Vancouver Art Gallery Collection: John Vanderpant. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1993.

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John Vanderpant's photographs of grain elevators on the Vancouver waterfront, produced between 1926 and 1936, evince an almost mystical optimism toward the processes of industrialization and the dynamism of modern life. Through their formal economy, precise composition and controlled modulation of light and shadow, Vanderpant's images deploy an aesthetic within which modern industrial architecture is represented as the embodiment of an harmonious interaction of technology, civilization and nature.

Vanderpant was born in the Netherlands in 1884. A self-taught photojournalist, he immigrated to Canada in 1911, initially settling in Okotoks, Alberta. In 1919, Vanderpant moved to New Westminster, B.C., where he established a successful commercial photography studio. Seven years later, he opened the Vanderpant Galleries on Robson Street in Vancouver. It became a focal point of activity within the local cultural community, and was frequented by musicians and artists, among them Fred Varley and Charles Scott.

During the early 1920s, Vanderpant's photographs were aligned with pictorialism, a movement which sought to "elevate" photography from the status of a technological process to that of high art through the emulation ofthe aesthetics of late 18th and early 19th century European painting. Pictorialists favoured a soft focus approach in their images, as well as compositions that employed "expressive" arrangements of light and dark masses, rather than sharply rendered detail. This approach is evident in Vanderpant's A Man's Portrait, 1924, which relies upon atmospheric effect, and conveys little sense of a particular individual, time, or place.

During the mid-I920s—perhaps in response to criticism that his work lacked the sense of national identity associated with the Group of Seven—Vanderpant began to photograph the grain elevators on Vancouver's harbourfront. For him, the elevators signified the dynamic agrarian spirit and industrial potential characteristic of the Canadian nation-state.

In their rigid strength and sublime simplicity they are the unpretentious temples of trade and a trade more vital through the storing of essential grains—than any other... [In their] combination of simplicity, severity and usefulness [grain elevators] reflect the vitality of a modern, perfect, architectural form display ...

The shift in Vanderpant's subject matter was accompanied by a growing interest in modernist aesthetics, which were developing in photography internationally. Modernist photographers avoided painterly manipulation of the image and emphasized properties that were seen to be intrinsic to their medium: the ability to render fine detail, a connection to a specific time and place, and a supposedly "objective" mode of seeing.

Vanderpant's transition to modernist aesthetics is clearly evident in Untitled (Concrete), 1934, a photograph of elevator architecture rendered sharply from edge to edge, foreground to background. The image emphasizes detail over atmosphere, and provides the viewer with a strong sense of the contrasting tactile properties of the depicted surfaces. Architectural components are incorporated within a precise composition which, through its unusual vantage point and slightly ambiguous depiction of space, straddles the boundary between abstraction and realism.

Vanderpant saw his photographs as articulations of the relationship of parts within a larger universal order, and of "the rhythm and beauty of design in nature's architecture." He believed that the underlying structures of nature informed the architecture of the grain elevators. As he described it, the photographic print delineated

...strength of form and cement, the tenderness of beauty of texture, the design possibility in form and shadow... [Photographic prints] give an almost religious adoration of significant form.

As one writer recently noted, Vanderpant's photographs offered the promise of "success in production during the economic depression of the interwar years." From the perspective of a viewer in the 1990s, this promise—together with Vanderpant's optimistic synthesis of nature, industry and significant form—seems difficult to sustain. Rather, these photographs are like artifacts from another time, when technology seemed to have a humanist face, and the resources of the planet seemed unlimited.

Grant Arnold