Gregory Colbert

Gregory Colbert is an influential filmmaker and photographer born in Brantford, Canada in 1960.

Career

Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1960, Gregory Colbert began his career in Paris in 1983 making documentary films on social issues. Filmmaking led to fine arts photography. His first exhibition, Timewaves, opened in 1992 at the Museum of Elysée in Switzerland.

For the next ten years, Colbert did not exhibit his art or show any films. Instead, he traveled to such places as India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Dominica, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tonga, Namibia, and Antarctica to film and photograph wondrous interactions between human beings and animals. Since 1992, he has launched more than forty such expeditions. Elephants, whales, manatees, sacred ibis, Antigone cranes, royal eagles, gyr falcons, rhinoceros hornbills, cheetahs, leopards, African wild dogs, caracals, leopards, baboons, elands, meerkats, gibbons, orangutans, and saltwater crocodiles are among the animals he has photographed. Human subjects include Burmese monks, trance dancers, San people, and Colbert himself free diving with whales.

In 2002, Colbert presented the culmination of his singular work, Ashes and Snow, at the Arsenale in Venice, a twelfth-century shipyard. It was the largest solo exhibition ever mounted in Italy. In spring 2005 the show opened on the Hudson River Park's Pier 54 in New York City in the first-ever Nomadic Museum. The exhibition and the museum have since migrated to Santa Monica, California, Tokyo, and Mexico City.

Ashes and Snow has no final destination, and many new species will be added as the project evolves. Each exhibition is simply a port of call.

Awards

• Lucie Award - Curator of the Year: 2006
• THEA Award for Outstanding Achievement in a Museum or Touring Attraction: 2007

Critical Acclaim

“A new master is born.” —Photo magazine

“The power of the images comes less from their formal beauty than from the way they envelop the viewer in their mood. . . .They are simply windows to a world in which silence and patience govern time.” —The New York Times

“There is no clash of species in Ashes and Snow; it is a world in which man and animals peacefully co-exist, living in each other’s dreams.” ––Los Angeles Times Magazine

"Tokyo is such an artificial space in which we who live here can gradually lose the sense that we still inhabit the natural world. When we come to the Nomadic Museum, however, we are reminded of the warm feelings man must have had while living with nature. The museum is a space where we can reconnect with who we really are." —Asahi Shimbun newspaper

“A magical, mystical tour.” —Life magazine

“His astonishing pictures—sepia and umber in tone . . . documented the whole caravan of beauteous creatures who had passed before his magic lens. . . . For all its apparent sobriety, this is an ecstatic space; as for the installation, it is Zen deluxe. . . . It’s like a Rothko chapel writ large.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Distinctive . . . monumental in every sense.” —Condé Nast Traveler

“The Nomadic Museum restores the possibility of wonder to museums whose excesses of clarity and light have banished the shadows. The power of the show and the power of the building are so reciprocal that it is difficult to separate the dancer from the dance. [Colbert conditions] the senses of the visitors to facilitate their psychological entry into the space of the photographs, to deliver the message that man is not, and cannot be, separate from the nature within which he evolved. In these agnostic and cynical times, the building becomes a place to feel and even believe. Ashes and Snow is a show that is disarmingly, and grandly, simple.” —Modern Painter

“The photographs seduce through starkness and spirituality. . . . Timeless and exquisitely timely.” —Newsday

“The most arresting aspect of Gregory Colbert’s photographs . . . is their air of dreamlike calm. The serenity pervades the sepia-toned pictures.” —Smithsonian

“In these photographs . . . the animals and the people seem to move in a cosmic dance filled with rhythmic and visual beauty that breaks out of the mundane world of classifications, of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and into the sublime.” —Camera Arts

“Colbert’s work feels timeless and sacred. It resonates with a luminous, essential wisdom speaking through the ages. . . . Colbert’s work operates in a parallel universe to ours, an earnest, refreshing, post-ironic world where pure wonder and awe still reside.” —The Globe and Mail

“The season’s most original art exhibition . . . a show of more than 200 striking photographs.” —Town & Country

“A truly uncommon artist.”

—Le Nouvel Observateur

“An extraordinary exhibition.” —The Economist

“The 8th wonder of the world.” —KPFK Radio

“Fascinating fotos of humans and animals...that reflect an astonishing harmony.” —Stern

“The exhibition presents a marvellous vision that transcends time and place.” —Goethe

“Ashes and Snow is an expression of the poetic possibilities of a harmonious relationship between animals and man.” —Newsweek Japan