After more than 20 years in the documentary film industry, Denis McCready is now exploring the intersection between his post-war documentary photography and oral history, pursuing since September 2023 a research & creation master’s degree in visual and media arts at Université du Québec à Montréal. He is a native French speaker based in Montréal, Canada. An award-winning writer and film producer, he now focuses on documentary photographic projects, film development consulting, and teaching.
Research interests:
Since the 90s, my artistic practice and professional activities have been divided between documentary photography and filmmaking. During my documentary film production career (2001-2022), I served on numerous grant juries, I chaired several artist centre’s boards and acted as a development consultant with dozens of documentary filmmakers. I was also a teacher in college for two semesters focusing on documentary film production. Sarajevo, the capital of BosniaHerzegovina, has been a milestone in my photographic career for 28 years. A first visit in April and May 1996 allowed me to photograph the newly liberated Sarajevo, empty of the usual image makers. I saw men and women who had stopped dying but had not yet started living again. Before my eyes began the slow reconstruction of their lives and their city. In 2019 in Sarajevo, I revisited 200 locations from 1996 to retrace my steps and photograph the evolution of the city's architecture and urban planning. A selection of these diptychs was presented at the Bob Carnie Gallery in Toronto during the Contact Photo Festival. I plan to continue this work in Sarajevo until 2046, 50 years after the initial journey. During my time at the National Film Board of Canada (2018-2022), I developed an interest in the personal narratives that emerge from the cataclysms that define us. I have been incorporating personal testimonies into my photographic practice for several years now, engaging in a conversation with my subject to probe the intricacies of human experience. Sanctuary is an ongoing photographic and oral history project with Canadian veterans who served in Afghanistan. 2022 and 2023 were years of consolidation around documentary photography, taking professional workshops with VII Agency in Arles, WARM Academy in Sarajevo, and starting a master’s degree in media and visual arts at Université du Québec à Montréal (Sept. 2023). In the autumn of 2024, I will travel to Sarajevo for an artistic residency at the Historical Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina. I will invite survivors of the siege to a photographic elicitation exercise in which my images of this city from 1996 will act as a catalyst for their memory. I'll record their oral testimonies and then ask them “Where would you like to be remembered?” to choose together a location in the city where I'll take their photographic portrait, thus creating a new memory. With this project, I want to give back to Sarajevo’s population their images and narratives, and break with my previous unidirectional approach. These images and testimonials will be shared with the museum for future research projects.
