University of Toronto Acquires 53 Portraits By Robert Giard

Beth Brant 1990 © Estate of Robert Giard

The University of Toronto Art Centre has recently acquired 53 portraits of LGBTQ authors by Robert Giard (1939-2002), part of Giard’s larger project, Particular Voices:  Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, an extensive and visually rich documentation of North American gay and lesbian literary figures.  Giard’s decades-long project, begun in the 1980s, celebrates queer histories and literature in the wake of the AIDS crisis, and includes such iconic figures as playwright Edward Albee, poet Allen Ginsberg, and young emerging talents like novelist Sapphire and Dorothy Allison. UTAC will incorporate this acquisition from the Giard Estate into its own substantial archive.

Giard’s portraits have been described as a “transaction between the photographer and the writer.” Often captured in casual surroundings, the portraits are disarming in their unadorned, straight-forward style, with occasional subjects sitting in domestic settings.  Between 1985 and his death in 2002, Giard took nearly 600 black and white portraits of literary figures including such Canadians as Beth Brant, Richard Labonté, Nicole Brossard, Michael Lynch and Daryl Hine.

“I believe it’s especially important that the Canadian authors included in Giard’s archive now have a home in Canada and in a university that celebrates Canadian literature. Students and researchers at SDS will have opportunities to see and work with the collection as part of their ongoing commitment to studying and exploring issues of identity, sexuality, and community and how they relate to questions of documentation, representation and aesthetics,” said Scott Rayter, Associate Director, Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.

“The University of Toronto Art Centre is exceptionally fortunate to be able to share this collection and the legacy it represents with students, faculty and the public, through special research projects, exhibitions, and rotating displays,” adds UTAC Interim Director Barbara Fischer.

The University of Toronto has also recently acquired the nearly complete archive of Allen Ginsberg’s surviving photographs. Together the two archives—Giard and Ginsberg—capture an extraordinary cultural history from the 1940s to the beginning of the 21st century. The entire Giard archive is available at the UTAC Collections Online portal that can be accessed from the University of Toronto Art Centre’s homepage at www.utac.utoronto.ca.

You can also view a tour of the exhibition Just As You Are: Portraits by Robert Giard by following the Watch link on the UTAC website www.utac.utoronto.ca/watch.