Note (ZL): This publication is an exhibition catalogue prepared for the 1995 showing, at the Owens Art Gallery (Sackville, New Brunswick), of Thaddeus Holownia’s Sable Island photographs. An essay by Penny Cousineau accompanies four colour photos (27.5 x 10.5 cm). Cousineau is a professor (History and Theory of Art) in the Department of Visual Arts, University of Ottawa. Holownia has been a professor at the Fine Arts Department at Mount Allison University since 1977, and made images of Sable during several visits in the late 1980s. He describes the island as a minimalist environment, a natural laboratory of light where fluctuations in light become immediately apparent (qualities also described by plein air painter Roger Savage). Cousineau notes that Canadian landscape photographers appear to prefer the format of the horizontal “panoramic” image, and writes that “This would seem to point to a mental image Canadians have of their country, that of a horizontal band spanning the continent, and to suggest that the panoramic format best accommodates our expansive sense of space.”
