Capture Festival lines Metro’s public spaces with photography

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Billboards, transit stations and building facades are serving double-duty as galleries for contemporary photography and other “lens-based” art as part of this year’s Capture Photography Festivalrunning through April 29.

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The festival, which hosts roughly two dozen exhibits in addition to talks, tours and workshops, also includes more than a dozen, often large-scale public exhibits, including billboards along the Arbutus Greenway, on the facade of a BC Hydro substation, and at SkyTrain stations across Vancouver, Richmond and Coquitlam.

“If you think about the volume of people that actually see these public art installations,” said Emmy Lee Wall, executive director of the festival, “that’s a tremendously exciting part of Capture.”

“What I like about it is that you’re reaching a really different audience and that you need to really think about the site and the space where you’re exhibiting the work.

While this will be the first time in two years that the festival will take place without COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in place, Wall said the outdoor exhibits were largely unaffected by the pandemic.

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“Even during the first lockdown we still had our public art projects,” Wall said. “During the time when it was difficult for a lot of people to be indoors in an enclosed space, the public art had been such a godsend for some people.”

The outdoor exhibitions are not without their challenges, however. Last year, complaints about a series of photos from artist Steven Shearer shown on billboards along the Arbutus Greenway led to the exhibition being taken down after just a few days.

Wall said despite the decision to remove Shearer’s work last year, sponsors were “incredibly supportive,” although she wished the work had remained up a little longer.

“It would have been really interesting to have that work stay a little longer and allow people to go themselves and make up their own minds,” she said, adding that she wouldn’t do anything differently if she had to do it again. “It really did spark such an interesting conversation for so many people.”

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For viewers coming across the outdoor exhibits who aren’t that familiar with art photography, Wall suggested spending a bit of time trying to read the image itself before reading about it.

“Really look and spend time catching all the details,” she said. “What’s the subject matter, how big is it, what’s the color involved?”

Then she said to read whatever information about it is available before going back and looking again to see if what you see “aligns with the information you’re being provided.”

“Everybody is bombarded with images with the proliferation of social media,” she said. “Visual literacy — the ability to read images and think about images the same way that we all think about text — is a super important skill.”

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In addition to the outdoor projects, galleries across Metro have curated exhibits as part of the festival, including many locally based or born artists. A group show of students at Emily Carr, titled Stranger than Fiction, examines the relationship between photography and truth and is part of an educational partnership with the university, something new to the festival year. That show opens Wednesday.

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