Item consists of a diptych of Dave Heath, 2005, by Michael Schreier
Schreier, Michael, 1949- : Michael Schreier is a professional artist, teacher, and photographer. His professional career began in 1972 and his work celebrates both the public and private hero and their rituals.
Mr. Schreier earned his diploma in Photographic Arts from the Ryerson Polytechincal Institute in Toronto, Ontario in 1971, and in 1975 completed his Master of Fine Arts Degree at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. He served as an assistant professor from 1972-2003 at the University of Ottawa, and later became associate professor in the Visual Arts Department from 1998 to 2001. A number of his works can be found at the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Photography, the Library and Archives Canada, Carleton University Gallery, the Agnes-Etherington Art Center at Queen's University, in the Canada Council Art Bank, and with the City of Ottawa Art Collection. In 1977 Michael received the Time-Life Annual of Photography Award.
He currently resides in Ottawa.
Heath, David, 1931-2016 : David Heath was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 27 June 1931. He became a landed immigrant in Canada in 1970 and a Canadian citizen in 2014. Heath began photographing in the late 1940s and in 1959 was in New York studying and working as a photographer. In the tradition of those he most admired like Walker Evans, David Heath endlessly compiled and chronicled everyday life toward a graphic and contemplative essay on the human condition and his own human condition. Heath's major influences were W. Eugene Smith whom he studied under in New York, Edward Steichen and Robert Frank who encouraged him to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships in Photography in 1963 and 1964 for photographic studies of the human condition in the United States.
David Heath is an internationally known photographer most famous for his collection of photography A Dialogue With Solitude that first appeared in 1961 and was reprinted by Lumiere Press in 2000 and 2002 with a Photogravure Edition and a foreword by Robert Frank. Hugh Edwards, Curator of Photography at the Chicago Institute of Art called A Dialogue With Solitude "a self-portrait in which the artist himself never really appears." A Dialogue With Solitude was the product of more than a decade of personal exploration and the resolution of Heath's creative search to enunciate his statement in the visually poetic form of sequence and stands as a testament to mankind's ability to transform through art, misery into beauty, loneliness into solitude"(Janine Smiter, National Gallery of Canada, 16 Nov., 1981).
After moving to Toronto to teach photography at Ryerson Polythecnical Institute in the early 1970s, Heath began experimenting with Polaroid technology. He created a series of narrative works in Songs of Innocence and began working with historical photographs in Le Grand album ordinaire (1973) and Ars Moriendi (1980). In 1981, the National Gallery of Canada mounted a retrospective exhibition of his work. Heath retired from teaching in 1997 but remained in Toronto.
In 2001, he gave up Polaroids and took up digital photography, returning to his original subject, street photography, on the sidewalks of Toronto and New York. A selection of this digital colour work appeared in his self-published book "Dave Heath's Art Show" (2007), dedicated to Robert Frank, in which he revisited familiar themes, the "undoing" and "rewriting" of A Dialogue with Solitude. "To undo the book then rewrite it a new" (Edmond Jabés in Heath's journals).
David Heath died in Toronto on June 27, 2016, the day of his 85th birthday. He is represented at major galleries across North America including National Gallery of Canada; the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the International Museum of Photography, New York; the George Eastman House, New York; The Getty, Los Angeles; the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and influenced generations of young artists during his more than 20 years as a professor at Ryerson University, Toronto.
