Past visitors to Keylight will recall last June's feature on Reva Brooks. Taylor produced the modern edition prints of the images for her June '98 Toronto exhibit at the Stephen Bulger Gallery. This completed a circle of events begun thirty-nine years earlier in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The serendipitous events are compelling. More significantly, they indicate the sense of interconnection Jeremy's works probe.

Born March 11, 1938 to artist parents his sensitivity was always apparent. At the age of three he was an eager model for his father, respected Canadian artist Frederick Taylor. When he looks into the eyes of these childhood portraits he can remember the intensity he felt sitting perfectly still, anxious to please his exacting father. Today, Jeremy credits his ability for deep meditation to this early training. His teen years set him adrift. Always sensitive, the family break up when he was twelve augmented his alienation. At fifteen he was diagnosed as a manic-depressive. Left to his own devices he sought repair in the lawless chaos of Montreal's jazz clubs. To the aspiring young drummer, with the beat of Gene Krupa in his heart, jazz seemed the answer. It was creative, all accepting, and exciting. At The Black Bottom, a major Montreal jazz club in the late Î50s and Î60s, it was possible the communist dreams he had heard his parents preach could be a reality; yet the actuality was a subculture, subversive and soul destroying, for his young sensibilities. Unable to complete high school and sensing a dead end to his talents in the jazz world, he took up the invitation from his father to come to San Miguel for a visit. In an attempt to encourage his son in new directions his father sent him the calendar of art courses offered at The Instituto Allende. Near the end of the list Jeremy found photography. He had seen some intriguing photographs on the back of jazz albums but that was the limit of his previous experience. Today he still ponders the casualness with which he entered his life's preoccupation.

In May 1959, shortly after his arrival in San Miguel, he was introduced to his father's friends the Brooks; he and Reva began life changing discussions about his aspirations to study photography. Jeremy purchased Reva's old Rolleiflex and she mentored him in his beginning efforts. His aptitude was immediately recognized and The Instituto granted him a scholarship to further his study. He remained in San Miguel for the rest of the year. The Mexican series is from these beginning months; ironically the negatives were never made into fine art prints until he was reminded of them and his former mentor in the fall of '97 when asked to make prints for Reva Brooks Toronto exhibit.

We see Jeremy's keen eye and compassionate presence in these earliest works from the days of his introduction to photography in Mexico. Unassuming and self effacing he was an unobtrusive presence, able to move in close recording the drama of human reality. In the young Mexican Boy, head in hands the intense communion between the photographer and his subject envelopes the viewer with both a physical and emotional impact: how we all struggle to understand each other and our circumstances. That Taylor moves so unnoticed among Mexico's citizens strengthens the candidness of his images. We all share a common emotional centre as witnessed in Family Group In Doorway. Jeremy, at twenty-one, recognized this truth and preserved it for our reflection. This innate intuitive perception has continued to be his gift as an artist. 3.

When he returned to his native Montreal, in the fall of 59, Jeremy looked at the city with fresh vision. His upbringing posed many questions. His paternal grand parents enjoyed an upper middle class lifestyle and encouraged their sons to achieve in like manner. Jeremy's father was a graduate architect; his older brother was Canadian industrialist E. P. Taylor. However, Fred Taylor never practiced architecture; instead he and his new wife (a first cousin) went to England to study art. Upon their return to Canada they resolved to get away from their parents middle class, conservative lifestyle and chose to settle in Montreal, at the time a centre of artistic and leftist ferment. Jeremy felt reactive to the contradictions and alienation of his formative years. In 1960 the young adult constructed his idealism through the camera lens.

My primary influence comes from my parent's idealism, middle class upbringing and freedom from violence or financial struggle. I was imbued with their communist principles of equality and sharing of Resources, and, of course, their appreciation and practice of classic artistic values. JEREMY TAYLOR

Modern art burst upon the twentieth century with a flourish of utopian dreams. One of the movements with particularly idealistic goals was Russian Constructivism. It has been described as the "Socialism of Vision"4. "Before Stalin there was one moment in Russia when advanced art served the power of the Left not only freely but in the highest spirit of optimism and with brilliant, if short-lived, results. It happened between 1917 and 1925, when the promise of communism was new and the newness of art fused with it." 5." They were imagining a perfect state of explicitness, in which things and the relationships between them were made clear to human sight as theologians supposed they were to God, a millennium of consciousness, which art had the enormous responsibility of bringing about." 6 The aesthetic leaders of the October Revolution created an art of expectation for a future of equality and organized energy in which the arts would act as a transformer. 7. Mayakovsky-Rodchenko believed "the best medium for achieving this aim was, of course, photography photography was instant socialism: it was cheap, real, and its images could be indefinitely repeated, copied, and distributed. Photography, Rodchenko argued, would supply the real monuments of the future." 8.

Did the young Jeremy absorb the essence of these dreams as he listened to his parents and their friends animated conversations about art and politics? As one examines his body of work the parallels with constructivism and its vision of arts ability to illuminate social problems seems key to a full appreciation of Taylor's meaning.