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Oct. 5, 2012
Recording B.C.’s lost world
Leonard Frank’s photographs are at SFU’s Teck Gallery.
OLGA LIVSHIN
Simon Fraser University’s Teck Gallery at the downtown Vancouver campus unveiled a new show on Sept. 3, Leonard Frank: Beautiful British Columbia. The exhibit includes 31 photos – digital copies of the originals – dedicated to the history of logging in British Columbia.
Leonard Frank is considered one of the greatest photographers in the history of Western Canada. In the first half of the 20th century, he immortalized in his thousands of images the industrial development of British Columbia: the first car, the first bridge, the first plane. He was almost exclusively an industrial photographer, taking major contracts from the B.C. government, as well as logging and mining companies. After his death, the bulk of his archives were divided between the Vancouver Public Library and the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia (JMABC). The Teck Gallery exhibit uses exclusively photographs from the JMABC collection.
Jewish museum staff started the digitization of their Leonard Frank Photos Studio fonds about a year ago. “We had a grant from Young Canada Works for this project,” explained JMABC archivist Jennifer Yuhasz. “We hired an intern, and she digitized over 2,000 images and put 300 on our website. But it’s only a small part of our Frank archive, which includes about 39,000 images.
“You have to realize that digitization is not preservation,” she said of the project’s challenges and limitations. “The originals, if stored in a controlled environment, will last much longer than the digital copies. The negatives might last hundreds of years, when stored correctly. Digitization is for easy access.”
“Yes, the photos we digitized are easily accessible for everyone with the Internet,” agreed Kara Mintzberg, JMABC’s education coordinator. “But it’s only a teaser, so people can have an idea of what we have. Nothing can compare with a live show. There is something very impactful in being face to face with a piece of art. You feel the ‘wow!’ factor.”
The “wow!” factor is pronounced in the Teck Gallery show. Although it is generally acknowledged that many different angles could be extracted from Frank’s huge collection of photographs, this particular show possesses a dual, contradictory nature. It’s simultaneously a tribute and a condemnation: a tribute to the genius of Frank and his visual chronicles of industrial progress in British Columbia, and a condemnation of the devastation such progress has wrought on the province’s natural resources, namely the forests.
Bill Jeffries, the curator of the Teck Gallery show, writes in his introduction: “These pictures document what environmentally minded citizens now see as the historical plunder of B.C.’s forests. These days, we are often reminded that trees are a renewable resource, but what we see in many of these pictures are destroyed animal and bird habitats. The almost total absence of songbirds in B.C.’s previously logged habitat indicates that, while trees may grow back, replacing habitat is a much longer-term proposition…. What we see here is ‘progress’ and ‘industry’ providing jobs for British Columbians while removing some of the most extraordinary trees to have ever grown on earth.”
Those may be harsh words but they underscore the show’s tight focus on the logging industry of the 1920s and ’30s. The people in the images look triumphant, proud of their victory over nature, but we, their descendants, look at the photos and wonder: was it really a victory? The selection, compiled by Jeffries, challenges viewers to consider this paradox.
While today most of us regard nature as a place of beauty and serenity, Frank presented the forests of British Columbia as a space exploited and crippled by industry. He might not have intended the effect the show broadcasts but, as a photographer, he was true to his art. The photographs themselves tell an impartial story, and it remains a mystery if the photographer intended to express a different sentiment.
In an interview with the Jewish Independent, Jeffries said that he has always been a fan of Frank’s photos. “There are many different exhibitions that one could curate out of the Leonard Frank’s archive. His logging images record a ‘lost world’ of sorts: the people are different, the attitudes – as in the train with dignitaries viewing what we see as destruction as if it is ‘progress’ – the tools and machines used to assist with the work, which are themselves a bit of a museum. And then there are oxen hauling logs in West Vancouver. Who knew we had oxen here in Vancouver? All that is rolled into the paradox of ‘terrible beauty,’ in which the desecration of the forest, the ecological horror of it all, also makes interesting photographs.”
Jeffries started working on the show about a year ago. He remembers scrolling through about 300 images, digitized by the JMABC, before he selected 31 for this exhibition. “Often, we watch a documentary of a war zone or a natural disaster, and it’s very moving and poignant,” he said, “but Frank’s photos are just business, the history of logging in B.C., and they’re no less moving.”
He also explained the juxtaposition between the name of the show – Beautiful British Columbia – and the images in the photos: the ruins of the forests.
“I went for an ironical approach,” he said. “The title is what we see on the licence plates. The images reflect how we’ve treated this beauty.”
Leonard Frank: Beautiful British Columbia is on display until Jan. 4, 2013.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
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