Philippe Guillaume is a walking artist, photographer and art historian based in Montreal.
Philippe Guillaume is a walking artist, photographer and art historian based in Montreal. His often relational artistic practice encompasses walking, photography and performances that continue to exist through pictures, installations and artist books. His projects are largely conceptual, with a sustained focus on the banal and everyday contexts that provide an ever-changing but recurring backdrop. His work also includes walks that become the basis for relational ventures in which he provokes what he calls “spontaneous bubbles of communication” in an increasingly virtual, technocratic and socially alienated world. Since 2025, he has been the creator and host of Photography and Walking, a podcast devoted to the relationship between walking, photography and art.
He was selected to present his artist book OC&G at the Association for Art History Annual Conference at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2018. His work was exhibited at AirSpace Gallery in England in 2014. In 2013, FOFA Gallery in Montreal exhibited his two-year ambulatory project along boulevard Saint-Laurent, and he was invited to create a dérive-based work at PERFOR4 in São Paulo. His work is held in the collections of Library and Archives Canada, the Collection patrimoniale of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Centre Phi and Artexte.
Philippe holds a PhD in Art History from Concordia University and was a 2016–17 Fellow at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. He obtained an interdisciplinary MA in photography and art history through Concordia University’s Special Individualized Program in 2012. His research and artistic practice explore the relationship between walking and photography in the context of art.
His essays on photography have appeared in peer-reviewed publications including the Journal of Canadian Studies, as well as in the art magazine Ciel variable and Photogenic Montreal: Activisms and Archives in a Post-Industrial City, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2021. His walk Mind the Gap (2019) was published in Walking Bodies: Papers, Provocations, Actions from Walking’s New Movements by Triarchy Press.
Conferences and Lectures
2023 “Camera-Based Artworks, Social Documentary Photographs and Activism in Canada.” Photography, Activism and the Visual Culture of Resistance.” Panel with Reilley Bishop-Stall. Universities Art Association of Canada Annual Conference. Banff Center, Banff, Alberta, 21 October 2023.
2021 Interviewer, Erwin Olaf: The Legacy, with director Michiel van Erp, presented by the McCord Museum as part of the 39th International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA).
2020 Guest Moderator, “Narratifs géopolitiques” panel with Frédéric Bigras-Burrogano, Emmanuelle Duret and Sylvie Laplante, Galerie de L’UQAM, Montreal, May 29, 2020
2019 “Mind the Gap.” Diverting Walking Section of Walking’s New Movements Conference. Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK, 1-3 November 2019
2019 “New Documents X 2: Through the lens of Actor Network Theory.” UAAC-AAUC Conference. Hilton Hotel, Quebec City, 27 October 2019
2019 “Josef Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land.” International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) and the McCord Museum, Montréal, March 28, 2019
2018 “Images Unfolding: A Conversation About Making the Past Present.” Co-presented with Martha Langford. Association for Art History Annual Conference.Courtauld Institute of Art and King’s College London, 5-7 April, 2018
2017 “Oral Histories First-Hand.” Sites of Photographic Knowledge: The Book, the Laboratory, the Territory. Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, Montreal, June 12-16, 2017
2016 “Richard Long and Hamish Fulton at the NCG: Intriguing Networks.”Networked Art Histories. 1960s to the Present Day (in Canada and elsewhere). Concordia University, Montréal, October 22, 2016
2016 “Jean-Paul Gill’s 1957 Red Light Photographs: A Heuristic Archive.” What Does Heritage Change?/Le patrimoine ça change quoi ?Association of Critical Heritage Studies, Third Biennial Conference, Montréal, June 7, 2016
2015 “A Line in the Scottish Highlands: A Contemporary Ecocultural Analysis of the Materiality of an Idea.”Ecocultures: Glasgow’s Festival of Environmental Research, Policy, and Practice, The Pearce Institute, Govan, Glasgow, UK, October 17, 2015
Horst : Un photographe de son époque et six décennies de mode, McCord Museum, Montréal, June 3, 2015
2014 “Particularity of Place: Photography, the City and Rural Places Where We Walk in Canada,” with Canadian Photographic History Research Group Panel (Concordia) with Chair, Martha Langford, paper presented at Speaking of Photography, Concordia University, Montréal, March 21, 2014
2013 “Particularity of Place: Photography, the City and Rural Places Where We Walk in Canada,” with Canadian Photographic History Research Group Panel (Concordia) with Chair, Martha Langford, paper presented at Meeting Places: An International Canadian Studies Conference, Halifax, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, September 18-21, 2013
“Walking, Photography and Thirdspace along Boulevard Saint-Laurent,” paper presented at On Walking, Sunderland University, UK, June 28-29, 2013
Artist Talks
2019 Mind the Gap, provocation for the Diverting Walking Section of Walking’s New Movements, University of Plymouth, U.K., 1 – 3 November 2019, by jury selection
2015 Round table, Lab 2 : ‘’Déplacement et Mobilité’’, Écoles des Arts Visuels, Université Laval, Québec, with Professor Richard Baillargeon
2013 Artist Talk: “ Every Foot of the Sidewalk: boulevard Saint-Laurent,” artist talk with Martha Langford, Fofa Gallery, Montréal, January 16, 2013
Artist Talk: “Issues in the Montreal Art Milieu: A Photographic History,” (Prof. Elizabeth Cavaliere), Concordia University, Montréal
Artist Talk: “Studies in Contemporary Photographic Art and Theory,”(Prof. Karla McManus), Concordia University, Montréal
2011 Artist Talk: MA Photo Class (Raymonde April), Concordia University, Montréal
