The Capture Photo Festival is entering its third year, and doubling down on its public presence. Vancouver isn’t super-huge on public space, but watch for billboards, transit stations, and even a power station to pull double duty as giant surfaces on which to display lens-based art.
Besides the public art, galleries across the Greater Vancouver Area will be hosting photo-based exhibitions, resulting in a many-faceted megashow that Vancouverites would be crazy to miss.
Capture Festival: Full Details
I was thrilled to get a glimpse of what’s on tap as Executive Director Kim Spencer-Nairn and Program Director Meredith Preuss hosted a media preview in Gastown.
Nine stations along the Canada Line will display a series of giant-sized images. The King Edward stop will be showing off John Goldsmith’s Bondi Beach, winner of the Georgia Straight/Capture Festival Canada Line Competition.
The Dal Grauer Substation (that building with the huge transparent outer wall next to the Scotiabank Cinema) will host a massive work by Steven Waddell. As with last year’s Dal Grauer installation, it will only be revealed at the last minute.
My favorite of the evening was a sneak peek at Viewpoint, by Erin Siddall and Sean Arden.
Siddall and Arden turned a shipping container into a camera obscura, aptly named Burrard Inlet Big Camera, which will sit at Lonsdale Quay. It gets its name in homage to Giant Camera, the camera obscura perched near the Cliff House in San Francisco.
Big Camera will sit atop another shipping container, in which Cate Rimmer will curate images from First Nations artist Ryan McKenna.
Here’s a map of the 2016 Capture Festival public installations. The festival runs April 1-28. Indulge your love of photography, or ignite it for the first time.