Grant Arnold. "The Terminal City and the Rhetoric of Utopia." In Rhetorics of Utopia: Early Modernism and the Canadian West Coast. Edited by Grant Arnold. Vancouver :Vancouver Art Forum Society and the Vancouver Art Gallery, 2000.

[transcription of excerpt]



The Terminal City
and the Rhetoric of Utopia
Grant Arnold


...pictorial photography... is a way behind in photographically giving what other arts are doing in their medium. It still dwells in the fairyland of romanticism... it is travelling by a horsecart midst the progress of motor power on wheel and wing.

This provocation appeared in the November 1928 issue of The Photographic Journal. The London-based journal, published by the Royal Photographic Society, had championed Pictorialist photography during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so these remarks were clearly a challenge to a premise held dear by the journal's editors—the understanding that "the principles of art are permanent and no [pictorialist photography] that is not based on them can be worth anything." The surprise registered by The Photographic Journal's readers in response to these comments would have been compounded when their unlikely source was considered‐John Vanderpant, a successful commercial photographer based in Vancouver, Canada. Vanderpant was well known to The Photographic Journal's readership. He had acquired an international reputation as a Pictorialist photographer within the network of camera club salons that flourished in Europe, the United States and anglophone Canada after the turn of the century. During the early 1920s, Vanderpant had participated in up to forty salons per year. The Royal Photographic Society mounted a solo exhibition of his work in 1925, which subsequently travelled to the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Articles on his work regularly appeared in publications such as American Photographer, The Photographic Journal, and Focus. In 1926, in recognition of his accomplishments, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.

By the mid-1920s, Vanderpant's practice was comfortably situated within a discourse that positioned photography as high art through the adoption of a codified formal vocabulary emphasizing qualities such as soft focus, atmospheric effect, and carefully balanced composition to emulate 19th-century European painting. He was not a figure The Photographic Journal's audience would have expected to challenge Pictorialism's legitimacy.

Vanderpant's break with a milieu in which he had achieved such success points to a moment of crisis in his artistic practice. From his assertion that Pictorialist photography was outdated and lagging behind achievements realized in other media, we can infer that this crisis was related to the ability (or inability) of his practice to address conditions of life in a modern industrialized society. However, as subsequent passages from Vanderpant's text demonstrate, this crisis was also related to the difficulty of linking the vocabulary of Pictorialism to the nationalist discourse that gained prominence in the visual arts in Canada during the early 1920s.

Pictorialist art photography had emerged out of 19th-century social formations connected to the rapid growth of industry and mass manufacture of cheap commodities. In mid-19th-century Europe, widespread industrialization represented a challenge to traditional aesthetic standards which alarmed members of the upper-middle class and triggered movements (the Arts and Crafts Movement and Art Nouveau, for example) directed toward the aesthetic improvement of manufactured goods. In conjunction with these movements came an emphasis on the importance of amateur artistic activities. Photography became linked to aesthetic reform in the 1880s, as technical advances simplified the processes of making a photograph and generated widespread interest among amateur practitioners. As Ulrich Keller has noted, millions took up photography as a pastime in the late 19th century, including some who were influenced by the current of aesthetic reform and "began to look upon camera work as a serious occupation involving the purchase of sophisticated equipment, carefully planned vacation trips to scenic regions, frequent museum visits and art historical studies. In their hands photography gradually gained an artistic dimension, and in the process a special support system of clubs, periodicals and exhibitions sprang up around it."

Within art photography's network of clubs, journals and salons—including the New Westminster International Salon of Photography that Vanderpant founded in 1923—Pictorialists developed a codified aesthetic creed to distinguish themselves from less serious amateur photographers, and from commercial photographers engaged in the mass production of portraits. As art museums, academies and most critics did not consider photographs as legitimate works of art, the development of a formal vocabulary that drew upon the aesthetic codes of established media and the production of exhibitions and publications that tapped into the traditions of the French Academy's salons were the only means available to satisfy Pictorialist photographers' longing for artistic prestige.

While there were significant differences between the modernism of Le Corbusier, Loos and Gropius and that of the Group of Seven, for John Vanderpant the meanings that resonated around the architecture of the terminal elevator neatly lined up with the strategies he was deploying to revitalize his practice. The sense that the elevator marked a break with archaic European architectural traditions paralleled the claims made for the Group of Seven's painting as a mode of representation that responded directly to the Canadian landscape rather than European artistic conventions. Further, Le Corbusier's positioning of modern North American structures such as the elevator at the dawn of a new age coincided with the Theosophist rhetoric that surrounded the Group's work and which portrayed North America as the site of a new stage in human evolution. An echo of Le Corbusier's polemical vision of a new age can be detected in Lawren Harris' 1928 essay "Creative Art and Canada," which asserts:

Just as we enter into new relationships in space which evoke a new attitude and are giving rise to what we call the modern world, so there is a new race forming on this continent, the race of a new dispensation which will develop and embody the new attitude .... Our art is founded on a long and growing love and understanding of the North in an ever clearer experience of oneness with the informing spirit of the whole land and a strange brooding sense of Mother Nature fostering a new race and a new age.

The convergence of a nationalist visual culture and the modernist discourses tied to the architecture of the grain elevator is marked out in Vanderpant's early elevator images, such as Colonnades of Commerce (1926). In keeping with Vanderpant's conception of modernist aesthetics, the composition of the photograph is highly simplified and direct, focusing on detail to stress the rhythm of the elevator's repeating cylindrical forms. The simplicity of the composition emphasizes the play of light over the concrete surface of the monumental silos; the drama of the oblique lighting-heightened by the shadow that falls diagonally across the cylinders—suggests that the form of the elevator is illuminated in the dawn light of a new day. Links between the architecture of the elevator and that of classical antiquity, as asserted in the writings of Gropius and Le Corbusier, are established through the simplified composition, which, together with the image's title, suggests the colonnades of an ancient Egyptian or Greek temple. As a writer for Saturday Night noted in 1929:


Anyone taking a cursory glance at "Colonnades of Commerce" would assume that it was a glimpse of one of the Temples of the Pharaohs at Luxor. In reality it is one of the great grain elevators which fringe Vancouver harbor, and is indeed typical of many other Canadian harbors.

However, in spite of Vanderpant's attempts to adopt a modern approach to photography, his work retained many of the visual attributes of Pictorialism, and thus occupied a somewhat equivocal position in relation to both the modernism of the Group of Seven and that of Le Corbusier. In images such as Colonnades of Commerce and Shadow Castle 1926, Vanderpant continued to rely on Pictorialism's characteristic soft atmospheric effect, a device artists like Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald had explicitly jettisoned from their work in order to signify a break with British academic traditions. While the emblematic paintings of Harris and MacDonald—such as First Snow, North Shore of Lake Superior 1923 and The Solemn Land 1922—claimed to locate an essential Canadian identity in a liminal space—the apparently "empty," "eternal," and "infinite" wilderness that instilled itself on the sensibilities of the solitary artist—Vanderpant located identity in an artifact of human social interaction. If Harris and MacDonald attempted to take in the immensity of the Canadian landscape in a near pan-optic view, the limitations of his medium and his conception of modern aesthetics compelled Vanderpant to focus on the detail in order to express in "extreme simplicity of composition" forms which could be claimed as intrinsically Canadian. Further, while Colonnades of Commerce clearly evinced a sense of return to the universal principles that governed ancient Egyptian monuments, Vanderpant also drew parallels between the architecture of the elevator and that of medieval European structures—the very tradition Le Corbusier and Gropius saw as bankrupt—in photographs such as Castles of Commerce, Castles of Today, and Shadow Castle, where the ghostly trace of a medieval fortress is inferred through the shadow that falls across the concrete surface of the grain silos.