Photography Division and in 1969, the National Gallery of Canada acquired his work for the first time. Another breakthrough occurred in 1980 when Jane Corkin, who had an important photography gallery in Toronto, decided to represent him. Only in 1985 was he able to work at photography full-time. His commitment was crowned by success: in 1990, he had a retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada, Robert Bourdeau: Retrospective. That same year, he began his keynote series of photographs of industrial sites. He has exhibited his work widely throughout North America and Europe. In Canada, he has been included in photographic surveys at the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (now the Canadian Photography Institute or CPI) of the National Gallery of Canada. In 2016, Linda Jansma curated the exhibition Edge of the Visible for the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. In 2011, Robert Bourdeau: The Station Point, a comprehensive survey of his work, was published by the Magenta Foundation and Stephen Bulger Gallery. His work is in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Photography Institute, Ottawa; the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa; as well as Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Bourdeau taught photography at the University of Ottawa from 1980 to 1994. He currently lives in Ottawa. Awards and honours He was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1983. He was named a member of the Order of Canada in 2011. Reference 1931 births Living people Members of the Order of Canada 20th-century Canadian photographers People from Kingston, Ontario Artists from Ontario