The CONTACT photography festival has become well-known for its public installations and for its yearly themes, both of which speak to the event’s sincere wish to reach as broad an audience as possible. The past two years have seen themes covering some of the most basic and still-contentious qualities of the medium: 2006 was “Imaging a Shattering Earth,” examining the usefulness and veracity of photographic documentation; 2007 was “The Constructed Image,” the flipside of the previous year’s theme, which drew attention to the deliberate fakery championed by many contemporary photographic artists.

This year’s theme, “Between Memory & History” — a looser one than its two predecessors, and in many ways a combination of them — finds its headquarters at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the result of an official, three-year alliance struck between MOCCA and CONTACT to host and curate the festival’s keynote group show. (This began in 2007, though 2006’s titular show, curated by Claude Baillargeon of Oakland University, was also at MOCCA.)

“I’m excited about the alignment of our objectives,” says David Liss, the museum’s director/curator, who has put this year’s show together with Bonnie Rubenstein, CONTACT’s director and editor. “Their mandate is to show how photography is related to more generalized human experience; ours is to exhibit Canadian artists alongside their international colleagues to create a global discourse for the country’s cultural voice. The Canadian voice is not necessarily one of their priorities but it is one of ours.”

MOCCA’s public installation — unmistakably located on the wall adjacent to the museum — is by local artist Robert Burley, encapsulating many of the concepts triggered by this year’s theme, and by the subtitle Liss and Rubenstein have chosen for their show, “From the Epic to the Everyday.” Burley’s large-scale work is of a crowd watching the demolition of a building, and is from his ongoing series about the dismantlement of photographic factories across the world, “Disappearance of Darkness” — here showing the obliteration of a Kodak industrial complex in Chalon-sur-Saone, France.

“We have to acknowledge the possibility that the preponderance, the overabundance of photographic information is so ubiquitous that it actually threatens, drains, the validity or usefulness of the photographic image itself,” says Liss.

The artists in the MOCCA show, most of them big names in the field, do just this, from Martin Parr’s dry photographs of tourists taking photographs, treating memories as a pirate would his booty, to Thomas Ruff’s blown-up jpegs from the internet. There is also a strong sense — in the work of Bert Teunissen, Luc Delahaye, Adi Nes, Alessandra Sanguinetti and Liss and Rubenstein’s coup, Nan Goldin (whose slide installation Heartbeat will be exhibited) — that the memorial and historical facets of the image might be reinvigorated through painterly composition.

“There is a more widespread ability to participate in the preservation of one’s memory and the making of one’s history now,” says Liss. “In North America, what percentage of people have taken a picture in their lives? And how many people have painted a painting? People feel very connected to photography in that sense, as amateur image makers.”