Dianne Bos was born and in Hamilton Ontario, and grew up in Dundas, to the west of Hamilton. After studying at Mount Allison University in Sackville NB, she lived and worked in Toronto, returned to Dundas, and then moved to Calgary in 2001. She now divides her time between Calgary and the Languedoc region of France.
Bos's interest in camera work developed at Mount Allison, due to one of her instructors Thaddeus Holownia. He encouraged camera device experiments rather than focusing on darkroom techniques. As a consequence Bos made her first pinhole camera. As she wrote in Pérégrinations catalogue (2013), "the knowledge that I could actually make a camera was very liberating and inspiring." Forays in pinhole photography began in the early 1980s and needing to learn from the ground up as there were few "how to" books available at the time. During this formative period Lorraine Monk, then executive producer of the NFB Stills Photography Division purchased one of her panoramic photograph-collages from a juried exhibition.
Bos's entry into a wider public forum was the "medium" group exhibition The Pinhole Camera, and which circulated to several public galleries in Western Canada in the mid-1980s. Her first solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 1993, was a dual invitation to present travel work done between 1990-92 under the aegis of Province of Memory, and through a curator dialogue, to develop a resonant exhibition from the AGH collection. Bos selected late 19th and early 20th century panel works done by Canadian artists while living and travelling abroad; including paintings by William Blair Bruce, Maurice Cullen, Harriet Mary Ford, John Hammond, J.W. Morrice and Robert Pilot.
The experiential-journey is a critical element to Bos's practice, and hence a form of "biography." One example was the Wheeler Hut Expedition organized by the Whyte Museum of the Rockies in 2000; an invitation to six artists to "create new ways of seeing mountain landscape" in the Rogers Pass region of Glacier National Park. The "expedition" lasted seven days, and "which historically places artists in the field together for a short while and returns them to their solitary practice." Bos's response reflected as much her approach and methodology as much as any expression of style. Self-directed return to sites with the photograph as embodiment of place-and-being is also part of her "biographical sketch." For 10 Countries (1999), Bos assembled images taken over a span of seven years; some were sites reflected in the earlier Province of Memory. John Armstrong noted in a C magazine feature article that Bos "admits her visitor status [for instance] to both Mexico's antiquity and its holiday-package tours," but that the works counter the "risk of producing false artifacts, suggesting duplicity or nostalgia."
A recent key working journey for Bos was the invitation to accompany Tim and Sally Goddard and the University of Calgary's Light up the World (LUTW) group, to document the installation of the solar lights in aid posts in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 1998. Bos's experience resulted in the exhibition It's You!: Unexpected Photographs from Papua New Guinea (1999), which included black and white and colour photographs by Bos and by children from informal workshops she conducted there, although not as a "foreseen project." Bos wrote:
The landscape and culture of PNG challenged my established perspective on the environment and pushed me to change my view and approach to photography. This is probably one of the few places on the planet that would feel little effect if all modern technologies failed. I felt this was a good place for me to use my low-tech photo devices.
Bos's studio practice has evolved to include other camera formats and printing processes as necessary experiments and adaptation, an intuitive embrace of "the difficult" yet in order to be "in the now." Concurrent with her predisposition to "culture through the camera," Bos has maintained two other unlikely passions, music and gardens. She had an active career performing and recording music in the 1980s, first with the Toronto electronic band TBA and then fronting her own group Perfect World, for which she received the CASBY Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist in 1986. Apart from the environmental-aspect of lyrics and videos, some of this aural interest and experience has migrated into photo-sound work installations.
In a pedagogical capacity, Bos has been active as an educator and lecturer for numerous public organizations and art schools, and in a curatorial capacity served as the visual arts manager for York Quay Centre (including the Community Gallery and Photo Passage), organizing and supervising numerous local, national and international projects. One of her innovative programs was Artists Gardens, a nine-year annual project from 1900-1995 that invited solo and team participants from visual art to architecture to develop landscape interventions across the Harbourfront site—in her words, as "a laboratory for experimentation."
Bos's ability and unquenchable passion for engaging and generating curiosity, interest and enthusiasm "in and beyond photography," while maintaining a high critical perspective for her own work, is a noteworthy and admirable quality.