Documenting Main Streets

OLGA LIVSHIN

Danny Singer’s tiny towns of the Prairies huddle beneath the immense sky of the photos that make up his solo exhibition, Small Beneath the Sky. The show opened on Oct. 5 and runs until Nov. 2 at Gallery Jones.

Singer told the Independent that the idea of such photos, a long street as a whole, came to him in the 1960s, when he lived in Montreal. “I loved the beautiful streets, the historical buildings. The idea to make a photograph of an entire street came to me then. When we pass a building on the street, we don’t see much, just that one building or even part of it, a slice of the whole picture. A human eye doesn’t have enough perspective. So I tried to photograph those slices and then combine them, but the technology to achieve what I wanted wasn’t there. I even bought an old aerial survey camera, but it didn’t work either. I abandoned the project, but the idea stayed in the deep recess of my imagination.”

Afterwards, Singer spent time as an industrial photographer, and worked in special effects, fashion and advertising. In 1976, the year of the Summer Olympics in Montreal, he was selected to be one of 30 Canadian photographers for the book Between Friends, a photographic journey along the long border between Canada and the United States.

In 1989, his family moved to Vancouver, and Singer started doing architectural photography. The idea of a long image of a street resurrected, especially after he and his wife went on a camping trip in Alberta. As technology evolved, Singer began experimenting with the early versions of Photoshop. His first experiments did not result in what he envisioned, but he knew he was closer to bringing his original idea to life. The inspiration for specific settings came to him at the same time – small towns on the Prairies.

“I came from the Prairies and I love the openness of the land, with the big sky above,” he said. “I identify with those towns, but they are dying. They were agricultural towns and as the agriculture changes, the towns change with it. Some become seniors’ communities. Others disintegrate completely. Houses fall into disrepair. Young people move out into the bigger cities, where jobs are. Schools close. Shops close. We now experience the demise of agricultural towns. Some towns I photographed 10 years ago are already gone. Others survived but changed.”

The pictures on the gallery walls stretch for a couple of metres, each town’s entire Main Street on display, but the buildings appear miniscule, like children’s toys, lost beneath majestic skies – sometimes stormy, sometimes peaceful and sometimes winter-white. The impressions of the sky dominate the gallery, but looking closer, the signs of decay become visible: peeling paint, boarded windows, an entire way of life disappearing. Both sadness and pride shimmer in the photos.

“My work is always about movement and the passage of time,” Singer said. “I want to have the beginning, middle and end in one picture – a whole story.” To absorb his visual stories, viewers walk along the length of the photograph, mirroring the movement of the photographer’s car as it moved at low speed to get the shots.

“People in B.C. see my pictures and say: ‘My father was born in this town’ or ‘My uncle is from there.’ These towns made Canada what it is today. Unlike the urban, glassy sprawl, these small places have a history, a soul,” Singer mused.

His images are reconstructions, not literal replicas of true life, however. “I take pictures every three or four feet, like driving along the street,” he explained. “It takes me three hours to photograph three blocks, and then several weeks to assemble the image on the computer. It’s a long and tedious process. I spend so much time on the computer with those images, I remember all the names of the towns, all the doorsteps and trees.”

When Singer started the project, he didn’t include the sky in his images, and a few of the old panoramas are included in the current exhibit. “I started adding the sky 10 years ago,” he said of the change. “I’m from Alberta and I wanted to show the vastness of the space. Sometimes, I insert a sky I shot some other place and time into a picture to make it look better. It’s an artistic decision. I can’t keep the same cloud over a long street of houses, it would be boring.”

In the window of the gallery hangs a photo collage of Singer’s wife Patricia holding signs with the names of the towns he photographed. There are 119 images in the collage, all with different signs. “My wife travels with me, and I always start a roll of film with such a photo, like the first frame in a movie,” he said.

By now, Singer’s photos have become an archive of rural architecture, an important recording of a rapidly transforming society. “I didn’t start the project in 1999 as a way to document the changes. I started it as an artist, esthetically,” he said. “It became a document by itself. Over the years, I shot approximately 300 North American towns. About 70 of them are finished and framed.

“I drove over 500,000 kilometres of gravel roads in America and Canada,” he added. “There are no paved roads near those towns.”

The expansive project has led to a book – a beautiful photo album, Main Streets: Towns, Villages and Hamlets of the Great Plains, published earlier this year. The book includes more than 40 illustrations – photographs by Singer and essays by Grant Arnold, a curator at Vancouver Art Gallery.

Singer will be speaking about his art and the book in West Vancouver on Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m., at Congregation Har El. To learn more, visit dannysinger.net or galleryjones.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

^TOP