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1988 A group of locals including Pages Books owner Marc Glassman and artists Richard Fung, Annette Mangaard and Ross Turnbull form Northern Visions to launch Images 88 at the Factory Theatre. Dedicated to Canadian artists, the festival courts controversy by screening video and film side by side. Years later, Inside Out, Hot Docs, ImagineNative, Worldwide Shorts, Reel Asian, the Jewish Film Festival and others follow the Images Festival start-up model.
1989 Zacharias Kunuk‘s Qaggiq screens at Images, 12 years before Atanarjuat brings the Inuit director international acclaim.
1990 Images introduces Toronto to California queer punk filmmaker Gregg Araki via The Long Weekend (O’ Despair). “Dirt cheap, dead smart,” says NOW. Vancouver video artist Sara Diamond gets a retrospective. Diamond is now president of the Ontario College of Art and Design.
1991 CNN broadcasts the Gulf War. Images pushes its own “alternative voices” in opposition to “mass media censorship of the war in the Gulf and Canada’s own Oka.”
1993 Andrew Paterson‘s Pink In Public and the hit doc Thank God I’m A Lesbian highlight Images’ queer passion.
1995 Jean-Daniel Lafond‘s Tropique Nord follows the cultural identity struggle of a Haitian Montrealer, Michaëlle Jean, now Governor General of Canada.
1996 Images debuts its first interactive program, CLIK>, and makes works available on the Internet for the first time.
1997 Artist-provocateur Vera Frenkel gets a retrospective as Images celebrates its first decade.
1999 Spotlight on Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. A giraffe rubbing its nipples graces the catalogue cover.
2000 The year of the DVD. Also the year of Images’ Art Fag 2000. Curator Laura U. Marks attends in a fetish dress made of film strips.
2001 Images publishes its first book, to accompany a retrospective devoted to Philip Hoffman.
2002 The shift from cinemas to galleries continues, and online through the festival’s Flow program.
2003 The Minute Movies program points to the coming boom in short digital cinema. Images now advertises its wares as “film, video, new media, performance, installation.”
2004 War in Iraq and Afghanistan prompts a return to global politics at Images, with artists taking on militarism and paranoia.
2005 YouTube launches. One year later, its viewers are watching 100 million video clips every day. Images stars include New Yorkers Jem Cohen and Lorna Simpson.
2006 Iraqi guards videotape Saddam Hussein’s hanging with a cellphone camera. The footage is broadcast worldwide. Among works by Stan Douglas, John Oswald and Mieke Bal, Deirdre Logue‘s installation Why Always Instead Of Just Sometimes is the hit of the multiple screens.
2007 Mobile phone companies offer downloadable mobile short videos. Images counters with Lida Abdul.
