George Legrady |
|
George Legrady
|
George Legrady, (born in 1950) is currently a member of the faculty in digital media and directs the Experimental Visualization Lab in the Media Arts & Technology graduate program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, his family resettled to Montreal, Canada in his childhood during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He attended French elementary schools where he was trained in classical music. Played in various rock bands in the mid-1960s such as the Mike Jones Group, the Haunted, and The Urge. He studied photography at Loyola College with Charles Gagnon and John Max in the late 1960s. He was invited to document the James Bay Cree coastal communities in northern Quebec in the early 1970s resulting in a photographic documentary of over 2800 photographs of the Cree way-of-life as they were organizing to negotiate to government over land rights due to the construction of the major James Bay Hydro-Electric project on traditional Cree hunting lands. Received his MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1976. Resided in London, Ontario between 1977-1981 during which time he was Professor of Photography in the Art Department at the University of Western Ontario. While in London, he was on the board of the Forest City Gallery. He curated the exhibition The Mask of Objectivity in 1981 for the McIntosh Gallery, Western University, London, Ontario. In 1984 George presented a solo exhibition at the Embassy Cultural House of his black & white photographs title Stock Footage. His work was simultanously shown in a public installation at a construction site on Dundas Street near Wellington St. in London, installed by Ron Benner. George Legrady was an early adopter and pioneer in integrating digital processing with photography. For this work he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. Please visit George's website for more information. Recent projects:
Links to the James Bay Cree 1973 project:
A sampling of videos taken by Andres Burbano and the artist during his 2012 and 2014 return trip to James Bay to present the photographs to the communities:
Online interviews: |
