Toronto Fashion Week comes to a close tonight, and in honour of the occasion, style mavens, fashion insiders and media will gather for an exclusive party downtown where the work of 12 prominent and emerging female Canadian fashion photographers will be showcased in an exhibit entitled Women x Women.
“Most people don’t realize how few female fashion photographers there are,” says Angela Young, who with her business partner, Alice Keith, launched the first Women x Women exhibit at Toronto Fashion Week last spring. The pair’s new marketing firm, The Advocates, is dedicated to raising the profiles of artists and cultural organizations across Canada.
The goal of Women x Women is to not only shine a spotlight on the creative work of women photographers in Canada, but to also inspire more young women to get behind the camera. “We’re actually looking to expand the exhibit to other cities in Canada over the next year or so,” explains Young.
One of the photographers whose work is being featured in tonight’s exhibit is the award-winning Geneviève Caron — a Toronto-based Montreal native whose minimalistic portraits appear in Canada’s top magazines and who counts companies like Johnson & Johnson and Bell Canada among her corporate clients.
“It was impossible to say no to such an invitation,” says Caron of being approached for the second year to be part of the Women x Women exhibit. “They put such a beautiful show together and as a photographer, you want your work to be exhibited.
“I was always very interested in photography. It’s something I always did from when I was a teenager,” says Caron. She studied both fashion merchandising and graphic design at university in Quebec, then worked as a graphic designer in the design and advertising world, before packing that in to pursue her lifelong dream of photographing full-time.
Caron, along with the other 11 photographers — including Renata Kaveh, known for her highly stylized photos and up-and-coming twin sisters Lily and Lilac, whose work is garnering awards and attention — has contributed a series of never-before-seen images shot especially for the exhibit.
Rather than showcasing the photos traditionally by framing prints and hanging them on walls, all of the images will be projected and shown alongside vignettes of the actual photo shoot.
Want to go?
The exhibit will be open to the public Friday at Thrush Holmes Empire, 1093 Queen Street W., from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, go to www.womenxwomen.com.
