Curator & Artist Tour

Claudia Fährenkemper (b. 1959, Castrop-Rauxel, Germany) has used photography for over thirty years to explore the strange beauty of manmade or natural objects by isolating them in some way from their environment. She studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the prestigious Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1989 until 1995 and has since produced series in landscape, machinery, photomicroscopy, and most recently, formal portraits of 15th- to 19th-century suits of armour. Since 1989, Fährenkemper has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and Asia. Her work has been collected by museums of art, as well as by museums of history, including the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; GoEun Museum of Photography, Busan, Korea; Sprengel-Museum, Hannover, Germany; and the Musée de L’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland. Fährenkemper is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery.

Ruth Kaplan (b. 1955, Montréal, Canada) is a documentary-based photographer whose work integrates still photographs and video and explores a variety of themes such as the social behaviour of bathers in communal hot springs, congregants participating in rituals of spirituality, and, most recently, refugees living in shelters along the Canada-US border as they await decisions on their pending status. Work from Kaplan’s series Some Kind of Divine (2000–10) and Bathers (1991–2002) can be found in numerous private and corporate collections in Toronto, as well as across Canada, and in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Kaplan has exhibited internationally and is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery. Her editorial work can be found in major Canadian and international publications, she has received numerous grants and awards and is currently an instructor at OCAD University, Toronto Metropolitan University, and University of Toronto Scarborough.

Stephen Bulger (b. Toronto, 1964) engaged in photography as a hobby throughout his youth. Eventually studying at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Image Arts, he became interested in the history of photography and began organizing exhibitions. He was asked to be the founding director of the Ryerson Gallery (located at 80 Spadina Ave., Toronto) where he sat on the exhibition review committee and managed over thirty exhibitions. After graduating from TMU with a BA in 1991, he worked in the photography department of OCADU and began working on the idea of opening a gallery of his own. While employed as a Technician at OCADU, he opened Stephen Bulger Gallery (700 Queen St. West, Toronto) on March 23, 1995; moving to 1026 Queen Street West in 2004, and to 1356 Dundas Street West in the fall of 2017. Since that time, he has curated over 300 exhibitions, represented numerous Canadian and international photographers, published catalogues and books, and participated in many North American and European art fairs. He is on the Board of the Art Dealers Association of Canada, as well as the Canadian Art Foundation. He served as Chair of the Advisory Board for the Image Centre at TMU, Toronto; President of the Board for the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD), Washington, D.C.; and the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board. He is also a co-founder of CONTACT, Toronto’s annual photography festival.