James, Geoffrey, 1942-

Geoffrey James LL. D. (born January 9, 1942) is a Canadian documentary photographer, who lives in Montreal and has been influenced lifelong by Eugene Atget. Like Atget, he has been fascinated with the built environment. Early in his long career, James made panoramic landscapes. These black-and-white photographs illuminated his subjects, nature's spaces and the changes wrought by society on both its more idealized creations such as formal gardens and its darker side - the asbestos mining landscape. His aims were two-fold, both "Utopia" and "Dystopia". (Utopia/Dystopia was the title of his book/catalogue and retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 2008. Around 2010 he was reborn as a digital photographer and his work, mainly of Toronto, though still intelligent and meditative, became more socially oriented. In 2016, appropriately, he was appointed the first Photo Laureate of Toronto by Mayor John Tory. For some years, James has been fascinated with the modern architect Jože Plečnik (1875-1957) and his architecture, especially the social places he created, in Ljubljana, Slovenia and exhibited photographs in shows about his work, both in Canada (2019) and abroad (2022). In 2023, James was described as a "consummate photographer with a distinctive vision".