East Side Story

in
Author: 
Christopher Grabowski
Teaser: 
Late last summer, Christopher Grabowski set up a portrait studio in a disused bank building on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, which is Canada's poorest urban neighbourhood, and let it be known on the street that he wished to take portraits of people who lived there.
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Late last summer, Christopher Grabowski set up a portrait studio in a disused bank building on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which is Canada’s poorest urban neighbourhood, and let it be known on the street that he wished to take portraits of people who lived there.

Text by Mandelbrot.

The result was Facing the Eastside, an exhi­bi­tion of Grabowski’s pho­tographs which opened in November at the Roundhouse Community Centre near the upscale condo devel­op­ments in the cen­tre of the city. On open­ing night peo­ple from the Downtown Eastside were bussed to the Roundhouse, where they par­tic­i­pated in the cel­e­bra­tions and were able to observe images of them­selves on the gallery walls. It was a mov­ing expe­ri­ence for many, even tear­ful for some who were briefly over­come when con­fronted by images of them­selves ren­dered in the mag­nif­i­cent tones of fine-art black and white prints. 

All of the por­traits in Facing the Eastside are anony­mous: they share a com­mon plain back­drop and none of the sub­jects are iden­ti­fied in any way. This was the agree­ment Grabowski made with his sit­ters, who were will­ing to lend their appear­ances to the project but not their iden­ti­ties; and it was this arrange­ment that allowed Grabowski to present his sub­jects in a visual envi­ron­ment that belongs more to the his­tory of pho­tog­ra­phy than it does to the his­tory of the neigh­bour­hood. These por­traits are an attempt to give back some­thing to the peo­ple we see in them, to offer them a straight­for­ward like­ness and not a soci­o­log­i­cal state­ment. At the same time these por­traits remind us of how much we read into faces, how much phys­iog­nomy is part of the way we read the world.

Christopher Grabowski’s pho­tographs have been exhib­ited in Toronto, Hannover and Warsaw, and pub­lished in numer­ous Canadian, German and Polish mag­a­zines. Facing the Eastside was accom­pa­nied by the poetry of Bud Osborn and Shawn Milnar.

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Bottom Text: 

Christopher Grabowski’s pho­tographs and photo essays have been pub­lished in the Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, Washington Post, Neue Zurcher Zeitung and other peri­od­i­cals. His most recent exhi­bi­tion of pho­tographs was Guns, Kites and Dreams (Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Halifax). Christopher Grabowski is a recip­i­ent of sev­eral awards, includ­ing the Michener-Deacon Fellowship for inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism. See more of his work at geist.com/author/grabowski-christopher.

Date Published: 
November 7, 2008