Where is the truth in Photography

I went to see Stan Douglas: Ghostlight at the Hessel Museum of Art. The show spans more than forty works from the 1990s to the present, covering photography, video, and installation. It’s Douglas’s first U.S. survey in over twenty years, and it makes the case for why his work matters now: he is an artist obsessed with the moments when history could tip one way or another, when collective memory becomes fractured or is questioned, and when images step in to fill the gaps.  

What struck me most was how Douglas constructs images that look like historical documents but are, in fact, fabrications. His works take on the authority of documentary —grain, framing, and the purposeful feel of photographed by the documentary photographer—yet behind the surface is staging, compositing, rooted in meticulous research. The results are unsettling, feeling factual and uncanny at teh same time. 

One example from Douglass’s Crowds and Riots series is Hastings Park, 16 July 1955 (2008). - (pictured below). It shows a dense horse-racing crowd in mid-century dress, absorbed in their betting slips, cigarettes, and conversations. The image could pass as a slice of documentary history, but Douglas built it piece by piece, directing actors and digitally assembling the scene.  

This tension between truth and performance runs through the whole show. Douglas doesn’t simply undermine photography’s claim to truth—he shows us how that claim is constructed in the first place. The images are believable because we want to believe them. They expose the mechanics of the photograph and our own willing investment in its authority. 

Hastings park

Scale plays a crucial role here. They are monumental, filling walls and commanding attention like history paintings. In fact, Douglas is working in what we might call the “fine-art scale” of photography: a seductive size and mode of presentation that emerged in the late twentieth century as artists like Jeff Wall or Andreas Gursky began producing photographs large enough to rival painting in the museum.  

In Hogan’s Alley (2014) -below, Douglas revisits a vanished neighborhood in Vancouver once known for its Black and immigrant communities, erased under the banner of urban renewal.

The location itself no longer exists, erased through decades of urban redevelopment. Douglas pieced it back together from archival fragments—museum collections, library records, and historical photographs of Hogan’s Alley. Using 3D modeling software, he rebuilt the entire architectural landscape, applying textures and lighting before finally’ re-photographing' the virtual scene. The resulting image, in black and white, is desolate and emptied of human presence. At its monumental fine-art scale, it appears convincingly photographic, yet its stillness gives it away: the scene feels suspended, too precise, revealing its origins as a digital reconstruction rather than a captured moment.

As you look at the image, I think you interpret it as a kind of staged model, maybe a maquette of something else, but it provides a lot of information and begins to feel reminiscent of being above a neighbourhood—a viewpoint from a tall building or even a low aircraft. You start to imagine how the next frame of an animation might play out, as if you were traversing the scene, as if you were alive, moving in front of the world itself. If you go that far in your mind, you begin to understand the spatial proposals at play. The objects built in the computer as physical forms develop spatial and volumetric relationships to one another; the stillness becomes more apparent. The absence of air, dust, sound, or any other atmospheric condition is palpable—each is stripped away in the black-and-white computer rendering. 

I find the light convincing. Light simulation in computer graphics becomes most compelling when radiosity comes into play, when light reflecting off one surface bounces to another, generating a dense network of subtle illumination. These interactions produce atmosphere in the most literal way: they make air visible. In Hogan’s Alley, rendered entirely in black and white, Douglas adds another layer of distance—one that mirrors our own encounter with photographs as forms of evidence. The removal of colour intensifies the sense of separation, reminding us that this image of a lost place is both a reconstruction and a meditation on how we come to see the real.