Sheryl Salloum. Underlying Vibrations: The Photography and Life of John Vanderpant. Victoria: Horsdal & Schubart, 1995.

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Nineteen twenty-nine was a momentous year, and one of "experimentation and great creativity for Vanderpant. He explored new avenues, new approaches to photography" This is exemplified in his abstracted view of stacked restaurant chairs, "The Morning After" (Figure 26). In August 1929, Saturday Night (at the time one of Canada's leading national magazines) ran the first of two illustrated articles on Vanderpant. Titled "Unique Photographs by J. Vanderpant F.R.P.S." the article included six Vanderpant prints: "The First Day of Spring," "Colonnades of Commerce," "The Morning After," "Trespassers," and portraits of the Canadian poet, Bliss Carman, and the Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore.

The next year was also exhilarating: Vanderpant undertook a six week commission for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Wanting an artist who could capture "the spirit and progress of the railroad" to mark its 1931 jubilee, a company official telegraphed Vanderpant, "You were chosen because you ... have imagination and can get much out of little."" Travelling from Vancouver to Quebec, Vanderpant took approximately a thousand photographs. Unfortunately, due to a lack of funding during the Depression, those images are not identified as Vanderpant's in the C.P.R.'s archives.

This is his creed and he lives it. Every spare moment is taken up with this urge to express a national beauty, and all his simple pleasures are so arranged that he himself may be in tune with Nature and so a fit medium through which she may be expressed.

While Vanderpant did photograph a number of mountain scenes, some of which are reminiscent of paintings by the Group of Seven (e.g., "In the Wake of the Forest Fire," Figure 31), mountains were not to become part of his iconography. Unlike the Group's members, he was not interested in hiking or camping: any views of mountains in his work were taken on accessible summits such as Grouse Mountain in Vancouver. Vanderpant's symbol of Canada's "dramatic strength" was his views of Vancouver's grain terminals.

Vanderpant was not the first to note the importance of those edifices. In 1923 the French architect, Le Corbusier, wrote that the North American grain elevators were significant architectural structures. Vanderpant's treatment of them supported this idea, but in a distinctive way. For him they were also "essential" symbols of Canada's agrarian heritage. Vanderpant described "Elevator Pattern" (Figure 32) as a pattern of triangles "based on an essential structure of today, selected from essential things and thereby to my mind tied up with the heart of humanity which ... must be the underlying foundation of all art."

Vanderpant photographed other subjects, but his interest in the dramatic and symbolic qualities of grain elevators lasted for many years. For him, they contained "the hidden flavor of lasting value" which was the "result of human or natural activity, and out of this human struggle selected to reflect in pattern or rhythmic play of form relationship, the sentiment of that struggle." Titles such as "Temples by the Seashore," and "Colonnades of Commerce" reflect a glorified view of the

towering structures. In prints like "The Watchman" (Plate 35), the elevators loom powerfully, dwarfing humankind; like the Egyptian pyramids, they are symbols of human progress and achievement. Vanderpant wrote that the elevators

rise on lakeshore and terminal throughout the land and in their rigid strength and sublime simplicity are the unpretentious temples of trade and a trade more vital through [the] distributing and storing of ... essential grain, than any other ... They ... [are] usefulness personified ... [and] through simplicity, through repetition of the cylinder form, pure architectural monuments of modern life.

For over 60 years Vanderpant's studies of grain elevators have been recognized as unique depictions of Canadian industry. In 1929 Bertram Brooker stated that Vanderpant's print, "Elevator Pattern," possessed "the qualities of a fine abstract painting," and illustrated "the thesis ... that grain elevators offer ... the only distinctively Canadian contribution to architectural design." In 1987-88 the Art Gallery of Hamilton sponsored an exhibition entitled Industrial Images: in the exhibition catalogue, Rosemary Donegan stated that Vanderpant's elevator prints "have become symbolic images of Canadian industrial architecture."

Vanderpant believed that photography was ideal for conveying a new vision of beauty as embodied in the cement silos. He considered "Towers of Today" (Plate 21) an example

of a simple pattern, modern in concept, striking in contrast yet based on a reality of human industrial endeavor and achievement. It gives part of [a] whole leaving, to an extent, light and masses to the imagination . ... The black blower gives the feeling of a tremendous bell against the whiteness of concrete structure and so in a simple, strong, modern pattern, a hidden hint of romance of human heroism in industry... Just this basic touch ... gives the vibrating emotion to this print ... [and] a secondary satisfaction in texture rendering."

By 1929, Vanderpant's studies of the elevators were becoming more abstract. Through close-up views, he sought to portray the "strength of form and cement—the tenderness ... of texture—