Arnaud MaggsLife & Work

“Arnaud Maggs’s innovative approach and willingness to experiment won him the respect and admiration of his peers, as a designer, commercial photographer, and visual artist. The connections between his extraordinary creative practices are fascinating.”

– Anne Cibola

In Arnaud Maggs: Life & Work, author Anne Cibola chronicles the breadth of Maggs’s oeuvre, from his early illustrations and photographs to his signature black-and-white portraits. Throughout the 1990s, he explored themes of memory and history by photographing found materials, from discarded ephemera to rare books, garnering attention in the New York Times and Village Voice. He chronicled people and paraphernalia with layers of meaning that are of personal, historical, and universal significance.

Towards the end of Maggs’s life, he was honoured with a survey at the National Gallery of Canada, and he won the Scotiabank Photography Award in 2012. That same year he completed his final piece, After Nadar, a series of self portraits in costume, tracing his life and interests and offering a remarkable statement that demonstrates photography’s capacity to represent the past, present, and future all at once.

Copyright Information

Banner image: Arnaud Maggs , After Nadar, Pierrot Turning, 2012. Courtesy of The Estate of Arnaud Maggs. © The Estate of Arnaud Maggs / Courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery.