir et de se raconter par l’image.” Résonance, McCord Stewart Museum, October 17, 2022.

Pierre Vallières. “La réhabilitation de l’ordinairement vécu.” Le Devoir, March 7, 1974, p. 15. Henri Barras. “L’affaire Disraeli et les photographes parias.” Le Devoir, May 4, 1974, p. 16. Michel Campeau. “Walker Evans et Disraeli.” OVO, autumn 1975, p. 8. Quoted and discussed in Tousignant’s article above.

Garry Winogrand. Artist page, Fraenkel Gallery. Includes the statement quoted in this episode.