Spooky Scene, Robson & Bute, Vancouver, 1978

“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.” ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

Now that I’ve explained why the 80s Vancouver photos were made in black and white, it’s time to introduce a new(er) set of images to the portfolio.

In fact, this All Hallows Eve marks the addition of a different, though related, body of work that mostly predates the medium format, 1:1 ratio photographs featured in the pre-existing Eighties Vancouver gallery — photos made with a manual Nikon FM 35mm camera and three prime lenses: Nikkor 24mm 2.8, 50mm 1.8, and 105mm 2.5.

The new 35mm gallery has been added as a submenu under “Projects” in the navigation bar above. Hover over “eighties vancouver” and click “35mm work.”

The feature photograph on this page, made with a 35mm Russian Zenit camera, represents the first exposition of a theme I would follow through a city intoxicated by the promises of Expo ’86 and “world class” status. The view was recorded at the southwest corner of Robson and Bute Streets (looking east), in 1979, as the old Robsonstrasse of German shops and delis took its first steps toward Guess and Club Monaco.

I lived steps away on Robson, sharing a (still surviving) bachelor apartment above the (long gone) Golden Wheel Chinese Restaurant with a large family of cockroaches. I worked at The Great Escape, an outdoor store at Denman and Georgia, escaping as often as possible on climbing trips to the Rockies and Coast Range.

Ironically, many of my Vancouver street photos, both medium format and 35mm, would be featured in the Vancouver’s Vancouver exhibition, which turned the storefronts of Robson Street into an open-air gallery, from August 15 to September 15, 1991.

I’ve dedicated the last few weeks, in between preparing posts for the chronological series that covered Toronto and England, to choosing and processing photos for the new gallery and to add to the existing one.

The exercise proved again that gems sometimes lie undiscovered or ignored, perhaps overshadowed by glitzier, more technically refined companions. 

Periodically, I will revisit some of these new photos within the “words & pictures” category. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these new/old pictures of Vancouver that Was. Check back often; there’s more to come. Select examples will be added to the corresponding shop collection.

“Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.” ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson