The old courthouse
The building that houses the Vancouver Art Gallery was not built as a gallery. It was the provincial courthouse, designed by Francis Rattenbury, the architect behind much of the province’s grand public architecture of that era, and completed in the years around 1906 to 1911. Its neoclassical stone front, with the columns and the dome, was meant to project the seriousness of the law, and the building did that job for decades before the courts moved out and the gallery moved in during the early 1980s.
What is inside now
Since 1983 it has held the city’s main art collection, including one of the most important groups of Emily Carr paintings anywhere, which alone makes the place worth the visit. There is a particular rightness to a stern old courthouse being turned over to art, the same rooms that once held trials now hold canvases, and the heavy formality of the architecture makes an odd, good frame for the work inside it.
Photographing a facade on 8×10
From the outside this is an architecture problem, and architecture is where a view camera earns its keep. The building is all verticals, columns and pilasters and the lines of cut stone, and pointing a normal camera up at it would make all of those lines lean inward. On a large format camera you level the body and raise the front standard instead, taking in the full height while keeping every vertical parallel and true. That is the difference between a snapshot of a building and a photograph of it.
Stone in the right light
Carved stone needs raking light to show what it is. Flat midday sun turns a facade like this into a grey wall, but low light early or late catches the depth of the columns and the detail in the masonry and gives the whole front some relief. A big negative then holds all of that texture, the grain and weathering of the stone, in a way that rewards standing close and looking. So the timing matters as much as the position, waiting for the light to come around to the face of the building.
A considered building, considered slowly
A building put up this carefully, by an architect this deliberate, deserves to be photographed with something more considered than a quick frame in passing. The 8×10 forces that. You set up in front of it, work the geometry until the lines are honest, wait for the light, and commit a single sheet. It is a slow answer to a building that was itself built slowly and meant to last, which is usually the right kind of answer.
The Emily Carr connection is worth the visit on its own. The gallery holds one of the most important collections of her work anywhere, and there is a rightness to a great British Columbia painter being shown inside a building that Francis Rattenbury designed to represent the province. Two very different visions of what this place is, the formal architecture of the law and the wild coastal landscapes Carr painted, end up under the same roof. Photographing the outside on film is my small way of tying the whole thing together, the building, its history, and the art it now protects, in one deliberate frame.