"This Place: Calgary 2004 to 2011"
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Courtesy Richard White
"This Place: Calgary 2004 to 2011" Cover
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Photo courtesy Richard White
Calgary Fences
Writer Aritha van Herk asks people to ponder the role of fences in Calgary's DNA. Many of George Webber's photos also include signs as a focal point.
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Photo courtesy Richard White
Calgary Mobile Home park
'Rough' is what is past the edge of the postcard, says Calgary author Aritha van Herk. Above, a mobile home park in Calgary.
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Photo courtesy Richard White
Sold Out Condo Sign Calgary
A condo brochure on a site under construction. Calgary is in transition from its past as a small prairie town to its future as a metropolis of more than a million people.
Book captures Calgary in transition
By Richard White, For the Calgary Herald -- Published with permission
Great cities are inspiring — especially for the artists who live there.
In the past, I have been critical of Calgary’s urban landscape for its inability to inspire its painters, writers, musicians, photographers and sculptors.
Too often — for me, at least — the mountains are, for the most part, the inspirational landscape that captures our artists’ imagination.
I am pleased to announce that Calgary photographer George Webber and author Aritha van Herk, in collaboration with Frontenac House Media Ltd., have proven me wrong.
They’ve released a book of photographs and essays called In This Place: Calgary 2004 to 2011.
Webber and Van Herk are kindred spirits and it definitely show in this just-released book.
The photographs
The book consists of 90 full colour, 10.5-inch by seven-inch photographs — none of which is a conventional, “postcard view” shot of Calgary’s iconic downtown skyline, or its pretty public spaces such as Stephen Avenue, Olympic Plaza or RiverWalk.
The mostly gritty images remind us of Calgary’s past as a small prairie town. Webber refers to them as the “overlooked, the feral, the discarded, the unexpected and mysterious” places that define Calgary.
These are definitely not images likely to be used by Tourism Calgary to attract visitors and conventions, nor by Calgary Economic Development to attract businesses — yet, they do define Calgary’s sense of place.
Webber had three criteria for choosing the photographs: they had to have a certain beauty, they had to be common places and there had to be a distinctive Calgary quality of light.
To me, they capture a city in transition, a city both eroding and evolving; the photographs speak for themselves.
The essays
Van Herk’s four essays — Fences, Signs, Rough and Requiem, were inspired by both Webber’s photographs, and her understanding and appreciation for Calgary’s unique sense of past and place.
Each essay is a work of art in its own right. Each word, each sentence is like another photograph revealing insights into Calgary’s psyche, soul and sense of place — past and present.
Fences was inspired by Van Herk’s observation of the preponderance of fences in Webber’s photographs, especially the chain-link ones.
She opens with: “Trace their double helix back to barbed wire, Calgary’s connective fences. How, they propose a puzzle. The First Peoples had never seen such a constrict. What kind of idea is that? Designed to stop movement, to herd what it encloses, to possess. As if this world could be corralled, could be divided.”
Elsewhere, she asks the reader to ponder the role of fences in Calgary’s DNA with words such as: “Fencing’s genetic linkage, Calgary’s optimistic chromosomes, lattice resistance. Open range is never open. Hoardings propose a future, surely better than the muddy construction site within.”
Van Herk’s second essay, Signs, is inspired by the dominance of signs in Webber’s photographs.
I counted 54 photographs where signs were the focal point.
Webber loves to play with the juxtaposition of landscape, light and word. His photography is both visual and verbal.
Signs is less an essay and more like “sound bites”:
-- “Signs cheerful as clear water trademark this Calgary. Come to me. Sell a dream. Buy a dream. Catch a check. Cash a cheque.”
-- “Suites: instrumental or orchestral, unified by key, like the repeated pattern of stacked apartments, flats in a collage, intermezzi connecting rooms, the city packaging its rentals, payment and yield in the pursuit of use.”
Rough is the third essay. It refers to Webber’s photographs of some of the Calgarians taken in places such as Chinatown, the Calgary Stampede and the Canadian Legion.
The first paragraph captures the core of Calgary’s soul: “No time to smooth the edges, to polish outlines and buff up shoe leather. Calgary is a binge city, gulping this split second down before it evaporates. No patina of venerable time here, no legends backing up street names or stairways. We are the irregulars, rough up and down, coarse as an old horse’s mane, a ruffian shout. This boisterous careless city, at its guttural ease.”
In the middle, she adds: “And the puzzled mosaic of cranes, ladders inching towards crossword grids. Cranus erectus, building sky out of sky, reaching across blue. No touch but to touch. Nothing but suggestions, the honeycombed buildings waiting to be filled, egg-cartons on end, their windows custom art is a repetition of space, dancing with refraction.”
She ends with “Rough is a dealer’s felt, a coffee pot’s grind, a tomato plant’s leaves. Rough is what’s past the edge of the postcard, the tempting cliff, the infraction of work, sweet exertion’s fatigue, and rhubarb pushing through the frost.”
The final essay, Requiem, opens with: “There are dozens of cities where one might choose to grow old, their literary homecomings thick with temptation. Those are the places that seethe with pilgrims, where postcards racks adorn sidewalks and the same bells have rung for centuries, tours of significant sites available hourly.”
Van Herk then turns to Calgary with observations like:
-- “This city isn’t gritty enough to be beautiful.”
-- “We rise early in order to reinvent ourselves before breakfast.”
-- “No one comes here for pleasure, but for ambition, that philistine affection.”
All of Webber’s images were taken from 2004 to 2011, which for him is an important period in Calgary’s history as it coincides with Calgary’s most recent boom period.
It’s a time when we became a city of one million people and lost the last remnants of being an innocent small Prairie town.
Indeed, something dies with each of Calgary’s booms and busts — hence Van Herk’s Requiem.
The cover
The cover photograph is an interesting choice — and is perhaps misleading, because it is the only photograph in the book that conveys a sense of Calgary’s emerging hip and chic image.
This glitzy, glossy and seductive photograph dominated by the image of a handsome blue-eyed male model, is something you’d expect from a European fashion magazine from London, Paris or Milan.
Look carefully and you realize it is Calgary. It is a reflection in the display windows of downtown’s historic Hudson Bay department store, with the old Palace Theatre’s marquee across the street
It begs the question: What does Calgary want to be in the future?
Do we want to become just another global corporate city, or do we want to evolve our own unique sense of place?
I’d encourage you to get a copy of the book. Give one as a gift this Christmas.
Use it to initiate a discussion with colleagues, family and friends on what makes Calgary a sometimes exhilarating — and other times exasperating — place to live, work and play.
Let the debate continue.
Richard White is a Calgary-based writer who has written on art, architecture and urban culture for more than 20 years. He is director of 3D visualization at Riddell Kurczaba architecture.
SHARED HISTORY
Perhaps it is not surprising that photographer George Webber and writer Aritha van Herk are kindred spirits — they have a shared history.
Both Webber and Van Herk were born in small Alberta towns: Webber in Drumheller and Van Herk in Wetaskiwin. Both are post-secondary teachers in the city.
Webber teaches photography at SAIT Polytechnic, while Van Herk teaches creative writing and Canadian Literature at the University of Calgary.
Both use Calgary and Alberta as their muses.
Given these similarities, it is no surprise they collaborated to create the book, In This Place: Calgary 2004 to 2011.