Wherefore thou art?

For the second time in 2-years, someone has contacted me asking if I am the photographer behind a photograph of Vancouver’s lost Orillia Apartment Building, razed in 1986 to make way for another nondescript commercial development on the corner of Robson and Seymour Streets.

Orillia mystery

I did indeed make a photo of the condemned building, on a rain-soaked day in 1985. The first correspondent had received his photo as a present from his wife, who bought the print at “a private home sale … in East Vanistan.” The signature on the print is indistinct — its author a mystery — so he assumed I had made the image when he came across my work and the Eighties Vancouver portfolio.

Last weekend, the second contact also assumed he had found the creator of the melancholy scene: a blurred pedestrian, umbrella in hand, passing the forlorn Orillia. Someone had spray-painted SAVE ME! on its facade. No one was listening in a city administration obsessed with chasing “world class” status and the fleeting amusements of Expo ’86. He had bought his print sometime in the ’90s from a fellow hawking photos on Robson Street, outside the old Duthie’s Books location.

Detective work

In 2017, the first contact sent me a couple of snapshots of his framed print. Certainly, there was more than a passing resemblance to my work. The photograph was made, one would assume, on the very same day as mine, during a torrential downpour typical of Vancouver in winter. The first snapshot I received didn’t show full dimensions so I wondered if it was 1×1 (square) format like mine. No, the print looked like it came from a 35mm camera — with a ragged black border created with a filed-out film holder in the enlarger. Possibly it was contact-printed from a large format negative.

Closer inspection and comparison to my image revealed slight differences in the posters pasted on the boarded-up windows and door of the Orillia, so it must have been made on a different day. But the resemblance was so uncanny, and my memory as faded as the mystery print, that I pulled my negs out of their folder to examine with a loupe.

Nowhere negs

The roll of film, shot in my Mamiyaflex 6×6 camera, represented another bicycle-supported exploration of Vancouver streets, returning to my apartment in Point Grey via the Granville Bridge, where, I “captured” the Captain Cook Tug entering False Creek.

The first thing that stood out was a missing strip of negatives that would have contained exposures 4-6. Obviously, they had been removed before I contact-printed the remaining 9 exposures. I have no recollection of where they went. Possibly, because I’m prone to perfectionism I’d tossed them into the darkroom trash. Nevertheless, I entertained thoughts of conspiracy.

Incognito still

Who done it?

The owner and I strained our eyes— he on his print, me on the phone photo he forwarded — to decipher the signature, which certainly had not been applied with an archival pigment ink pen.

So, once again, serendipity visits via this site. This time, though, a mystery remains: who was the Vancouver street photographer who viewed the poor old Orillia (through a curtain of rain) in the same light as I did, 34-years ago?

My ode to the Orillia is hiding in plain sight and prints are available through my sales gallery.

Condemned Orillia Building, Robson & Seymour, 1985

Addendum

Last week we lost two great documentary photographers. Fred Herzog’s photographs of 50s and 60s Vancouver only came to light in the last decade or so. His Kodachrome images, restored digitally and printed, like my work, with pigment inks, have come to define the Vancouver since supplanted by the fevered rush to “development” that demolished the Orillia. Herzog was 88.

Swiss-born Robert Frank, with his iconic book The Americans, similarly documented the United States of the 1950s. Frank died Monday in Inverness, on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. He was 94.

Earlier in the month, fashion photographer Peter Lindberg died. He was just 74. His iconic black and white photographs of Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, and Christy Turlington launched the age of the “supermodels.” His unretouched approach to fashion and celebrity portraiture engaged us with a natural documentary approach more often eclipsed in the genre by artifice.