Stan Douglas’s “Every Building on 100 West Hastings”, at home and away

The issues surrounding representations of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood in contemporary art have bothered me (in the best sense of that word, as in, it keeps tugging at my brain when I least expect it) for several years now. I think it began with Charo Neville’s “Picturing the Downtown Eastside” exhibition in 2005, which I saw when I was in Vancouver and which featured Stan Douglas’s panoramic photograph, Every Building on 100 West Hastings (2001). But the area, and its depiction, has continued to interest me, even from afar in Toronto, especially the reception and discussion around Althea Thauberger’s Carrall Street project, commissioned by Melanie O’Brian while she was the director of Artspeak, an artist-run centre that has long called the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood its home.

The DTES is not easily representable, in photography or otherwise, but photographs of the neighbourhood always particularly intrigued me because of their capacity to travel outside their original context (both literally and through their reproduction). For a while, it felt like Douglas’s photograph was following me. It had also showed up in the “Baja to Vancouver” exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery while I was a public programming volunteer there in 2004 and the discussions I had about the image with other viewers and volunteers stuck with me.

Then, the catalogue that accompanied the photograph’s debut in Vancouver, in a 2002 exhibition curated by Reid Shier at the Contemporary Art Gallery, reappeared in a course I took at York on contemporary art in Vancouver with Sharla Sava. (The catalogue is a fascinating and easy read, by the way, that meticulously unpicks the history and context of the neighbourhood.) Through my discussions with colleagues and friends at York, it became clear just how difficult it is to translate the DTES to people who do not visited that part of Vancouver, especially photographically. Representations of the DTES don’t travel well, it seemed.

All of which is a long, roundabout way of explaining why, for what feels like the past three years (but is actually only the past eight months), I’ve been working on trying to understand the issues that representing this neighbourhood photographically might raise, especially when those photographs travel to other contexts, like the Serpentine gallery in London, or the lobby of a Toronto law firm. I’ve just finished adapting the research project on Douglas’s photo, which I completed for my master’s degree at York University, into a journal article and this month, the final product is available at last in the latest issue of Photography & Culture, a journal published by Berg, based in England. If you get a chance to read it (many universities have purchased online access to the articles, but non-students might have a harder time finding it), I’d love to hear people’s thoughts and feedback. I’m still not done thinking about the potential and limitations of these projects, so I’m always game for some engaged discussion.

Also, for those who might be interested, artist David Look has made an interesting reinterpretation of Douglas’s photo using Google Street View based on images from 2009. It provides a good overview of how the block has changed, and yet remained the same, in the past eight years.