Ten amazing shots from the Contact Photography Festival

By Simon Lewsen

The city-wide Contact Photography Festival returns in May with a smorgasbord of images from 1,500 artists. Here, the 10 most mesmerizing shots:

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<strong>Untitled, 2013</strong><br /><br /> Michael Barker’s gritty shots capture Parkdale’s Niagara Custom Lab, one of the few places in Canada that still process Super 8 film. <em>May 1 to 31, Gladstone Hotel.</em>

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<strong>The Death of a Journey V, 2008</strong><br /><br /> The bay of Nouadhibou, Mauritania, is a graveyard for decaying shipwrecks. This shot, by Zineb Sedira, is of the United Malika, a beached 400-foot reefer vessel. <br /> <em>May 1 to 31, Power Plant.</em>

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<strong>Contemporary Floral Arrangement 4 (Two Monochromatic Color Schemes), 2014</strong><br /><br /> Sara Cwynar assembles eye-popping still lifes from household junk. Here, she recreates a retro floral arrangement using old electronics, spools, matchboxes and candles. <em>May 1 to 31, billboards on Lansdowne at Dundas and College.</em>

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<strong>Ascension, 2014</strong><br /><br /> Randy Grskovic collects vintage photos on eBay and manipulates them in his Toronto studio. In this shot, he used strips of Scotch tape to create beams of light radiating from the model’s head. <em>May 2 to 30, Katzman Contemporary.</em>

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<strong>Miuccia and Green Stripes, 2013</strong><br /><br /> Lorenzo Vitturi’s diptych, shot at the Ridley Road Food Market in London, features a regular shopper known as the market’s Miuccia Prada because of her colourful clothes. <em>May 1 to 31, Contact Gallery.</em>

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<strong>Backward 1 W, 2013</strong><br /><br /> For each of her madcap self-portraits, German artist Isabelle Wenzel dons vintage dresses, nylons and heels; auto-times her camera; and contorts her body into an awkward pose. <em>May 1 to 31, Metro Hall.</em>

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<strong>Garlic Man, 2012</strong><br /><br /> After moving to rural Mexico, the photojournalist Russell Monk began snapping portraits of the townspeople in his backyard studio—including this man, shown here as the king of the local garlic trade. <em>May 1 to 31, Nikola Rukaj Gallery.</em>

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<strong>Untitled (Clay Portfolio), 2013</strong><br /><br /> Chris Curreri attended pottery classes at the Gardiner Museum, where he photographed mounds of half-formed clay. His pictures reveal the chaotic nature of the creative process. <em>May 1 to 31, Gardiner Museum.</em>

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<strong>A Young Lover’s Dream, 2013</strong><br /><br /> This beach scene is inspired by photographer Joshua Jensen-Nagle’s childhood summers by the sea in New Jersey. He re-shoots his images repeatedly in the studio, introducing smoke or colour filters, until they take on the hazy quality of a distant memory. <em>To June 21, Art Gallery of Mississauga.</em>

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<strong>Untitled, 1960</strong><br /><br /> When he moved to New York in 1936, the Hungarian street photographer André Kertész found that Americans didn’t want their pictures taken, so he worked on the sly. For this image, he used a zoom lens to capture a Greenwich Village sunbather. <em>May 2 to June 20, Stephen Bulger Gallery.</em>

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