link Between Davies and Beach Sts in Vancouver there are a series of apartment blocks built between 1950 and 1970, their lobbies gleaming with money and modernist hope, the fonts suggest hope for a future that seemed to gleam from Vancouver until the serial killlers and heroin of the lower east side, the economic downturn of the rest of it, the end of socialised anything courtesy of Gordon Cambell, and the final recognition that it might not all be sunshine.
Maybe it was also Expo 1986 or world class Whistler, or the LA movies, something international that leeched out the Canadianess of it all.
These apartment buildings were swinging singles, married couples on the prowls, newly liberated gay men and young kids doing vague and artistic things for money. Crossing the threshold into field stone, broad carpets, slick wood, gold letters and steel elevators was to own the world for a while, their is an inmutable sadness to the lack of care that marks their and by extension the paradise on the Coast.
The other interesting thing, is how the best work that comes out Vancouver seems to be these huge Cibrachromes and C- Prints. Stan Douglas working penance for Nootka Sound, the implied and sexualized violence of Jeff Wall, the documentary energy of Una Knox .
I think it is because this kind of photograph does very well to show the tension between what is being represented and what is, and Vancouver has not been represented well.