Main Street: Towns, Villages, and Hamlets of the Great Plains

About

About the Author
Danny Singer is a photographer living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1945, Singer began his career working in the Film Department of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but, in 1970, he moved to Montréal, where he made the transition to still photography. Singer’s photographs have appeared in exhibitions and art fairs across Canada, Europe, and the United States, and they are part of numerous public collections, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Denver Art Museum, Crown Collection for the Official Residences of Canada, Canada Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Canadian Embassy in Berlin. His photographs have also appeared in publications such as Canadian Architect, The Paris Review, Prism, and Prefix Photo, and he has received awards from the British Columbia Arts Council, Canadian Council for the Arts, Montreal Art Directors Club, Ontario Arts Council, and Portfolio magazine, among others. www.dannysinger.net

About the Essayist
Grant Arnold was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 1955, and he was raised there. He completed his B.A. in studio art at the University of Saskatchewan and his M.A. in art history at the University of British Columbia. He is currently the Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery. During the past twenty-five years, he has organized more than fifty exhibitions of historical and contemporary art, contributed essays and articles to numerous exhibition catalogs and journals, lectured on historical and contemporary art at many conferences and institutions, and taught in the Critical and Curatorial Studies program at the University of British Columbia. He resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Slide Show

My Place

I’m sitting in my home office in North Vancouver, looking up at a towering fifty-foot cedar tree, whose roots are threatening our foundation. If I were to walk out to touch the tree and glance to the right, I would be looking down a hill across the waters of Burrard Inlet to the sparkling glass towers of Vancouver, a “postcard” beautiful city surrounded by water and snow-capped mountains.

It is the kind of place where, on a sunny day, everyone wants to move to. It’s the kind of city where you are more likely to be run down by a bicycle than a car, a city with outlandish real-estate prices and more good Asian restaurants than anywhere outside of Asia. Vancouver, like most western Canadian cities, is relatively new, incorporated just over a century ago as the terminus of our national railway. In this century, it has become a city that is defined as much by its natural beauty as by its rich mix of cultures.

I first moved here from Edmonton, Alberta, during the early 1960s and experienced the exciting rise of the counter-culture and the emerging contemporary arts scene. But, for all the excitement of those days, Vancouver still seemed like a small, very British colonial outpost.

I returned here in 1989 after a twenty-year stint in Montreal. Vancouver was then experiencing a boom, and the influx of immigrants was making it a very dynamic place to be. We settled on the North Shore, in a place with a view of the water and the city out one window and the mountains out the other. My wife teaches art history at a university just eight minutes away. We are but a stone-throw from mountain trails, and a marina is a short walk down our hill. It’s not hard to feel blessed! It’s odd then that the photographic work I do now is mostly far to the east, on the prairies and the Great Plains, a place I love and am drawn to. But, when I return from a trip, the smell of the ocean and the cool mountain breeze always feel like a welcoming home.

Copyright © 2013 Danny Singer. All rights reserved.