Texaco Station, 655 W. Broadway, Vancouver, circa 1958 (Photo: Holger Hansen. Used by permission)

“I don’t believe art can be considered a cosmetic. It is an indigenous part of the life of society—utilitarian, functional, humanizing. The artist no longer exists in isolation.” ~Robin Mayor, the third director of the Vancouver School of Art, 1975

Vancouver School of Art (photo: Holger Hansen. Used by permission)

Student of art

Holger Hansen was around 30-years-old when he climbed a parkade at the southeast corner of W. Broadway and Heather, in Vancouver, to snap a photo of the Texaco gas station, across the road at 655 W. Broadway.

A recent immigrant from Denmark, Holger began his life in Canada, at 24, working on a farm in Brantford, Ontario. After a brief stint at the G.M. plant in Oshawa, 25-year-old Holger drove across Canada (before the Trans Canada Highway existed) to Vancouver, where he enrolled in the Vancouver School of Art (precursor to Emily Carr University of Art and Design and its various incarnations). There, for 4-years beginning in 1954, he studied under instructors like Jack Shadbolt, Canada’s official artist on the battlefields of WW II. It was during this time that Holger made the Texaco photo with his medium format Zeiss Ikon camera (I have one in my collection).

Three decades later, in 1983, I rode my bicycle to the top of the same parkade, carrying my medium format Mamiyaflex camera to photograph the same building, then housing a carpet store. I was 31.

Search history

Last week, Holger’s daughter, Mia, contacted me. She had been searching the Web, trying to put a location to her father’s fantastic photo, when she came upon my original post on the making of my photograph, Broadway & Heather, Vancouver, 1983.

When I was writing that story, and a follow-up documenting conversion to a plant shop, I too had scoured the Internet, hoping I might locate an image of the Broadway building serving its original purpose — discerned in my photo by the oil company’s logo peeking through peeling paint. 

No luck. All I could find, as mentioned in the latter post, were images documenting “Broadway Falls,” created when Heather Street Creek overflowed, in 1909.

Broadway & Heather, Vancouver, 1983

The algorithm of art

More times than I’d like to admit, I question the purpose of this blog — I did so recently — then another of these coincidences occur. Sometimes “social media synchronicity” is at play. Sometimes the Google bot is at work. Logical Ray knows that (presumably) dispassionate mathematical algorithms decide where our searches lead. Nonetheless, who could blame me for suspecting something of the black arts in programs that vet the online content we’re served? 

The omnipotent search engine, praise be, has been working its magic in my favour lately.

A few days after Mia’s inquiry, a comment on the blog (I love comments!) added a personal anecdote to my story on Main Street and the nightclubs of Chinatown in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

These kinds of events remind that the contents of my photographic archive are not isolated, solely related to my story. Instead, set lose in the world, they become part of a communal narrative.

Holger Hansen spent less time in Vancouver than I — he returned to Ontario in 1959 to pursue a career in graphic design, in Toronto — but our photographs are an important part of the city’s documentary record, as I confidently predicted in regard to another photographic “survey” along Robson Street, in 1984. 

As such, these “vintage” photographs kindle human connection in the present. They are part of shared memory that photography weaves together in a way quite unlike any other visual art.

Could it be that the programmers have lent their art, voodoo to an innumerate like me, to the search for social convergence? Let us hope, against those who would subvert these channels of communication to sow discord, that intersection lies in community, continuity, and good will.

Mia Hansen arrived in Vancouver in 1994, missing “a lot of the character” that existed when her father and, to a lesser extent when I, roamed with a camera. She is admittedly “obsessed with then and now photos and tracking locations.”  So it was, armed with her father’s scrapbook and a networked computer, we met on the Information Superhighway, at Broadway and Heather.

Raymond Parker’s Broadway and Heather photos are available as a poster, limited, or open edition print. This image is part of the larger Eighties Vancouver Collection. Gallery here. Shop for prints here.