Douglas Clark

Born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1952, Douglas Clark studied at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto from 1971 to 1974, later moving to Edmonton where he worked as an instructor of Photography at Grant MacEwan College (later Grant MacEwan University) in 1975. He worked as a consultant on photography at the Edmonton Art Gallery from 1976 to 1977 and as Curator of Photography there in 1978. In this position, he organized numerous historical and contemporary exhibitions of photographic work by important regional, national and international artists. His curatorial work helped foster the development of the Edmonton Art Gallery's fledgling photography program, which for a period during the seventies and eighties, provided lively encouragement to photographic art production in the region.

After leaving the Edmonton Art Gallery, Douglas Clark taught and lectured throughout Canada and Europe, including at the Fachberreich Gestalung (School of Art and Design) in Hamburg, Germany and at Ryerson Polytechnical University. His work was exhibited widely in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including at McMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton, Ont.), the Goethe Institute (Dusseldorf, Germany), the Kamloops Art Gallery, the Toronto Photographers Workshop, Presentation House (Vancouver, BC) and the Edmonton Art Gallery. He is represented in the collections of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, The Canada Council Art Bank, The National Film Board of Canada, Stills Division, Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery and La Bibliothè national de Paris.

Douglas Clark established his reputation in the seventies with beautifully nuanced black and white images that documented the urban and rural landscapes of Western Canada. He later turned to colour photography and began creating images of tableau arrangements that expressed aspects of his own world, things that he had collected or seen, or that held personal meaning. Examples of these were included in the series “Articles of Faith,” which later became the subject of a book of the same name.