Mandelbrot

Mandelbrot is the edi­tor of Geist in another life. He is also a pho­tog­ra­pher and has been writ­ing about pho­tog­ra­phy since 1990. Visit his web site at phototaxis.ca

Mandelbrot on Geist.com

The John Molson Way

The message on the sign under the elevated railway read, “The John Molson Way,” and seemed to have been designed to resemble a six-pack of Molson Canadian. These were confusing signals and for some moments I couldn’t understand what the sign, with its unequivocal definite article, was meant to say.

Pictures on Postcards

Pictures on postcards were authorized by the Canadian post office in 1903 (postcards without pictures had been around since 1871), and over the next twenty-five years—a period known to postcard collectors as the Golden Age—postcards became exceedingly popular as vacation souvenirs, and the images they bore became a preferred way of confirming one’s arrival at exotic destinations.

Celebrity Cover

We were trying to find a cover image among a stack of Tom Abrahamson's photographs, which we were passing around the editorial table. A lot of intense look­ing went on, and very little talk, until Eve said: you know, if we want a strong cover, there's really only one choice.

What’s There

One of the first pleasures of taking pictures is finding out what something looks like when it gets into a photograph. This is often what motivates young photographers, who are always surprised (sometimes delighted and sometimes horrified) by what they discover when their film is developed.

1974

In those days, when you saw a Woolworth’s store you thought of the photo booth, and if you had nothing else to do, you went in and invested a quarter in the history of photography.

Girl in the Photograph

When my friend Barbara heard a description of this photograph of a friend’s aunt taken when the aunt was nine years old, sometime in the early 1950s near the town of Barrington, Nova Scotia, she was put strongly in mind of her own mother, who had grown up in Nova Scotia and who used to tell stories of catching fish when she was a girl.

Summer Snapshots

One summer I began taking pictures of people on the street surreptitiously, by holding the camera at my waist and aiming it at passersby when they were about six feet away.

City Pastoral: The Public Photography of Goran Basaric

When Goran Basaric first encountered the public spaces of Vancouver (in 1994, when he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his wife), he remembered the pictures he used to look at on the trains that took him to the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia when he was a child, and every year his parents would send him with other skinny kids (as he tells it) to summer camp, where his health would be improved by the salubrious coastal air.

Hero of the Socialist Kitchen

The photographer was a young man working for Stav, a youth magazine whose title translates as “Attitude.”

Jalopy World

Decades before there was a “Vancouver school” of photography (also known as photo-conceptualism), there was a Photography of Vancouver, as invented or discovered by Fred Herzog in the early 1950s, when he began taking pictures in a city that had barely entered the photographic record (at that time defined largely by the streets of Paris, New York, Chicago, et al.).