Mandelbrot
Farewell, Print Emporium
Mandelbrot
Magazine addicts on the west coast have lost their most reliable (and revered) source of supply. Magpie Magazine Gallery on Commercial Drive in east Vancouver went out of business in spring 2008, after fifteen years of catering happily to a multifarious range of cultures, subcultures, factions, sects and wily individualists.
The John Molson Way
Mandelbrot
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
Mandelbrot
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
Mandelbrot
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.
The Life of Yousuf Karsh
Mandelbrot
In an interview reported in The Life of Yousuf Karsh by Maria Tippett (Anansi), Karsh said that he strove to bring out “the strength and personality” of men and “the charm and beauty” of women—an aesthetic purpose that he never abandoned, and one that stands in contradiction to the new modernism of Robert Frank, Fred Herzog, John Pascievich et al.
What’s There
Mandelbrot
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
Mandelbrot
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
Mandelbrot
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
Mandelbrot
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
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.
