den.The special responsibility of those who chose to live in suburbia was to be “happy”: happiness was the point of suburbia, and its great moral burden. »»
In December 2006, the St. Louis Hotel and beer parlour in Calgary—once a favourite haunt of Ralph Klein, former premier of Alberta—closed its doors after ninety-two years of operation. George Webber made many visits to the hotel during its final weeks, with his camera and his notebook.
The mythological story of the dating couple (or “dyad” in the jargon of theory) is the subject of Susan Bozic’s The Dating Portfolio, a work of staged photography that took two years to complete. The “man” in the photographs is a mannequin named Carl, and the woman is the artist herself, wearing a wig. “Anything becomes possible when creating staged images,” she says. “The moment I put on the wig I get straight into character and became Carl’s girlfriend.”
Brian Howell’s first glimpse into the impersonating world came at a lively Sunday gospel meeting in southern British Columbia, led by an Elvis impersonator who said that his Elvis costume had given new meaning to his life. The impersonating world is a hall of mirrors through which Brian Howell has sought out myriad reflections of celebrity at every level, from the neighbourhood gospel show, to community centres catered by Lions Clubs, and finally to big conventions in Las Vegas and Orlando, Florida.
In 2005, James Long discovered an abandoned suitcase filled with photo albums in the alley behind his house. The photographs in the albums and the process of tracing them—and even finding members of the family who “appear” in them—form the basis of Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut, a play produced by Theatre Replacement and Rumble Productions.
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.
In Winnipeg in 1993, Micah Lexier put an ad in the local newspaper looking for males named David. Hundreds of people responded, and he asked the first David of each age, from age one to seventy-five, to be photographed at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
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.
Only loved ones remember what an Alzheimer’s patient has lost. Yoshikazu Ehara is my grandfather. Eight years ago, when he was eighty, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Daily life has become a struggle for Yoshikazu and his family as the disease has slowly erased his memories and abilities.
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.
