Photography

I’m a big fan of Svend-Erik Eriksen’s photography of Vancouver in the ’70s. Last week I called him up and asked how he got started. Erik, is an animator by trade, but his interest in photography goes back to the 1950s when he was a kid in Namu, BC. His parents had immigrated from Denmark… Continue reading The Photography of Svend-Erik Eriksen

When I think of street photographers, the first names that usually spring to mind are Fred Herzog, Foncie Pullice, Greg Girard, Michael de Courcy, Curt Lang and Bruce Stewart. But there were so many other great photographers shooting Vancouver in the 1950s to 1980s—names like Paul Wong, Tony Westman, Angus McIntyre and Svend-Erik Eriksen (Where… Continue reading Meet Vancouver’s Newest Street Photographers

Jack Cash (1918-2005) started as a Vancouver Sun photographer in the 1930s. He spent most of his life in North Vancouver and went on to have an amazing career.  I first heard about Jack Cash when I was researching his mother Gwen Cash, who when she went to work for Walter Nichol at the Vancouver… Continue reading Jack Cash, Photographer

It wasn’t easy getting a seat at the West Vancouver Library last Wednesday night. The West Van Historical Society presented Local Voices: Shooting the North Shore with Ralph Bower, retired Vancouver Sun photographer and Mike Wakefield, who also recently retired from a 35-year photography career with the North Shore News. The place was packed. I… Continue reading Documenting Local History

About six years ago, I was doing some research for my book Sensational Vancouver and took a tour of Strathcona with James Johnstone. I was excited to meet Paul Yee, a historian who now lives in Toronto, and has written several brilliant books which include Salt Water City, Tales from Gold Mountain, and most recently, A… Continue reading Paul Yee’s Vancouver Archives

When Fritz Autzen, a baker from Neukölln, Germany moved his family to British Columbia in 1954, his first job was a cook at Zaro’s of America, a deli on Robson Street. Five years later he moved his family to the West End and established the Hippocampus, a fish & chip shop on Denman and Comox… Continue reading Fritz Autzen and the West End’s Hippocampus

There is a chapter in Sensational Vancouver called West Coast Modern which explains the connections between artists and architects and the West Coast Modern movement in Vancouver. Last week I wrote about Selwyn Pullan’s photography exhibition currently on display at the West Vancouver Museum. I focused on his shots of West Coast Modern houses now… Continue reading West Coast Modern Architecture

I finally got a chance to drop by the West Vancouver Museum yesterday to check out the latest exhibition on the photography of Selwyn Pullan. Assistant curator Kiriko Watanabe has done an amazing job, not only pulling out some of Selwyn’s most interesting work, but also displaying the cameras that he used to shoot them… Continue reading Selwyn Pullan Photography: What’s Lost

On May 26, 1896, 143 people crammed onto Streetcar No. 16 to cross the Point Ellice Bridge. It was Queen Victoria’s birthday and they were on their way to attend the celebrations at Macaulay Point Park in Esquimalt. They never made it. The middle span of the bridge collapsed under the weight and the streetcar… Continue reading The Point Ellice Bridge Disaster – May 26, 1896

I had the pleasure of chatting with Bob Cain this week and discovering his beautiful photographs. Bob grew up in Marpole, at a time when a swing bridge joined Marpole to Sea Island (it was dismantled in 1957 after the Oak Street Bridge opened). “Marpole was a small town like Kerrisdale and Kitsilano,” he says.… Continue reading The Photography of Bob Cain

City archivist Heather Gordon says the recent donation of a whopping two million negatives from the Sun and Province (Postmedia) photo library is the largest photographic collection that Vancouver Archives has ever received. It’s also one of the most important. “The Sun and Province photographers were everywhere, documenting everything, so their work is an extraordinarily… Continue reading Vancouver Archives Receives Two Million Negs

Stephen Joseph Thompson was a photographer working mostly in Vancouver and New Westminster between 1886 and 1905. I’m obsessed with a photographer named Stewart Joseph Thompson. I first heard of him a few weeks back when I saw a photo he’d taken of Georgia and Burrard Streets in the 1890s. Last week, I found a… Continue reading Stephen Joseph Thompson, photographer (1864-1929)

Fred Herzog, Foncie, Selwyn Pullan, Michael de Courcy, Bruce Stewart, and Angus McIntyre were just a few who took up a camera in the Vancouver of the ‘70s, and were documenting images of everything from buildings to the changing skyline, and from neighborhoods to neon. They also put a spotlight on people—the famous, the quirky,… Continue reading Vancouver in the Seventies

When Foncie Pulice was 21 in 1934, he quit house painting and went to work for Joe Iaci and his street photography company Kandid Kamera. Foncie, to my knowledge, never crossed the bridge or took the ferry to North Vancouver—at least not for his work. He did capture many of our most colourful citizens. A… Continue reading Foncie’s North Vancouver Connection

Angus McIntyre was a Vancouver bus driver for 40 years. He has a love for photography, street lighting and transportation systems. Last week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Angus for tea and a chat. Angus was given his first camera at age eight—an Argus with the little window and the roll through… Continue reading Angus McIntyre

  When I think of photographers working in Vancouver in the 50s and 60s, I think of Foncie Pulice, Selwyn Pullan and Fred Herzog. Foncie was a street photographer who opened Foncie’s Fotos in 1946 and shot millions of photos of people as they strolled Vancouver’s streets. Vancouver-born Selwyn Pullan, served in the Canadian Navy… Continue reading The photographs of Jan de Haas (1914-1967)

I’ve been posting pictures of the BC Electric Building on Facebook this week, but I haven’t posted this one—it’s on the back of Sensational Vancouver and in the chapter on West Coast Modern. The photo was shot by Selwyn Pullan in 1957, the same year BC Electric completed this ground breaking piece of architecture. While… Continue reading The incredible photography of Selwyn Pullan

When North Vancouver’s Dene Rossouw takes a photograph he’s not looking to capture the physical reality of the scene he wants to evoke a mood, an emotional experience or just draw our attention to a detail that we might not otherwise have noticed. His photo of the Dominion Building on West Hastings is shot from an unusual… Continue reading Blurring the line between reality and fantasy – the photographs of Dene Rossouw

Last week I wrote about Darren Bernaerdt who teaches Photoshop at Langara College. Each year Darren sends his students to the Vancouver Archives to look at old photographs, choose one that resonates with them, research it and then go out and photograph the same scene from the same angle and merge them together. The results… Continue reading Then and Now: Images of Vancouver

Some of my favourite pictures in Sensational Victoria are the then and now ones in James Bay. There’s a fabulous archival shot of Carr House on Government Street taken in 1869 and a current photo that doesn’t look all that much different—143 years later. Another find is of the Queen Anne house on South Turner… Continue reading James Bay – Then and Now