3:43pm-View of same house, by Keefer


Hillside Secondary School, 1996 [15], by Aaron Vidaver

Other people's photographs. A signed print of Keefer's picture, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, showed up today, unsolicited, in the mail. The image is one of a number of photographs taken on a long walk through Surrey, B.C., a rapidly industrializing city-suburb of Vancouver, whose geographical variety is endlessly rich and dense, and impossible to appreciate unless you spend three weeks driving back and forth through it, documenting every one of its 1600+ bus stops (as I did, several years ago, as an assistant on my friend Sylvia Borda's great video project, Every Bus Stop in Surrey, B.C.), or walk, like Keefer, just looking and listening.

I like Keefer's picture a lot; it summarizes, in an easy, unselfconscious, and not neccessarily "arty" way, many ideas I've had around the intersection of landscape, abstraction, and the supernatural. The crumbling house -- the site of a "ghost light" Keefer identifies in a prose caption -- is on its way out, soon to be replaced by, one supposes, condos or duplexes, and a general lack of the organic clutter that structures the picture so well. The photograph also reminds me of paintings by Peter Doig, whose work, at least to me, similarly emerges from contemplating modernity's and landscape's corrosive effects on each other, while retaining an openness to the experience of being out in nature.

Thanks, Keefer!

Aaron Vidaver and I both attended West Vancouver's Hillside Secondary School in the mid- to late- 1980s. I don't recall us having much in common, outside of what I might characterize, with Aaron's indulgence, as incompatable left (or, in my case, intermittently left-leaning) politics. But we share a love of books, poetry, visual art, and regional history, and have kept running into one another over the years. Aaron's Hillside Flickr set showed up unsolicited in my morning email, and I spent half an hour or so with it.

Hillside Secondary, perched high above Canada's richest, or second-richest, suburb, was a really strange place to go to school. I was glad to leave in 1988, but, looking back on my five year stay from twenty-odd years out, the school's physical location was one of the most formative experiences of my life. Sweeping views, from Mount Baker in the east to Vancouver Island in the west. Endlessly changeable light. The arc of the bridge, and all the freighters at anchor in the harbor. Jet trails. The Cascade Range at sunrise. & etc. Science classes, in particular, in the building's west wing, with its high, wide windows, were a constant education in climate and geography.

A memory: seven thirty in November. My dad drops dru and I by the side of the highway and together we walk down an asphalt path to the service road above the school. It's slippery, the pavement underfoot white with frost. The sky to the east is fluorescent pink, shot with steam clouds rising from North Vancouver's apartments and the Ioco hydro plant. Mount Baker's silhouette seems to have been cut from black construction paper and pasted onto the brilliant horizon. I'm worrying about a story I'm writing, or getting my ass kicked later that day in the breezeway, or algebra, which I'm failing. But the landscape knocks me out of myself, over and over again.

Thanks, Aaron!
- posted by cjb @ 8:38 PM