Donigan Cumming
Donigan Cumming addresses themes of the body, taboos of representation, social engagement and photographic truth. He uses photography, text, sound, video, collage, animation, drawing and painting in artworks, installations, projections and books. Cumming locates his work in a created community formed in the early 1980s, allowing him to explore the social and ethical implications of participant observation.
Since 1986, when his first major cycle, Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography was launched in New York and Paris, theorists and curators have engaged with his oeuvre in catalogues essays, book chapters and articles. His monographs and artists’ books include The Stage (Maquam, 1991; Errata, 2014), Pretty Ribbons (Stemmle, 1996), and Donigan Cumming (Dazibao/VU, 2012). A box set of prints, Even as the Falcon Plummets, appeared in 2022. Recent book works include Falcon’s Guide (2023) and Primer (2025). His production is explored in Vidéographe’s online compendium Body-to-Body: The Works of Donigan Cumming (2020). Public collections include the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Maison européenne de la photographie, Photo Elysée, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art. Cumming is a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. [Source: VOX, 2025]
