For the past 20 years, Geoffrey James has been engaged in photographing the man-made landscape. His early work dealt largely with European gardens, and resulted in several major exhibitions and publications, including the books Morbid Symptoms, Arcadia and the French Revolution (Princeton, 1986) and The Italian Garden (Harry Abrams, New York 1991). In the 1990s he produced bodies of work on the Roman campagna, on the Asbestos-mining landscape of Quebec, and on the oeuvre of the great American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Current projects include a book on the Alberta town of Lethbridge with the writer Rudy Wiebe, and documentation of the industrial wasteland of Porto Marghera, outside Venice. Geoffrey James has received fellowships from the John Solomon Guggenheim foundation in New York, the Graham Foundation in Chicago and the John Lynch Staunton prize of the Canada Council. His work is in such collections as The National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He lives in Toronto, where he is engaged in photographing the new ex-urban landscape of the 905 region.

Major Projects:

The Italian Garden: Geoffrey James worked over a period of ten years photographing the great Renaissance and Baroque gardens of Italy with a Kodak panoramic camera of the 1920s. For him, this primitive camera with its large negative and rotating lens was the best tool to capture the complex perspectives of these magical spaces. The work was exhibited at the Palazzo Braschi in Rome and published by Harry Abrams in 1991. In the spring of 2000, the Boston publisher David Godine will publish a new edition of George Sitwell's On the Making of Gardens, with a portfolio of James' photographs. The work will also be featured in a travelling show in 2001 by the American Federation for the Arts.

Asbestos: In the early 1990s, Geoffrey James photographed the moonlike landscape created by mountains of Asbestos tailings in the Thetford Mines region of Quebec. The work was exhibited at Toronto's The Power Plant, with a catalogue written by Power Plant curator Richard Rhodes. The work was subsequently exhibited in museums in San Francisco, Naples, Frankfort and Tokyo.

Frederick Law Olmsted: For seven years Geoffrey James photographed 60 sites created by the great American landscape architect F.L. Olmsted, as part of a major commission by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. The work was exhibited in Montreal, New York, Boston and Lausanne (Switzerland) and was published in the catalogue Viewing Olmsted (MIT, Boston), with essays by Phyllis Lambert and John Szarkowski.

Lethbridge: As a millennial project for the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Geoffrey James made four visits to the Alberta town in 1998 and 1999, documenting the history of human settlement in a majestic physical setting. The work was exhibited at the SAAG and will be published this Christmas, with a memoir by the Governor-General's Award-winning writer Rudy Wiebe.