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Land's End

Memory Arranger

Memory and the Valley

Wall of Shame

Marcello Di Cintio

For cen­turies the Saharawis have called the desert home, but they don’t belong here. At least not on this side of the Wall. Nominated for the 2010 National Magazine Awards.

Lincoln Clarkes, The Eastside Portraits

in
  • Photo Essay
October 15, 2009
Patty Osborne
For the past year and a half Lincoln Clarkes has been photographing women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for Heroines, a project that started out to be a series of about a dozen images and has so far grown to over 250 photographs and two gallery showings. Most days Clarkes is out on the street meeting the women, giving them apples, oranges, vitamins, Band-Aids, cigarettes, cash, advice. When he and his female assistant ask to take a woman’s photograph, they introduce themselves and ask her name, age and where she’s from, then offer her five dollars, five minutes, five photos. Later, Clarkes gives each subject a portrait of herself. All of the women they approach are addicted to heroin or cocaine. When Clarkes explains what he is doing, most of them show interest and an eagerness to take part. Since they rarely leave their neighbourhood (they say they are treated like lepers if they venture into the west side of the city), not many attend the gallery showings. Some gallery visitors, writing in a comment book, have condemned Clarkes for exploitation, while others have praised him for opening their eyes. When I saw Clarkes’s photographs for the first time it was through the window of the Helen Pitt Gallery, and I hurried on, thinking this was just another photographer who was using downtrodden people to make a name for himself. Indeed, a good deal of controversy was generated by the show. But when I spoke to Clarkes myself, and then thought about it, I reconsidered my first reaction. The women in Clarkes’s photographs give consent before their images are recorded, thus entering into a collaboration with Clarkes. They present themselves to the camera and by extension, to us, and in that moment they are no longer invisible. Within these transactions Clarkes tries to disrupt the power relationship that is built into the roles of photographer and subject, and he seems to succeed: he has ongoing contact with most of these women (at least the ones who haven’t died yet). But I wish he’d chosen a different title. For me, the word Heroines puts up a barrier of myth that at first obscures the humanness of his subjects— the essential quality that he is attempting to portray. For me, knowing the context in which the photographs were taken is an important part of how I perceive the photographed women. Only when I am satisfied with the photographer’s motives and methods can I concentrate on the images before me, looking into their eyes, studying their faces, their clothes, their neighbourhood. These beautifully composed and visually rich photographs allow me to look closely, even to stare—something I find difficult to do on the street. Clarkes says that these photographs have made people pay attention, and he hopes this will change things so that “more women won’t end up here.” I’m skeptical that viewing the images in the safe confines of a gallery or a magazine will spur us to take action, but now when I see women like this on the street I know there is more there than meets the eye. Clarkes’s photographs give us the opportunity to look straight into the eyes of these women without risking any interaction with them. In the gallery we have permission to study these people; in “real life” we avert our eyes out of fear or embarrassment. Lincoln Clarkes is a professional photographer in Vancouver. Information about the Heroines project and interviews with Clarkes can be found on the Internet at www.ellavon.com or www.highway99.com/lclarkes.
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Memory in Belgrade

in
  • Photo Essay
July 20, 2009
Goran Basaric

Web Exclusive: Check out the spe­cial 12-page dig­i­tal edi­tion of “Memory in Belgrade,” and order printed copies.

My father, Djuro, was born in 1925 in Bosnia. When World War ii started in 1941, Croatian fas­cists burned down the fam­ily home. My father joined the anti-fascist Partisans and spent the next four years hid­ing from the Germans and fight­ing them in the forests and moun­tains. After the war he con­tin­ued in his mil­i­tary career until his retirement.

My mother, Milica, was born in Kragujevac, an old cap­i­tal of Serbia and the birth­place of the Yugo auto­mo­bile. Her father was a skilled tool­maker who worked in a gun fac­tory. In 1941, he and seven thou­sand other men were taken hostage and shot by German sol­diers in reprisal against the Partisans. My mother never got to know her father, and she car­ried this deep sor­row through the rest of her life. She worked as an admin­is­tra­tive clerk in var­i­ous insti­tu­tions, and after she mar­ried, she devoted her life to our fam­ily. My older brother and I have happy mem­o­ries of our child­hood in Belgrade.

In Belgrade these days, every­thing seems to be new, even when it looks famil­iar. Streets have been renamed for old kings and com­man­ders; the gov­ern­ment has new agen­cies; new neigh­bour­hoods are burst­ing with new kids; the city is buzzing with a new lan­guage. The old Belgrade used its court­yards to hide from pros­per­ity and moder­nity dur­ing the years of social­ism, and to guard small shops where local mer­chants, lock­smiths, bar­bers and shoe­mak­ers were still ser­vic­ing the old bour­geois. The result was a pecu­liar sym­bio­sis of the cap­i­tal­ist past and social­ist present. When I returned to those court­yards in 2008, hop­ing to find the old shops, I could see that our past had been con­quered by the forces of glob­al­iza­tion: inter­net cafés, over-designed for­eign banks, MaxMaras and Benettons. 

My wide-angle cam­era, a Soviet-era Horizont with a mov­ing lens, is more suited to pho­tograph­ing large, open spaces like parks and oceans than the den­sity of big cities. The cam­era needs light and space, and it takes time for the lens to travel from one side of the frame to the other. Urban cen­tres move con­stantly and quickly and don’t wait for me to reframe. In Belgrade I had to be patient with my panoramic cam­era — I passed hours near river­banks and in parks wait­ing for peo­ple to enter the scene. Often I would posi­tion my own shadow some­where in the frame and wait for some­thing to happen.

In 1968, when I was six years old, my fam­ily moved to the newly devel­oped dis­trict of New Belgrade. When I wasn’t in school, I spent my time play­ing with my friends, build­ing cities of wet sand. New Belgrade was a giant sand­box in those days — high cranes and con­struc­tion crews were every­where, build­ing over the swamp­land. My neigh­bour­hood was called Block 37 and con­sisted of noth­ing but huge apart­ment build­ings. There were no cor­ner stores or mar­kets. My ele­men­tary school was her­alded as the most mod­ern school in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. An English princess vis­ited the school, but she wore no crown on her head. When the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity opened, we were sent out to stand along the road for hours, wait­ing for President Tito to pass by on his way to and from the air­port. We waved national flags and sang songs about rev­o­lu­tion and broth­er­hood and unity. I took my first pho­to­graph in Block 37 in the fall of 1977.

When I left Belgrade in January 1994, infla­tion was run­ning at 400,000-billion per­cent (fif­teen dig­its). The National Bank was print­ing new ban­knotes every Monday, and there were no pay­cheques — only cash, and tons of it. By Friday all that cash was worth­less, unless it was exchanged for for­eign cur­rency on the black market.

I lived in Belgrade for twenty-five years. I worked and played there, slept there and breathed in its rhythms, stud­ied and later lec­tured on cin­e­matog­ra­phy at the University of Arts in Belgrade, and I can still slip into the city’s pat­terns when I return for a visit. Everything feels famil­iar and pre­dictable, even if it is dif­fer­ent on the surface. 

I have always felt that there is much about Belgrade that every­one could learn to love, if only I could show the city at its best — or, as we would say in Serbia, to show it in its best light. Last sum­mer I returned to Belgrade to pho­to­graph and write about the place of my past and of the present as well; to remem­ber and hon­our the city, and to chase the mag­i­cal light of early morn­ing and late afternoon.

Goran Basaric is a pho­tog­ra­pher, cin­e­matog­ra­pher and pho­to­jour­nal­ist who lives and works in Vancouver. “Memory in Belgrade” is part of a work com­mis­sioned with the assis­tance of Arts Partners in Creative Development.

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Fighting Season

in
  • Photo Essay
  • Palu, Louie
July 20, 2009
Louie Palu

During the fight­ing sea­son in Afghanistan, which unfolds each year through spring, sum­mer and fall, the lush land­scape of grape fields, trees and irri­ga­tion canals in the south pro­vides essen­tial cover for guer­rilla war­fare. The vil­lages and farm­ers’ fields serve as tem­po­rary bat­tle­fields, where the Taliban insur­gents clash with the U.S-led coali­tion, which includes the Canadian Forces, Afghan National Army and British troops. Once the fight­ing ends and the insur­gents and sol­diers break con­tact with each other, life for the vil­lagers returns to rel­a­tive nor­malcy: the insur­gents mur­der and intim­i­date civil­ians, place land mines and road­side bombs, and ham­per the recon­struc­tion efforts of the Canadian troops.

Afghanistan has been in a state of war for so long — the Soviet inter­ven­tion in the 1980s, then civil war and the Taliban regime, and now this stand­off — that the peo­ple have grown accus­tomed to the cycle of vio­lence, but they always know it is fiercest dur­ing the fight­ing sea­son. They have adapted to the con­flict and it has become a part of their daily lives. 

Many civil­ians ask who I am and why I don’t carry a gun, and I have vis­ited vil­lages where they don’t know what a pho­tog­ra­pher or jour­nal­ist is. My Afghan nick­name is Mustafa, which I got in Pakistan in 2004 from Afghan refugees mov­ing to Canada. The name stuck and an Afghan sol­dier wrote it on my hel­met, but most civil­ians can’t read or write so they don’t under­stand what it means. Apart from basic reli­gious stud­ies, school­ing in rural Afghanistan is a low pri­or­ity — the vil­lagers are so poor that most of the chil­dren and adults must work the fields and tend the flocks of sheep so their fam­i­lies can survive. 

On days when it’s quiet on patrol, chil­dren run up to me and the troops from their homes and the fields, yelling “Hello! Hello!” They gig­gle and ges­ture with their hands for pens and candy. None of the chil­dren know their age — few Afghans do — because record keep­ing in Afghanistan is scant at best. On the way to one vil­lage we fre­quented on patrols, I always picked wild­flow­ers for the girls. The sun wilted and dried them within min­utes, but the flow­ers made them smile. We usu­ally toss hand­fuls of candy to the kids. Candy is rare, and I love giv­ing it out, espe­cially because American sol­diers in Italy tossed candy to my father when he was a child dur­ing the Second World War.

One day as we marched back to base after an intense bat­tle, we reached an irri­ga­tion canal where some boys were splash­ing and div­ing, less than two kilo­me­tres from where the fight­ing had just occurred. Only min­utes ear­lier we had been in the midst of com­bat: artillery pound­ing the field and rat­tling the earth, dust bil­low­ing from rub­ble, and the cracks of gun­fire every­where, and then there were those boys, jump­ing into the river and hav­ing fun. Back at the base, the sol­diers and I had to be rehy­drated intravenously.

Since the begin­ning of Canada’s com­bat mis­sion, there have not been enough sol­diers to con­tain the insur­gency. Now Canada will realign its posi­tions and the U.S. mil­i­tary will face what could be the blood­i­est fight­ing sea­son in years. The longer I stay in Afghanistan and the more I see, the fewer answers I have about what is going on there and what the future holds. Back in Toronto I can’t even talk to any­one in a bar, because con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple who think they under­stand Afghanistan just end as heated argu­ments on the sidewalk. 

Louie Palu is a Canadian pho­to­jour­nal­ist who has trav­elled to Afghanistan three times since 2006, for three months at a time. He has spent more con­sec­u­tive time on the front line with Canadian troops than almost any other Canadian jour­nal­ist. In May, Palu returned to Afghanistan to doc­u­ment the 2009 fight­ing season.

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Pentimento

in
  • Photo Essay
  • 72
  • Qi, Lu
Author: 
Lu Qi
Teaser: 

Cambodian children flashing smiles in front of mass graves are superimposed on pages of my journal. The effect is so eerie that it takes me a while to realize I am looking at double exposures—I must have put that roll of film through my camera twice.

Teaser Image: 
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In every one of the prints from a roll of film I shot at the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, two images over­lap each other like shad­ows, or ghosts. In one pic­ture, a friend holds her cam­era up to pho­to­graph me, and she is over­laid by rows and rows of skulls in the mon­u­ment at the Killing Fields. Another friend gazes out of the frame amid clothes, bones and teeth pro­trud­ing from the ground around a tree stump. Cambodian chil­dren flash­ing smiles in front of mass graves are super­im­posed on pages of my jour­nal. The effect is so eerie that it takes me a while to real­ize I am look­ing at dou­ble expo­sures — I must have put that roll of film through my cam­era twice.

If a pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words, what about two over­lap­ping pic­tures? Do the words from each image con­join, or do they dis­tort each other, cre­at­ing one intan­gi­ble and mean­ing­less image?

A pho­to­graph is a record of the light that passes through the shut­ter of a cam­era at a given instant. Our mem­ory does that too, but it also makes and stores a fab­ri­cated record of the instant, a col­lec­tion of translu­cent images that stack up over time, and we can “see” them all at once. Did the June bug land on my hand before or after din­ner? Who walked with me down that wind­ing trail? The many over­lap­ping images pre­clude the accu­rate recall of a par­tic­u­lar moment, but the effect of the lay­ers is much more true to my mem­ory of the trip to Cambodia. —Lu Qi

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Lu Qi is a Canadian photographer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also the co-founder of Cyto360 Bioscience, a company that researches cancer detection.
Date Published: 
March 25, 2009
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Images of Butterfly Garden

in
  • Photo Essay
  • 33
  • Hogan, Paul
Author: 
Paul Hogan
Teaser: 
Photographs from the Butterfly Garden in Sri Lanka, a retreat for children traumatized by the civil war.
Teaser Image: 
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Deck: 

These photographs were taken in 1998 by Paul Hogan in a walled enclave known as the Butterfly Garden in the town of Batticaloa in Sri Lanka. The Butterfly Garden was once the orchard of St. Michael’s Jesuit college and is now a retreat for children traumatized by the civil war that has raged in Sri Lanka since 1983.

Chil­dren from six to six­teen years of age attend the Butterfly Garden for nine months, one day a week, in groups of fifty drawn from the local Tamil and Muslim pop­u­la­tions. Many of them have endured pro­found fam­ily loss and wit­nessed great hor­ror: they are the chil­dren of ter­ror. In the Butterfly Garden these chil­dren are slowly restored to them­selves and to the world through play and sto­ry­telling, music and drama, the arts of paint­ing and pup­petry and par­tic­i­pa­tion in the life of a gar­den. Reconstructed rit­u­als of genogram-making (The Mother-Father Journey) allow them to begin telling the story of their fam­i­lies and their vil­lages; group sto­ry­telling allows them to find the nar­ra­tive and dra­matic power to rep­re­sent new worlds of their own mak­ing. Many of the Butterfly Garden staff were them­selves child vic­tims of the war, and work­ing there is for them a process of heal­ing and recov­ery. The work of the Butterfly Garden extends to the vil­lages in the coun­try­side through a pro­gram of out­reach and by means of the Butterfly Garden Bus, which was a gift from the World University Services of Canada.

The war in Sri Lanka is becom­ing a very old war, and it has made refugees of more than a quar­ter of a mil­lion peo­ple. Sri Lanka is an island half the size of Newfoundland, with a pop­u­la­tion of 18 million.

A cen­tral expe­ri­ence in the Butterfly Garden is play­ing on Mud Mountain (a pile of mud), an activ­ity which often leads to the devel­op­ment of story ele­ments. The story that fol­lows found its begin­nings with a group of six chil­dren who met at Mud Mountain in 1997.

Blood of the Mango

The broth­ers Iqbal and Mustan lived on Mount Himalaya, which was a moun­tain not to be con­fused with the Great Himalayas of Northern India, for Mount Himalaya was sin­gu­lar and small and located on a jun­gle island in the south­ern sea, where Iqbal and Mustan were both cir­cuit court judges who used to ride around on their camel hear­ing cases, weigh­ing evi­dence and decid­ing people’s fates.

One night when Iqbal and Mustan were out on their cir­cuit they stayed in a rest house where they were both bit­ten by a mos­quito. They were annoyed by this and decided to find the offend­ing mos­quito and bring him to justice.

Along the way they asked every­one they hap­pened to meet if they had seen the cul­prit, and indeed almost every­one they asked had also been bit­ten. There was a mouse, a tur­tle, a rab­bit, a duck, a snake, a deer and a mon­key. The mos­quito had bit­ten each of them in turn. They decided to join in the search and help Iqbal and Mustan track down the culprit.

With so many in the posse it was not hard to find the mos­quito. They entered the shade of a cool gar­den in a small sea­side vil­lage and there he was, sleep­ing soundly under a coconut palm on an over­turned bucket beside the well. They approached him stealth­ily, arrested him and secured him to the stalk of a tall orange marigold with his wings tied behind his back. The inter­ro­ga­tion then began:

“Are you the crim­i­nal who bit us?” asked Iqbal.

“I am not a crim­i­nal,” answered the mos­quito. “I am just doing what comes nat­u­rally. I was hun­gry so I bit.”

The mouse, the rab­bit and the mon­key cried out for jus­tice. “He admits it — he bit us! He must die.”

Some of the oth­ers dis­agreed. The wise old tur­tle stepped for­ward and pre­sented a thought­ful alter­na­tive. “It is true that he bit us, but it is also true that seek­ing blood and bit­ing are in his nature. He can­not help it. Let us have mercy and not take his life. Let us instead ban­ish him from Mount Himalaya to a place so far away he will no longer bother us.”

The duck and the snake imme­di­ately agreed. This was a more rea­son­able and com­pas­sion­ate course to fol­low. The deer kept silent. He had found some fresh grass to chew and was more inter­ested in that. Iqbal and Mustan con­ferred. “Where will we send him?” they asked.

The ani­mals dis­cussed it among them­selves and came up with a pop­u­lar destination.

“Let us send him to Canada,” they said. They all seemed pleased with this, but the mos­quito him­self dissented.

“Oh please don’t send me to Canada. It is so cold and the blood of the peo­ple there is very bland, I’m told. Not hot and spicy blood like I’m used to.”

Mustan spoke. “We are not send­ing you on leave, Mosquito. We are ban­ish­ing you for being such a men­ace here.”

Iqbal pon­dered aloud. “The prob­lem with send­ing him to Canada is that he will become a men­ace there. Surely, after time, he will break down and bite a Canadian, even if their blood is not to his taste. Then the Canadian will try to kill him. He will be in the same fix there as he is here. Sending this mos­quito to Canada does not solve the problem.”

“Then send him to Colombo,” said the duck. “The place is full of mos­qui­toes. Who will notice one more?”

“That is true,” said Iqbal, “but jus­tice is not served by send­ing him there for surely he will bite a Colombo per­son and we are back where we began.”

“Then send him to Eravur,” said the deer, look­ing up from his grass. “The peo­ple there are very nice. Maybe the mos­quito will not bite them.”

But we are very nice too,” said the mouse. “That didn’t stop him from bit­ing us.”

“True,” said Iqbal, “the mos­quito bites good and bad alike. He makes no dis­tinc­tion. Wherever we send him, he will bite.”

“So let us not ban­ish him,” said Mustan. “Let him remain here where we can keep an eye on him, but he must agree to leave us alone. He must under no cir­cum­stances bite us.”

“Then what will I do when I’m hun­gry?” asked the mosquito.

“How about this,” said the tur­tle. “We will find a fruit whose juice you like. You will agree to eat it and leave us alone.” The mos­quito thought this was a very naïve solu­tion but he kept silent. The court appeared to be run­ning out of steam and if he did not agree they’d soon be propos­ing the death penalty again.

The ani­mals favoured the turtle’s sug­ges­tion and even the judges seemed con­vinced of its merit. But the blood of which fruit would most likely sat­isfy the mosquito’s needs? That was the ques­tion. The mos­quito was untied and many dif­fer­ent kinds of fruit were brought before him. Wood apple, guava, pineap­ple, durian, rambu­tan, jack­fruit, papaya, banana, bread­fruit. The list went on inter­minably. He would stick his stinger in and choke back a small sip but most of the fruits were very bland or oth­er­wise dis­agree­able. The Canadian option was begin­ning to look more and more attrac­tive. The mos­quito decided to change his mind and argue for ban­ish­ment to Canada. It was dif­fi­cult pre­tend­ing he liked the unpalat­able fruits he was being forced to sample.

Then the snake slith­ered over with a beau­ti­ful ripe mango in his mouth. This looked rather tempt­ing. The aura of the mango seemed dif­fer­ent from that of the other fruits and when he tested its skin for per­me­abil­ity he found there was both a give to it and a resis­tance, not unlike human flesh. Maybe he could get to like this fruit?

The mos­quito pressed home his prod and drank deeply from the juice of the mango. His translu­cent belly filled up with its deep golden nec­tar. All the ani­mals gath­ered around. The mos­quito drank his fill, then mer­rily buzzed off burst­ing with bright mango energy.

Iqbal and Mustan mounted their camel and headed for the near­est rest house. It made them happy to think there would be no more mos­quito bites to worry about that night, or ever again, on Mount Himalaya.

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Paul Hogan is an artist who lives part of the year in Toronto, where six­teen years ago in the tiny for­est grove behind the Bloorview MacMillan Centre (off Bayview Avenue), he co-founded the Spiral Garden, a remark­able place of recov­ery and heal­ing for phys­i­cally chal­lenged and chron­i­cally ill chil­dren. The Butterfly Garden in Sri Lanka grew out of the Spiral Garden after the Centre for Peace Studies and Health Reach, both at McMaster University, began study­ing the effects of war on chil­dren in the for­mer Yugoslavia, the West Bank and Sri Lanka. In 1994 some of the Sri Lankan par­tic­i­pants in that study invited Paul Hogan to come to Sri Lanka to see what might be done there. The result is the Butterfly Garden, which opened in 1996, an oasis of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and heal­ing for Sri Lankan chil­dren affected by war. Paul Hogan works as artist-in-residence at the Butterfly Garden six months of the year.

The story “Blood of the Mango” was cre­ated by Zareefdeen Mohamed Ithrish, Haniffa Iqbal, Lariff Riswin, Abdul Cader Riswana, Slevarajah Matihikaran and Halitheen Shathikeen and trans­lated by Paul Hogan. It appears in Blood of the Mango and Other Tales, pub­lished by the Butterfly Garden Professional and Psychological Counselling Centre, 1A Upstair Road, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.

Date Published: 
February 10, 2009

Beatrice Street

in
  • Photo Essay
  • 71
  • Grant, Anne
Author: 
Anne Grant
Teaser: 

 In the spring of 2008, Anne Grant began photographing a group of adjoining apartment buildings occupying a single lot on Beatrice Street in Cedar Cottage, a residential neighbourhood on the east side of Vancouver.

Teaser Image: 
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Deck: 
Beatrice Street is part of a work commissioned by the Geist Foundation with assistance from Arts Partners in Creative Development.

“Memory is a story I tell myself.”   —a ten­ant

In the spring of 2008, Anne Grant began pho­tograph­ing a group of adjoin­ing apart­ment build­ings occu­py­ing a sin­gle lot on Beatrice Street in Cedar Cottage, a res­i­den­tial neigh­bour­hood on the east side of Vancouver. She had observed the build­ings over a period of years, and only rarely seen any­one going in or out. In time she came to see the anony­mous, rather unfor­giv­ing facade of the Beatrice Street build­ing as the face of a silent repos­i­tory, a house of mem­ory. She began pho­tograph­ing some of the peo­ple who live there, and talk­ing to them about per­sonal his­tory and memory.

In 1911, when the vil­lage of Cedar Cottage was incor­po­rated into the city of Vancouver, much of the sur­round­ing area was still farm­land; today it’s an older neigh­bour­hood of mod­est homes and a few small apart­ment blocks. Trout Lake (John Hendry Park) is a short walk away and Lord Selkirk School is just around the cor­ner. Until the late fifties, there was a small com­mer­cial area only a block away with a bank and gen­eral store and other ser­vices. Property records for the Beatrice Street lot go back to 1914, when one of the build­ings housed a sheet-metal busi­ness and a gro­cery store on the main floor. 

In order to begin answer­ing the ques­tions of what had been here then and what was here now, Grant made her own inves­ti­ga­tion into the lin­eage of the build­ings, the vari­ety of own­ers and pro­pri­etors (some leg­endary, oth­ers ver­i­fi­able); and she began to inter­view some of the peo­ple liv­ing in the apart­ments, as well as peo­ple who had lived there in the past. Many of the peo­ple who talked to Grant did not want their apart­ments pho­tographed, but they were will­ing to share their fam­ily albums with her. Everything at Beatrice Street — peo­ple and place — was cloaked in privacy.

“This place is haunted. See that pic­ture? It often falls off the wall. That man­nequin falls down those stairs again. For no rea­son.”

Memories are hard to ver­ify. Some of the ten­ants were cer­tain that Beatrice Street had been owned at one time by a wait­ress at Scott’s Café, but there is no record of her. Another res­i­dent remem­bered fol­low­ing the hockey career of a son of one of the own­ers, but no one by that name has ever played for the wha. The leg­less woman with “fake legs,” seen “crawl­ing around doing things” by one ten­ant, is unknown to any­one else.

“We’d hear the pitter-patter of lit­tle feet at night, yet the chil­dren were sound asleep. The neigh­bours told us years ago a lit­tle girl named Donna had been killed on her way to Lork Selkirk School. They said to tuck Little Donna in at night as I tucked in my own chil­dren. The pitter-patter stopped.”

Over an extended period of get­ting acquainted with the peo­ple and the build­ings of Beatrice Street, Anne Grant accu­mu­lated a port­fo­lio of images and sto­ries that form the mate­ri­als of the next stage of her project: to offer her rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Beatrice Street to a wider audience. 

“We kids would meet at the old oak. This guy lived in num­ber 3. He was the size of a moun­tain. He had this sui­cide blond girl­friend—you know, a chick who doesn’t want to be brunette. On week­ends we’d lis­ten at their win­dow. She’d come by with strange guys. They’d all get liquored and high. She’d say some guy touched her ass. A fight would hap­pen. Cops would come. She once hit him over the head with a bot­tle. He got seven stitches. We’d com­pare sto­ries at that old tree.”

Portrait-making is a way of get­ting to know peo­ple. During a por­trait ses­sion, when one of her new sub­jects spoke of her con­cern for a rel­a­tive whose mem­ory was fail­ing, Grant asked her how she might rep­re­sent such a con­di­tion. After some thought, the woman cov­ered her­self in a white sheet.

The images dis­played here are a reflec­tion of first acquain­tance, an exten­sion of the first moment of ­say­ing hello. 

—Mandelbrot

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Anne Grant grew up in Edmonton and stud­ied art and pho­tog­ra­phy at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She lives in Vancouver and main­tains a dark­room on Main Street.
Date Published: 
March 16, 2009
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