Pharma photo

It's intriguing to come across a photobook that looks at an unusual subject, in this case pharmaceuticals. The Montreal based Pharmascience asked Deborah Davis to curate a photo collection to be displayed throughout their building. The collection now has over two hundred and twenty works and this well printed book (three hundred screen on a gloss art paper) includes seventy-six of them with other images in the two illustrated essays.

What I found fascinating looking through the book were the number of well known street photographers including Callahan, Croner, Eggleston, Epstein, Erwitt, Evans, Friedlander, Herzog, Klein, Leiter, Maier, Meyerowitz, Owns, Parks, Sherman,Shore, Sternfeld, Weston  and Weegee who had all included a drug store in their work, mostly unintentionally as drug stores, like gas stations are an everyday part of American commonplace.

Work from other equally well known photographers (like  Abbott, Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Frank, Penn, Sander) reveal interiors of drug stores, still life, portraits and historical images from Europe dating back to an 1850 shot of the inside of a pharmacy by Charles Negre. All the photos and this includes some mixed media, are drug related in the widest possible sense though oddly there are no contemporary colour photos of drugs being manufactured

In the front pages there are two illustrated essays, curator Deborah Davis explains how the collection started and photo historian David Campany considers the significance of this expanding Pharmasceince photo collection. I found the book and it's photos quite fascinating even though it's about one subject.