"Raymond Williams once remarked that the greatest cultural achievement of the working class is the creation of the trade union movement….Culture is at the root of our identity. It is the recognition, through words, sounds, gestures and marks, of who we are, where we come from and where we are going. It expresses the spirit of our lives and our struggles. It is the spirit of our community." (Making Our Mark, Labour Arts and Heritage in Ontario, Karl Beveridge and Jude Johnston, 1999, p. 2).

As artists Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge’s body of work is about that most dangerous of subjects; contemporary political issues. Whether it be the concerns about nuclear energy or the Days of Protest in Ontario, the photos tell a story of what’s happening to the people involved in the struggle, and what we should be paying attention to.

I found that because the photographs presented in Political Landscapes were full of details and images, I had to visit the work time after time. Like a good mystery novel, the details serve to provide the solution. How would one divulge the emotional angst of someone involved in the resistance to a right-wing agenda in Ontario, or the memories of the 1946 Hamilton Strike to someone who had not been involved in those issues?

Their photographs are carefully set up using actors and sets that focus our collective attention to the issues. Condé and Beveridge write a storyboard of the issue and gather the props and actors and in, what must be an intensive session, photograph the entire sequence. Every prop and gesture is carefully though out to further the meaning of each photograph. The cibachrome process provides the viewer with rich, bold colours that enhance the photographs and give them a painterly quality.

For Condé and Beveridge, the process begins by interviewing the workers involved, writing a storyboard, making the sets, gathering the actors and shooting the narrative in one day. This process is the culmination of months of research with the community involved and the text on the photographs are often direct quotations from the workers interviewed.

For example in "No Immediate Threat", a series about the assumptions of nuclear energy being a clean energy source and the problems faced by workers in that industry, Condé and Beveridge used a pregnant woman in one photograph to visually represent the concerns of women who marry a "nuclear energy" worker. There is a saying by women who have married "nuclear" men - never marry a second generation nuclear energy man. What is unsaid is that there is a fear by women of giving birth to a genetic mutation due to the irradiated sperm of the man.

Both Condé and Beveridge have been instrumental in the establishment of Ontario Arts Council Artist in the Workplace program, the Ontario Workers Art and Heritage Centre, Mayworks, the Ontario Federation of Labour’s Cultural policies and a multitude of other projects that involve the community and labour. They believe that the artist is a labourer because art is not decoration or holy object to be viewed by a select few - art is work. Artists should connect with the community reality because art is the language of the community. The artist’s "job" is, therefore, to interpret our shared reality through images.