Michael Flomen, Blue Flyer II at Le Mois de La Photo. Photo © Carlos and Jason Sanchez.

Gaelle Morel is a French curator and art historian based in Toronto, and the first non-Canadian curator of Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal. She opted to investigate ‘The Spaces of the Image’, the ways in which image are presented in exhibition. 'While the processes that go into the making of the artwork are generally subjected to painstaking study, the technical side of images and the situations they are used are often ignored - they are likely to be deemed too prosaic,' she writes in her essay in the festival catalogue. 'These installation processes must be seen, however, as one of the essential keys to reading many photographic, video, and media arts projects presented in recent years.' Diane Smyth caught up with her at the opening of Le Mois de la Photo.

DS: What's the concept behind the festival?

GM: When you go to a photo show, often what you see is black-and-white, framed pictures on the wall. That’s great but it’s just a convention, it doesn’t have to be that way. There are many artists who have thought about it and worked in a very different way, and I thought it was good timing to throw a spotlight on some of them. We tried to show work that hasn’t been shown in Canada before, although for example Pierre Tremblay showed his work [a stop-motion image of his daughter] in the Nuits Blanches in Toronto. If it was good, I wanted to show it.

DS: Three of the artists are showing work that goes outside the museum or gallery, could you explain how they fit into the concept?

GM: When you’re dealing with sceneography and trying to open doors, you very quickly go outdoors. This is is a festival so it has to be very open. It has to be coherent and demanding, but it also has to be open to the public. It can be hard for people to say "Let's go to an exhibition" so I wanted to find ways to bring work out.

Robert Burley's image is of a giant Polaroid, opened up to show the positive and negative image, and it's on the side of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He's using a very new technology developed in advertising, in which images are bonded directly to surfaces without damaging them. It was a great opportunity to try something new, using new technology. Anne Ramsden has created a series of posters, using images from Flickr, that supposedly advertise The Museum of the Everyday, an imaginary museum. These posters have been put all over Montreal, so you don't know when you'll come across them or even that they're an art work. And Le Mois de la Photo always uses a couple of billboards, so Michael Flomen was able to utilise them.

We also have lots of exhibitions where people have to touch or blow the images, or have turn in the space to understand them. It means that they’re really part of the show and I hope it means they feel committed, and feel part of the work. Because really without an audience, there is no work. That doesn't mean we have to dumb down, all the work has to be good, but we have to make sure we're sharing something with the public.

DS: A few of the exhibitions consider photojournalism and how it's disseminated - Alfredo Jaar is showing a video piece about Kevin Carter's shot of a Sudanese famine victim, for example, while Pascal Convert has made a wax sculpture based on Hocine Zaourar's shot of a weeping Palestinian woman. Are you commenting on photojournalism?

GM: Photojournalism is the main way for photographs to be distributed, so it’s the way people usually see it. The artists who use photojournalism are concerned with how the photograph was taken, when and how, and what the discourses on it were. They're asking "Are we ok with photojournalism" but also "Are we ok with it if photojournalism disappears?" because photojournalism is facing challenges now. New technologies mean that photojournalists will probably have to imagine new ways of working, so it’s a good time to consider what it is and what it might become.

DS: Did you consider using work which uses new technology to distribute images in new ways?

GM: I was open to everything but if you work online it's difficult to show works to the public, plus we have regular exhibition venues here. But it would be wonderful to do more with that in future. It would be fantastic to experiment and create new kinds of venues - there’s a whole path in front of us, we don’t even know what we’re capable of with these new devices.