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.
Photo: Svend-Erik Eriksen
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 and sponsored a Hungarian refugee family who lived with them for a year. “Mr. Frank had a dark room and when I saw pictures emerging in the developer tray, I was just gob smacked. I thought this was incredible.” When Erik was about 12 he moved to the Lower Mainland and saved up and bought a Nikon camera.
Vancouver School of Art:
In 1969, Erik was a first-year student focusing on photography, painting and animation at the Vancouver School of Art. “In those days animation was very laborious and required a lot of technical skill, the technical end of photography came naturally,” he says.
After he graduated, an animation project he was working on needed backgrounds of city streets. Erik got up one early Sunday morning in July 1973 and walked from Main to Columbia taking photos.
“I walked all the way down to Woodwards turned and walked all the way back taking photos every ten feet or so,” he says. The NFB film was never aired and the negatives languished in Erik’s drawer for the next couple of decades until he found that someone was doing an analysis of the deterioration of Hastings Street and was looking for photos.
“I had to dig for them. They were all scratched up and full of dust and mildew because they were never meant to be art, they were meant to be utilitarian.”
Unfinished Business:
Erik scanned the negatives, cleaned them up and started stitching them together. When Bill Jeffries, curator at Presentation House in North Vancouver heard about them he asked if he could include them in his upcoming group show: Unfinished Business: Vancouver Street Photographers 1955 to 1985.
Unfortunately, I missed the show in 2003, but I do have the book and it’s filled with some of my favourite photographers: Michael de Courcy, Greg Girard, Curt Lang, Jeff Wall, Paul Wong, Bruce Stewart, Tony Westman and Henri Robideau. Erik’s beautiful panoramas are prominently placed between Fred Herzog and Ian Wallace.
I asked Erik if he thought of himself as a street photographer.
“No, not really, I consider myself a very eclectic photographer. I work mostly by intuition, I walk around and I take pictures. I don’t actually analyze it too much. It’s very organic, I don’t try and make art.”
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