Robert Bourdeau (born November 14, 1931) is a Canadian photographer whose career bridges modernists of the early 20th century and contemporary photographers. Biography Bourdeau was born in Kingston, Ontario, in 1931. In 1957, he moved to Toronto for a year to attend the University of Toronto, before returning to Kingston. After coming across a copy of Aperture magazine, Bourdeau corresponded with then-editor Minor White in Rochester, New York in 1958, then met him, and for the next ten years, the two men were in contact. Bourdeau soon decided, encouraged by White, that taking photographs was the correct path for him, although he worked in a job as an architecture technologist (1960–1985). Another mentor was Paul Strand who he corresponded with, then met, in New York in 1965. With these photographers as mentors, he was drawn in his early work to modernism. He has also spoken of Paul Cézanne and Giorgio Morandi as being influential. At first, his chosen subject was landscape which he photographed in black-and-white. His choice of scenes in Canada, Ireland and elsewhere were presented in luminous detail but gave the viewer not the surface but the spirit of the natural world. His work developed over time to a more measured, meditative view and he introduced architecture into his subject matter, preferably architecture which spoke to an historical time. Generally, his work is marked by a sense of growth and change. Bourdeau says: "I hold the conviction that emotional forces generated by a place can be made visible." Since the 1970s, Bourdeau has created large camera format images, which he methodically prepares from contemplating a site for a lengthy period before making an extended exposure that allows a maximum of detail. He is known for his technical perfection, and for the unique gold chloride solution that adds a warm tone to his silver gelatin prints. The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography calls his work remarkable for its rigorous consistency while the Globe and Mail in 2005 called his photographs of abandoned or inactive industrial sites and buildings of the past "beautifully precise" and "immaculate". The Calgary Herald, in 1989, said of a show of his work at the Glenbow Museum, that his work is "beautiful, meditative, alive with tonal richness and compressed details, and still in atmosphere, all in ways that reward long looking". In 1966, he had his first exhibition in Canada at the National Film Board Still