ǝʇɒƆ ƨ’ǝϱɿoǝӘ, Broadway & Yew, Vancouver, 1985

Sometimes I miss Vancouver. Or rather, I miss the Vancouver that once was … or maybe I miss the Vancouver I once was. Anyway, that Vancouver visits me in dreams, in images that arise like chimera from my archives.

The photograph above has called to me from a binder of “rejects” for decades, occasionally returning to demand attention. Lately, the image, latent in the true sense, has become more insistent. It was made on a walk, from Point Grey, along Broadway to Granville, where Brian Hay and I, carrying our Mamiyaflex cameras and tripods, stopped to gawk at the smouldering shell of a shop gutted by fire (the last exposure on the single, 12-exposure roll of film I shot that day shows a firefighter emerging from a doorway, engulfed in smoke).

Five of those exposures were focussed on a nondescript square box of a building, housing George’s Café and the Evergreen Patch, at the southwest corner of West Broadway and Yew. Or should I say, save one image, it’s reflection in a newer building across the street? It’s those, rather than the overexposed photo I made from the north side of Broadway, that brought me this morning, coffee in hand, to the scanner. I was careful not to mix the java with Kami fluid used in the wet scanning process.

Though I can’t tell you the specifics of my thinking as I moved my tripod and camera around, I can recall my conviction that this was a worthwhile subject — more interesting and unique than the purely documentary image I’d recorded (poorly, as it turned out) on negative #6.

The contact sheet illustrates that I was preoccupied with the position of the two lovely, sculpted bushes — where should they intersect the reflected café? Should they be centred, or follow the “Rule of Thirds.” The 1×1 ratio is a wonderful and perplexing thing. I believe I tried several filters — yellow, orange, red — which accounts for the enhanced contrast in the foliage.

So, once again, this Eighties Vancouver project, or burden, or obsession, has brought me to another buried gem. Over the last few hours, I’ve experienced a little bit of the excitement I saw via the focussing screen of my camera on that day in 1985. Compared to the photo at right, the negative is exquisite, rich and detailed. For the first time since I tripped the shutter, 35-years-ago, I have produced an enlarged image that is faithful to the the original previsualization.

Like so many Vancouver intersections, Broadway and Yew has been transformed in the interim. The little café, reflected in the bank’s windows (I think it was a bank) and onto the light-sensitive, silver emulsion film in my camera, has been replaced with modern condos and retail stores. Certainly, that little stucco-clad box was no architectural treasure, but it was part of the Vancouver I occasionally pine for in my dreams.

As far as technical details go (who doesn’t love technical details?), I used Ilford’s fast HP5 film. Unusually, I neglected to record developing details on the back of the contact sheet. My usual procedure for HP5 was development in Perceptol 1:1, for 21 minutes. I”m assuming I exposed the film at its native ISO 400. HP5 is hardly a perfect choice for such a bright day. I’m guessing it was all I had available, going on complaints of privation in my journals of the day.