05/07/2026
One of the real joys of managing George’s archive is how it keeps pulling me deeper into the world of photography — and out into it, too.
Tonight I went to the Spring/Summer Opening Reception at The Image Centre (IMC) at Toronto Metropolitan University, and it was a wonderful evening. Three remarkable exhibitions opened, and each one stopped me in my tracks for different reasons.
The survey show for Dawit L. Petros — winner of the 2025 Scotiabank Photography Award — was extraordinary. His Chromatic Cartographies series, tightly cropped photographs of the painted sides of buses traveling across West Africa, looks at first like pure abstraction. Bold color fields, sweeping curves, geometric forms. Then you realize you’re looking at maps of movement, of migration, of lives in transit. It’s a beautiful and genuinely original body of work.
Larry Fink’s Social Graces and Runway filled two galleries, and if you don’t know Fink’s work, this is the place to start. He photographed both Manhattan high society and a farming family in rural Pennsylvania — and somehow made both worlds feel equally theatrical, equally human. The darkroom notes on one of his working prints on display were alone worth the visit.
And Kenna Robinson’s cyanotype work, With My Whole Body, was something I hadn’t seen before — fabric cyanotypes sculpted into three-dimensional forms, the artist both subject and maker. Quiet, powerful, and completely original.
I also ran into some wonderful people. I caught up with Cindee Karnick, whose father Ike Karnick’s show The Spirit, The People, The Land — sixty years of documentary work in Portugal and the Azores — is still up at The Peach Gallery. Well worth seeing if you haven’t.
And I met two new people who I suspect I’ll stay in touch with — James Fowler, artist and curator, and Peter Sramek, a photographer who also makes handbound books and runs workshops at Shibagau Creek Forest Farmstead, a nature retreat in Tamworth, Ontario. The kind of person who reminds you that photography and craft and community all belong together.
The IMC is free, it’s open to the public, and it runs through August 1. If you’re in Toronto this summer, go.
🖼️ Signed lifetime prints by George Zimbel are available through the George Zimbel Photography Archive, and through our partner galleries: Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto), Fahey/Klein Gallery (Los Angeles), Catherine Couturier Gallery (Houston), and A Gallery for Fine Photography (New Orleans).
